Children with developmental needs is not a disease. Children with developmental needs is a developmental disorder. One thing that we can do is to give children stimulations, interventions and treatments, in the hopes of enabling them to be independent as possible. We teach and enhance life skills with visual cues to help them function in their daily lives.

If children with developmental needs understand pictures, we can give them choices in the formal two or more picture visual supports to teach them how to make their own choices. Visual support is one of the ways to communicate with children with developmental needs.

We should not raise our voices, but rather give instructions with clear and firm intonation. Speaking loudly does not help children with developmental needs to understand better but pictures do. All family members must be consistent and persistent to avoid confusion.

Use objects to symbolize whose turn. For example : Hat. If child gets the hat, it means it is his/her turn. When the hat is worn by others, it means it is the other person´s turn.

Research has shown that many children lack the [dpp4] enzyme that allows them to break down the peptides from gluten and casein. As a result, these individual, may have proteins, which are not digested fully, and cross the intestinal membrane, reaching the blood vessels, these proteins pass through the blood-brain barrier and interfere with neurotransmission. Consequently, the children may have poor attention span, odd behavior, a deficit in socialization skills and poor speech.

Fundamentally, it is important that the child is able to communicate, regardless of his/her means-using verbal or non-verbal language. Communication takes places only when there is a two way interaction between the child and other party (parents, siblings, teacher, peers, etc). Communication is integral for the child to request his/her needs, to ask for help, to agree or disagree, and to receive others inputs as well. A child with developmental needs may experience difficulty in verbal communication due to their lack and speech understand instructions and expressing their emotions, needs and wants. Pictures exchange becomes their voice, or “secret weapon”, to reduce a stressful situation when they need to rely a message to others and logically, in a less stressful environment, it provides a learning opportunity for the child to practice verbal language.

This is very much dependent on the child’s own developmental progress. If the child has modality to be verbal, he/she will be able to speak with guidance and therapy assistance. On the other hand, the child’s medical condition may be too severe and he/she will be experiencing difficulty to talk. Our goal is, nevertheless, to enhance the child’s communication as much as possible, using both verbal and/or non-verbal language.

There needs to be a certified paediatrician, psychologist and psychiatrist to be able to diagnose a child with developmental needs. The process of determining the diagnosis will involve an interview with the child’s parents, caregivers as well as a clinical observation of the child.