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Mental Health and Children with Disabilities

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Development and Learning of Young Children with Disabilities

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Abstract

Plenty of research has documented a higher prevalence of mental health problems in children with disabilities of all types, thus indicating a common underlining risk dynamic. Based on empirical findings, the chapter will begin by exploring the question of whether specific types of impairments are associated with certain types of developmental aberrations. The cultural-historical model of disability is used to analyse the processes involved. The first example will be attachment. Attachment has been studied in psychology as one important factor that may explain the development of both positive mental health and mental health problems. From the cultural-historical point of view, attachment is built and develops around parents and their infant/child as mutual social agents; and the congenital dispositions the child brings into the mutual system impacts on the development of the attachment system. Challenging behavior is another theme addressed – showing how behaviour is mediated by dialectical cultural and biological processes. Behaviour considered to be problematic (either for the child, for the environment or both) needs to be understood as the child’s social agency in answer to conflicts between the natural and the cultural line of development. In probing the possible meaning of a child’s problematic behaviour as intrinsic to the social situation of development, it is necessary to consider both the capacity of the child to understand the situational social demands, the child’s repertoire of social agency in relation to cultural demands and the availability of support within the specific setting.

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  1. Danish School of Education, Aarhus University, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Louise Bøttcher

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Jesper Dammeyer

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  1. Louise Bøttcher
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  2. Jesper Dammeyer
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Bøttcher, L., Dammeyer, J. (2016). Mental Health and Children with Disabilities. In: Development and Learning of Young Children with Disabilities. International Perspectives on Early Childhood Education and Development, vol 13. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-39114-4_6

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