Affects of mentally disabled kids to the family and siblings

It is very common for people to underestimate the importance of the developmental milestones that a human being completes throughout a lifespan. The way a newborn is looked after in it’s mothers womb, followed by its birthing and by the taking care processes during its first few years of life, determines the way a child will be able to achieve and complete the so called developmental milestones, also known as the stages of development. Anything varying from an accidental teratogen intake or several prolonged extra minutes, or even just seconds, without oxygen during birth, can cause life long developmental damages, including both cognitive and/or physical. How do parents of children afflicted with these disabilities work through the growth and development of their child, knowing that their life, both the parents and the kids’, will forever be impacted by such a seemingly small and insignificant event? How do the second-born children learn to interact, and in a way accept and look past the differences of their siblings? This paper will focus on discussing the effects that children with mental retardation and learning disabilities have on their family’s adaption to their unique approach at the developmental stages. Those above are both questions that will be considered throughout this paper via the aid of personal anecdotes from my family and individual experiences with my brother, and several other papers that reported the results from different related studies.
The disabilities that were introduced above are somewhat similar but yet very different inabilities that are definitely worth defining. The various studies focused on individuals with both learning and mental disabilities. A learning disability is typically a condition giv...

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...d the city alone most of the time on public transportation, and is able to be alone and take care of himself when the situations require him to. Seeing that his level of independence is distinctively higher than at least most of his friends, whom I met, I am not surprised at all that the option of having him potentially live in a specific institution wasn’t even mentioned. So there is definitely the element of independence to keep in consideration when evaluating the responses from the surveyed parents. It would’ve been interesting to know if the parents had discussed those options with their kids and also to see what the disabled individuals would have chosen if a copy of the survey was given directly to them as well. A variant that could have affected the results of the surveys includes the degree of independence and freedom that the parents allow their children.