engleski

Early intervention in children with perinatal brain lesions

Early intervention rests on the acquired knowledge that the early years constitute a unique opportunity for influencing child development and supporting families, an opporunity that may well maximize long-term benefits for all concerned. This preventive philosophy should be implemented on thouse children with the risk of biological or enviromental factors as well as on thouse with established disabilities. Early intervention seeks to prevent or minimize developmental problems for children at risk or to minimize related problems that may further compromise development. It has been widely accecpted &laquo ; ; ; that successful early intervention programs must center on the needs of families, be based in local communities, be able to thorughly and efficiently integrate the contributions of multiple disciplines, and have the capacity to plan and coordinate supports and services from numerous agencies within a systems framework&raquo ; ; ; (Guralnick, 1997, p.3). This presentation is focused on the Croatian pilot project on early intervention which was organised on the above mentioned philosophy and lasted for 1, 5 years. The project consisted of the following parts: (1) early intervention and its evaluation, (2) research on early development with emphasis on prelinguistic and linguistic communication, (3) parent education and (4) promotion activities of new ideas on early intervention in the public media. The project was offered to all parents with smal children who were concerned about their child's development or who experienced parenting problems in the raising of the child. Although our research interest was primarily directed towards children with perinatal brain lesions, based on rich experiance with the shortcomings of already established programs, we offered this program to all parents in accordance with the philosophy of early intervention. We understood that parents of children born with perinatal brain lesions had extreme difficulties with having their child stigmatised since birth and that those parents are greatly helped by the early intervention program and family fostering based on the same principles as programs for other parents experiencing any other kind of problems. This presentation emphases the results of diagnostic and councelling work collected during a one und a half year long project as well as the evaluation based on the parents' assessment of the services they had been offered.

early intervention; developmental problems; parent education; parenting problems

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