Dyspraxia, or Developmental Co-ordination Disorder, is a disability that affects movement and coordination.

When you are dressing, you don’t put on your coat first and then your jumper.  We know that there is an order to the way we dress. It is how we dress our babies and small children and gradually they learn that order and start to dress themselves. 

Praxis

After a while, the child learns that they can take off the jumper if it’s too hot and put on a coat if they are cold, without having to go through the entire order of dressing & undressing completely.  They can draw from past experiences to create appropriate actions at the time. This is called Praxis; the ability of the brain to conceive, organise and carry out a sequence of events. Praxis is the ability to self-organize. The term praxis and motor planning are often used interchangeably however it is more accurate to consider praxis the broader term that encompassed motor planning.

Praxis allows us to develop higher-level skills and to interact purposefully with each other and the environment. A baby innately learns to sit, stand, walk, and babble. It is when the baby breaks from the sensory-motor aspect of object use such as repeatedly banging a spoon on the table, to purposeful object use, attempting to eat with a spoon that they begin to utilize praxis. 

What is Dyspraxia?

Dyspraxia is having difficulty executing new tasks, even though there is adequate motor and conceptual capacity to do so. A child with Dyspraxia that picks up some Lego pieces might keep picking them up and dropping them but not attempt to build with them, typically showing little sense of purpose or intention. In short, praxis is necessary for behaviour to become purposeful. If a child with Dyspraxia cannot organize the steps in dressing, he will not become independent in this skill. In other words, praxis is necessary for behaviour to be effective. To adapt effectively to his environment, a child must have an idea of what he wants to do; he needs to have a plan of how he will sequence and time his movements, and finally, he needs to perform the action.

Individuals with Dyspraxia have difficulty imitating actions, sequencing activities, and executing higher-level reasoning. 

Many children with developmental challenges have motor planning difficulties. Difficulties with motor planning are often at the heart of these children’s frustrations. As children grow, they move away from simply experiencing the world and are instead called upon to master it. Toys, tools and self-care activities become more complex, requiring more intricate and sequenced motor planning behaviour. Motor planning problems make it difficult for these children to master the use of objects, which leads to an increasing sense of frustration. Academic tasks become increasingly complex and the self-organisation required at the level of secondary school can be daunting. 

Learning with Dyspraxia

People with Dyspraxia often require repeated exposure to an activity to master it. They need to consciously organise their action since the body is less able to automatically determine the necessary steps for execution. They can’t generalise their experiences to other situations.

Learning becomes exhausting because they are working much harder than their friends & classmates to accomplish the same thing, all of which places an enormous tax on the nervous system. 

Learning can be challenging for these children as motor planning problems decrease a child’s ability to imitate the actions of others. 

Misunderstood

Some find it easier to just devise their way of doing something as opposed to attempting to learn someone else’s way or “the right way.” These children can then be described as unconventional or oppositional, all of which can make social interaction more difficult. The children end up feeling misunderstood and parents & teachers wonder why this bright child isn’t performing at their potential.

Speech and language can also be affected by Dyspraxia. As a child develops, language becomes increasingly complex, requiring rapidly sequenced movements of the tongue and jaw, all of which must be coordinated with breathing. A motor planning disorder can affect articulation and compromise intelligibility. Dyspraxia can compromise language development, as phonemes must be organized into words, words into sentences, and words into paragraphs for a person to express their thoughts and feelings. For a child with Dyspraxia, ideating and organizing language can be a tremendous challenge.

Self-esteem

Dyspraxia can harm a child’s sense of self-esteem. Children with Dyspraxia have very few feelings of mastery. Learning is not intrinsically rewarding. They never have a sense of effortless accomplishment. Since this is a hidden disorder – they don’t look different on the outside from their friends – they’re left to feel that something is wrong with them. They feel “stupid” and it is difficult to talk them out of this, as that’s what their experience feels like. They are often labelled as lazy by misunderstanding adults and this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy as these children start to “give up” due to repeated failure.

If your child or student has dyspraxia, talk to us about how we can help. Contact us on 087 2996065 or elaine@hummingbirdlearning.com