Dysgraphia Treatment in Children in Kyiv

Many clinics in Kyiv offer dysgraphia treatment for children, but at CSM Clinic treatment is not limited to speech therapy sessions. This disorder often has a neurological cause, so we first look for the cause and then decide how to treat dysgraphia for each individual young patient.

Modern neuroscience research suggests that children with learning difficulties often show impaired function in three parts of the brain: the cerebellum, the brainstem and the basal ganglia. Speech therapy alone may not address these impairments, so CSM Clinic also uses modern hardware-based techniques that aim to support the function of these structures and their connection with the cerebral cortex. This is the rationale behind our approach to treatment.

Dysgraphia in a Child: How Is It Treated?

The main principle of treatment at CSM Clinic is early referral. Early treatment gives the best chance of successful correction of dysgraphia in preschool children; even treating dysgraphia in younger schoolchildren already takes more time. Naturally, dysgraphia can be diagnosed at CSM Clinic only after the child starts learning written language, that is, learning to write.

Signs of dysgraphia include:

• illegible handwriting;
• general difficulty learning to write;
• missing capital letters and punctuation marks;
• "mirror" writing of letters and confusion between similar letters, for example Sh and Shch in Ukrainian;
• slow writing pace and a link between writing and mood: when the child is upset, handwriting becomes even worse.

Dysgraphia also has non-speech symptoms: poorer hearing, emotional and volitional problems (the child finds it hard to make themselves do anything except play), poor speech and memory, and attention disorders. These symptoms should prompt parents to look for a specialized center in Kyiv or elsewhere in Ukraine where the child will be thoroughly examined, the cause and type of dysgraphia determined, and an individual treatment plan developed.

Types of Dysgraphia

Several forms of this disorder are distinguished:

• acoustic dysgraphia: the child speaks correctly but confuses similar-sounding sounds in writing (D-T, B-P, Zh-Sh, etc.);
• articulatory-acoustic dysgraphia: the child pronounces sounds incorrectly and writes them incorrectly in the same way;
• agrammatic dysgraphia: the child writes contrary to the rules of grammar; this form is diagnosed late because the child must first learn the grammar rules in order to break them;
• optical dysgraphia: the child does not understand the differences between letters and confuses those that look alike;
• dysgraphia related to difficulty analyzing spoken language and converting it into written language: the most common form, shown by many typical errors such as unfinished words, transposed syllables and omitted letters.

The treatment approach at CSM Clinic is chosen based on the causes, form and severity of the disorder. We use hardware-based therapy to help restore the function of the affected areas of the brain, and then involve a psychologist, a speech therapist and a special education teacher. Without addressing the underlying problem, it is hard to achieve fast and lasting correction.

Our treatment approach aims to help the child achieve lasting improvement in written language, speech, memory and school performance; the key is not to delay seeking help.

A Diagnosis of Dysgraphia in a Child: Is Treatment Always Needed?

Dysgraphia is a disorder of mastering written language, characterized by the same errors repeating constantly in writing because of insufficient development of higher mental functions (HMF). What interferes with the development of HMF and writing skills? The brain cannot cope with processing sensory information from the outside, and too many resources are spent on keeping the child balanced, so the brain simply lacks the resources to master writing.

The causes of these disorders often lie in the same area as the causes of most central nervous system disorders:

• traumatic birth;
• exposure to pathological factors in the perinatal period;
• organic damage to parts of the brain;
• specific conditions of the child: autism, delayed mental and speech development, reduced intellectual abilities, etc.

In addition to biological factors, there are social factors that increase the risk of dysgraphia:

• the child is rarely spoken to;
• the family speaks two or more languages from different language groups;
• the people around the child also speak incorrectly;
• lack of attention to the child's speech development.

If dysgraphia is caused mainly by social factors, even regular dictation exercises for children with dysgraphia may considerably improve the situation. If biological factors predominate, exercises to correct dysgraphia should be supplemented with hardware-based methods selected according to the specifics and severity of the child's condition.

Sources

• Ukrainian Wikipedia
• Ministry of Health of Ukraine