Enhancing Peer Interaction Among Children with Intellectual Disability

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Children are most beautiful and unique creation of God endowed with the numerous abilities and enormous potential. During the course of development, the physical, cognitive, language and psycho-social capacities of children unfolds and extends the new frontiers of knowledge, opportunities and possibility. The innate factors and the societal influences help children to achieve maximum development of their potential in different arenas of life and with the passage of time they become the fully functioning adults equipped with essential skills and abilities required for a successful life. But the journey of children who are deficient in some of the abilities is not same as the typically developing children as their deficiencies or limitation interferes with their pace of development and they could not meet the expectations of society. Fundamentally, the children with deficiencies are visibly and functionally different from the typical children, their developmental milestones are delayed and even restricted in some cases, different pace of learning, poor adaptive skills, poor social skills, complete or partial dependence on others, poor socialization and poor self-concept affect their quality of life to a great extent. To achieve their full potential based on their residual abilities, they need different approaches and strategies of teaching at home and school along with some assistive technologies. Similarly, in the social front, they need special attention and assistance of parents, siblings, teachers, peers and other members of society. These children are identified with different names like 'children with disability', 'exceptional children', 'children with special needs' 'children with different abilities', 'children with significant disability', 'children with diverse abilities. Disability is one of the most misunderstood terms and in lay vernacular it is often interchangeably used for 'impairment' or 'handicapped'. According to WHO & World Bank (2011), defining disability is a very complicated task as it is very "complex, multidimensional, contested and dynamic". In its initial attempt to define disability, WHO proposed a three-fold definition of impairment, disability, and handicap stating that "an impairment is any loss or abnormality of a psychological, physiological or anatomical structure or function, a disability is any restriction or lack (resulting from an impairment) of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being, a handicap is a disadvantage for a given individual, resulting from an impairment or a disability, that prevents the fulfilment of a role that is considered normal (depending on age, sex, social and cultural factors) for that individual" WHO (1976).