Fine Motor Disabilities

Fine Motor Disabilities negatively impact a student’s performance in school but have no bearing on their intellectual ability. It strictly speaks to an individual’s struggle to control the small muscles in their hand as they write. Since communication in the form of writing is important and still heavily relied upon in our society and schools, kids with this disability face a variety of obstacles. Simply writing their name is not only time consuming, it may also end up illegible. Throw this in the mix of a teacher asking you to write an essay or copy 100 sentences off the board and you have got yourself one impossible situation. To make their work legible, these individuals must exert a great deal of focus and energy which leaves very little left over for the actual meat of what they are writing about not to mention problem solving. Miscalculations rule the day in their attempt at computations, diagrams are a mess, dissections are unrecognizable and their art endeavors look similar to their writing; primitive and way below their age level.

Clumsiness is the order of the day: they run into glass doors, trip over a classmate’s book bag heading to the front of the class or ruin the pick up game of basketball by throwing it the wrong direction. Kids with fine motor problems deal with the fact that their learning disability is out there for everyone to see. It is constantly before the world and impossible to hide just by the nature of the deficit itself. The frustration in dealing with trying to control their fine motor movements combined with trying to ward off social humiliation all the while navigating the developmental steps, fighting to grow up, make good grades, and get kids to like them can be more than any one kid can handle. Early diagnosis, intervention and lots of consistent support are vital.

Because these students hate to write, they avoid an entire array of activities that are essential to their development as a student. Every time a child with fine motor disabilities sits down to write pretty much anything, or every time they endeavor to express themselves on paper, they begin to question themselves. They question what careers are open to them, what possibilities if any will they have in the future to be like other people, to accomplish what other people are capable of accomplishing.

It is important to remember that learning disabilities are unique to each child. They vary in severity and sometimes overlap with other learning disabilities thereby presenting an endless cache of combinations. Learning Disabilities are permanent. And while a person may show improvement over time, they will likely need support throughout their entire educational years. Upon reaching adulthood, certain learning disabilities pose more problems than others due to the way in which they are manifested. Someone with a fine motor disability for instance may drop things but this does not negatively impact their ability to produce on the job as an attorney. On the other hand, language and attention problems are disruptive in every occupation even when the individual has figured out how to structure their life so that reading and writing are not major issues.

Due to research and education, we know so much more about learning disabilities today. This means a child can have a gifted IQ but he or she may also have a learning disability which means learning how they learn best will be of utmost importance for them to succeed in their educational and social environments. The future is as bright for children with learning disabilities as it is for children without as long as they get the proper diagnosis and intervention they need to effectively learn how to learn. One way to do that is to construct the clearest possible picture of the particular deficit your child has through a Psychological Evaluation.