Though she was having a job that paid her well, the incident led her to take a journey within and work around social challenges. As per Sonalee it was never a one day job to start a social foundation and that she had been a witness of many instances that kept fueling her thoughts of starting such an enterprise. As a student, she already had spent over three years volunteering at the Baba Amte Ashram in Mumbai. Besides, she also worked with children living in red light areas of Mumbai through the organization Prerna. All these experiences coupled together made her realize that she needs to do something substantial for children.

Through the Urmi foundation, Sonalee and her team want to create an environment that is adaptive and inclusive for children of special needs and help them grow academically. Her way is to make things easy for these kids. For example, they found that kids with speech disabilities were not able to express their problems to the doctor easily. So, the created digital emojis for them, that include body parts and select expressions. They even provided these signs to doctors of government hospitals so that the kids could communicate with the doctors about their pain easily. Well, this is just the beginning for Sonalee as she plans to open a special education school in the red light area for kids here, first of its kind, as she thinks these kids compared to others are more prone to physical mental or sexual abuse. And to turn this dream into reality she is working with other people and trying to get like-minded ones on board as well.

*Sourced from Internet

Physical disabilities include conditions like chronic asthma, epilepsy, multiple sclerosis and more. Behavioral these include disabilities like bi-polar, ADD, defiance disorder and more. Developmental these include disabilities like dyslexia, autism, Down syndrome, etc. Sensory these disabilities include blindness, deafness, etc.

So, if your child does have a disability then as a parent, knowing the rights of your children is always better. It will definitely help you get help you get your child all the help needed for a better upbringing and education. Early intervention is the key in case of children with special needs.

Neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, autism, mental retardation, intellectual disability may tend to make children impulsive, easily bored or frustrated and also pose an issue with concentration. While children with eating disorders like binge eating, night eating, bulimia nervosa will have atypical behavior around their eating or weight. Besides they do tend to possess intense emotions as well as attitudes. Other disorder is the elimination disorder that involves enuresis or bed wetting and related disorders. Then there are children with the affective disorders involving frequent mood swings, consistent sadness, bipolar disorder and depression to name a few. Another less known disorder is Tic disorder leading to sudden body repeated body movements not on purpose or even meaning less sounds known as tics. The sounds do not include sounds like coughing, throat clearance, sniffing or grunting.

In India the most common disabilities include the hearing and vision disabilities. The rural areas have more number of children with disabilities as compared to urban population. The simple reason is lack of adequate medical care in rural and remote areas of India. The state with maximum number of disabled children is Assam while the lowest is Sikkim in India as per records. In villages the even today there are women who give birth with the help of midwives as home. Also, as pediatricians are not available disabilities of children aren’t tended at the right time leading to further damage, as per a renowned medical expert.

*Sourced from the Internet

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Furthermore, there is a difference between learning disability and learning problem or issues. While learning problem is due to factors like motor handicaps, emotional disturbance, or visual handicap to name a few, learning disability is about the gap between a child’s potential and actual achievement against it. It is not easy for a parent to find out whether the child has symptoms of learning disability or not because the child looks as normal as any other child, only that the child is not at par with a peer of his or her age as far as skill development is concerned.

Here’s run down some of the specific learning disabilities found in children –

1. Dyslexia – This is a learning disability that affects the reading skills besides the language based processing skills associated with it and hence it is also referred to as language based learning disability. Though the severity of the disability varies from child to child it affects common skill sets like reading, recalling, writing, decoding and sometimes even speech alongside other disorders.

2. Dyscalculia – This specific learning disability is associated with understanding numericals and includes disorders like memorizing and organizing numbers, telling the time, counting trouble, poor comprehension of maths symbols, to name a few.

3. Auditory Processing Disorder – This disability is associated with how the sound that commutes through the ear or how it is interpreted by the brain. A child with this ability does have difficulty processing sounds, recognizing subtle difference between sounds in words even if the sound is loud and clear. The have difficulty understanding from where these sounds are coming in order to block out competing sounds or understand their order.

4. Dysgraphia – This disorder is responsible for affecting the fine motor skills and handwriting ability of a child. The child may experience issues with illegible handwriting, poor spelling and spatial planning, improper spacing and issues while writing as well as with thinking and writing simultaneously.

5. Visual Perceptual/ Visual Motor Deficit – This disorders affects the ability to draw, copy or ability to understand the information that a child views. The disabilities associated with it include poor hand eye coordination, holding pencil too tight, struggle cutting, missing out on differences in printed letters or shapes, to name a few.

6. Non Verbal Learning Disabilities – An individual having NLD or NVLD shows significant disparity between social skills and visual spatial skills besides trouble with interpretation of body language, facial expressions, nonverbal cues as well as poor coordination.

So, if you find your child is exhibiting similar symptoms and you suspect that your child might have learning disability, evaluate your child’s symptoms and on confirmation you may work upon the gaps that are assessed in comparison to the peer group. The special educator usually is the one with whom you can work out a plan that involves activities and actions for making the child independent and move ahead in learning by bypassing the disability or by overcoming it.