Dyspraxia

Dyspraxia is a neurological disorder throughout the brain that results in life-long impaired motor, memory, judgment, processing, and other cognitive skills. Dyspraxia also impacts the immune and central nervous systems. Each dyspraxic person has different abilities and weaknesses as dyspraxia often comes with a variety of comorbidities. The most common of these is Developmental Co-ordiantion Disorder (also known as DCD), a motor-planning-based disorder that impacts fine and gross motor development. 

Early indicators that a child may have Dyspraxia:

   1. Irritable and difficult to comfort from day one

  

   2. Difficulties with feeding, allergic to milk, colicky, needs to be on a restricted diet

  

   3. Has difficulty sleeping, establishing and sticking to a routine,  needs constant adult   

       reassurance

  

   4. Early motor development is delayed, needs help sitting up longer than most kids, needs

       extra help in learning to roll over from side to side, most likely skips crawling and goes 

       right to walking. 

   

  5. Constant high level of motor movement of arms and legs including clapping, hand or 

      foot tapping, wringing of hands, swinging of feet, not being able to sit still longer than 5 

      minutes, flaps hands when running or walking, constantly falling or bumping into things

   

   6. Has behaviors that are repetitive in nature

   

   7. Sensitive to noise levels that are higher than normal such as loud shrill voices, out of 

       the ordinary noises

   

   8. Has continuous problems with their feeding development-spill things, prefer fingers to 

       eating utensils

  

    9. Toilet training is delayed longer than most typically developing children

  10. Avoids toys such as puzzles and Legos (toys that require you to put things together in

        a specific way. 

  

  11. Slower to respond to verbal instructions and needs them broken down into small steps 

        to process, slower in comprehension

  12. Prefers Adult interaction over peer interaction

  13. Does not liked to be touched or wear new clothing-clothes may need to be washed 

        several times to become comfortable for them to wear

  

  14. They have no fear from jumping off of things that are too high and have no sense of 

         danger 

  15.  Fine motor skills are slow to develop such as holding a pencil appropriately, using 

         scissors, and coloring recognizable objects

  16. They do not like playing dress up or engaging in appropriate imaginative play