Mentally Handicapped Children In Adaptive Behavior

Adaptive behavior and intelligence are the two criteria for diagnosing and classifing people with mental retardation . For the children with mental retardation the impairment in intelligence is unchangable, but the impairment in adaptive behavior can be improved by training . Therefore it is important for the mental handicapped children to improve their adaptive level .In additon ,the moderate mental handicapped children who are called trainable children are the main group in schools for children with mental retardation ,and adaptive development is very important for them. Therfore it is necessary to study adaptive behavior in children with mental retardtion .There are many researches on adaptive behavior in other coutries,but different results were got because of the Use of different scales. Although two studies on adaptive behavior have been reported in China ,they were not concerned with the critical time, the important domain and the difficult domain for the intervention in adaptive behavior .This study probed adaptive behavior in children with mild and moderate mental retardation aged from 4 to 12 years .And some suggestions were proposed for developing addaptive behavior in the mental handicapped children .It was found that ADQ was higher than IQ for children with mental retardtion almost througout the range of ages . Moreover, both the correlations between adaptive behavior and intelligence, cognition domain and intelligence were significant for children with MR,while the correlations between independent domain,social domain and intelligence were low and insignificant. The level of cognitive developtment was badly low in children with mental retardation ,which was a very important reason why the adaptive behavior level in children with mental retardation was significantly lower than that in normal children ,while weakness in language was the key reason for cognitive lag .Although children with mental retardation significantly lagged behind normal children in adaptive behavior ,they had great potential to develop high-level skills. The rate of independent and social development accelerated in the span of ages ,on the contrary the rate of cognitive development decelerated from 9 years old. Adaptive development didn't balance within chiildren with MR, such as the developmental level in cognitive domain was lowest, while it was highest in social domain relatively. In addition, the trajectory of adaptive development showed that efforts on intervention must begin early, at least begin at 4 years old for children with mental retardtion .This study suggests that children with MR have great potential to develop adaptive skills. During the education and training for them, what is crucial is to develop their independant and social skills and what is difficult is to develop the cognitive skills ,especially the ability of language. Moreover it is needed to make individual program according to the character of every child.