Promoting the Developmental Needs of Children With Difficulties in the Development of Preschool Age

Abstract

For adequate child development and achieving their full developmental potential, it is necessary to create natural conditions of knowing and understanding child’s personal abilities. Understanding the course of normal child development can help parents, educators and other professionals to recognize deviations in the early stage of childs development, which is the first step in the process of a family-oriented early intervention. Existence of developmental difficulties in preschool children further complicates child’s development as a phenomenon. At preschool age, children with developmental disabilities are intensively exposed to various diagnostic and rehabilitation procedures with purpose of enhancing different developmental skills. From a theoretical point of view, it requires respect for the needs and interests of the child as a basic determinant in the programming and structuring of such procedures. However, the existing research was mostly focused on the child’s developmental areas in terms of speech-language, motorical, cognitive, socio-emotional and adaptive development. Insufficient number of researches are focused on studying childs development needs, their fulfilling and its correlation with success in rehabilitation procedures. This paper focuses on the basic developmental needs of children at preschool age, with the goal of analyzing and studying specifical developmental needs of children with disabilities and meeting basic children’s needs through preschool education and rehabilitation programs.