Adaptive Abilities Special Education Dunlap Breaks Down

Adaptive Abilities

Special Education

Dunlap breaks down adaptive abilities in children into three primary categories: motivation, socio-emotional skills, and self-care or self-help skills. All of these skills are necessary for healthy and all around development in children. For children with special needs, developing these skills and maintaining them at moderate levels can be challenging, depending on the nature of the conditions that hamper their learning. This paper will consider these skills outlined by Dunlap with respect to problems children with special needs have and to suggest approaches to intervene with such difficulties.

Motivation, as Dunlap (2009) explains it, includes a number of activities. These activities may be intrinsic or extrinsic. Motivational activities include self-regulation with respect to behavior and choices. It also includes behaviors that demonstrate movement toward autonomy. One very fundamental objective of child rearing and education is to develop children who grow into self-reliant, independent, functioning adults. Therefore motivation is a very critical area in development. Children with special needs may have a few kinds of troubles in this area. They have the internal motivation for these activities, but if the nature of their special needs condition is physical, they may not have the physical capability or necessary command over their bodies to develop motivation in a healthy way. If the special needs of the child includes intellectual or learning deficiencies or differences, the child may not be able to recognize how these activities are important. The child may not be able to generate these ideas or motivations intrinsically. The child may not be able to remember these behaviors if developed or taught as well as experience difficulty during the learning process of motivation behaviors.

Dunlap (2009) calls socio-emotional skills essential. To this author, these are some of the most important skills for a child to develop as their intensity affects the development of nearly all other skills. Socio-emotional skills include self-esteem, the development of empathy, the ability to take one and shift between perspectives, development of morality, prosocial behaviors, and the existence of interpersonal relationships. Self-esteem is necessary to survival, especially for children, whose formative experiences and their assimilation into their live experience dictate the kind of adults they will be and what kind of lives they will live overall. Empathy and prosocial behaviors are in great lack among those who are narcissistic, sociopathic, and psychopathic. Without these skills, children cannot develop a sense of morality and will not be able to conduct or sustain healthy interpersonal relationships. These skills are essential to the existence and functioning of a society. Without them, there would be a great deal (more) violence and chaos.

Children with special needs at some point have issues with self-esteem. Special needs is a category that sets children within it apart from normative and exceptional children. Special needs children have the capacity to understand that they are labeled and that they are different. Children, normative, exceptional, or with special needs can be intensely cruel to those who are different, as bullying is no longer exactly an accepted facet of childhood and adolescence, and is a topic that is taken with a great deal more gravity than in previous decades. Interpersonal relationships of special needs children can be affected because of their label and because of their abilities if they are not ever in the company of peers who understand and accept their differences. Loneliness can affect all children and all people regardless of abilities; special needs children may be more prone to lack them because of ignorant perceptions by the outside world.