This was the central question
Petra van Schie and colleagues addressed in their article published in Research in Developmental Disabilities.
According to the authors communication becomes more important as children grow
older, and they were keen to find out how cerebral palsy affects the
development of communication and social interaction.
Over a period of 3 years, van Schie
and colleagues monitored the development of 108 children with CP in the
Netherlands. The children joined the study when they were about 6 years of age.
Information on their communication was collected each year through an extensive
parental questionnaire (the Vineland Adaptive Behaviour Scales).
Findings showed that more than
half of the children (58%) had problems with communication and social
interaction because of CP. This was particularly true for those children with a
history of epilepsy, and – not surprisingly - speech problems. The results also
showed that children who could not walk had greater problems with social
interaction than those children who could walk or had walking aids. This shows
that there is a link between motor abilities and communication, which mirrors
findings from previous studies discussed here in this blog. However, even
children in the latter group, i.e. who could walk, were not always successfully
interacting with others. The authors thus conclude that a wide range of
children with CP would benefit from intervention to support communication and social
development.
This study highlights again how important intervention is to
support communication development in children with CP…and how desperately needed
intervention and intervention studies are to monitor progress…
Reference: van Schie et al. (2013). Development of social
functioning and communication in school-aged (5-9) years children with cerebral
palsy. Research in Developmental
Disabilities, 34, 4485-4494.
