Social Disadvantage
The term social disadvantage includes a broad range of barriers to learning, where the primary cause is not the health or disability of the child. The causes of social disadvantage stem from the social environment the child is brought up in or other life circumstances which negatively affect the child’s development, specifically the development of their educational potential.
Aspects of social disadvantage may be defined at the level of:
• individual (for instance differences in language, sexual orientation, noticeable physical appearance, unkempt dress),
• the family (for instance different family lifestyle, cruelty, abuse, neglect, the parent’s large workload, absence of one parent, separation of the child from their biological family),
• the social environment (socially excluded location, shelters or environments with prevalence of risky behaviors) and
• the context of socio-economic status (poverty, loss of material support due to excessive debt, migration, unsatisfactory or changing living conditions, cultural and religious difference).
Children are unable to influence these disadvantaging factors by themselves. To a large degree individual causes of social disadvantage intersect and it is impossible to determine the dominant cause of the need for increased educational support.
Diagnostics should therefore aim to identify any needs the child has within the educational process and search for appropriate measures to achieve them. When looking for optimum forms of support it is important to take into consideration that the causes of social disadvantage are always linked to the broader context of a child’s life which may be unknown to school staff. For this reason it is important, when assessing the needs of each specific child, to include as many people who know the child as possible, including the parents.
Social disadvantage is characterized by a broad range of expressions of a social, psychological, cultural, economic or physical (meaning appearance) nature. Social disadvantage may be a child with a different first language, a child with a facial deformation which isolates the child in the group due to its difference; a child from a dysfunctional family or placed in institutional care.
As has been said above, these aspects very often combine and intersect and also
• vary over time (they may be temporary, occasional or permanent),
• vary over place (something one social group considers normal may be considered unacceptable to another).
At a preschool age we can observe the following behaviors in socially disadvantaged children:
• Ignorance or insufficient knowledge of the language of instruction for children with a different first language,
• Difficulties respecting the daily schedule or ignorance of the relevant language due to lack of experience with a regular schedule in the family environment,
• Difficulties with time orientation and observing scheduled activities,
• Decreased ability to focus attention on one’s own or other people’s tasks (for instance a demonstration of the required activity),
• Ignorance of the rules of common games, didactic toys, children’s books,
• Ignorance of the basic sequence of operations when carrying out tasks,
• Lack of experience with delaying immediate impulses to talk, move, etc. in situations which require the concentrated activity of the child,
• Insufficiently developed visual and auditory perception,
• Insufficiently developed fine motor skills and visual motor integration,
• The absence of experience in drawing or other childhood artwork techniques or the use of the relevant tools (watercolors, scissors, etc.),
• Ignorance of basic terms used for the classification of objects (colors, shapes, sizes, etc.,
• Limited vocabulary
• Ignorance of common social situations,
• Lack of experience with separation from the family and spending longer periods with adult strangers,
• Difficulty in listening to commands and instructions, ignorance of the rules of social interaction,
• Reduced ability to regulate one’s own behavior,
• Prominent expression of emotion (more frequent emotional outbursts, increased anxiety),
• Limited experience with the larger world outside the home environment and its immediate surroundings (lack of experience with visits to cultural and educational events, holidays spent outside the home, etc.).
In supporting children with social disadvantage we place particular emphasis on providing those stimuli which the child lacks in their home environment. We should comment on each activity, introduce the child to the names of activities and the tools used to perform them, demonstrate how to work with these tools. To begin with we should choose the activities we can be sure the child is able to manage.
Experiencing success strengthens motivation to further work. When selecting activities:
• We should more often switch between activities requiring focusing of the attention and activities less demanding of attention (a similar approach to that used with children who have ADHD).
• We should encourage the child to ask questions, search for links between phenomena, sort items according to a given characteristic (shape, color, etc.).
• Through positive motivation we can strengthen different forms of interaction with other children and adults, respecting the basic principles of social behavior.
• We should also introduce the parents to appropriate forms and means of support for the well-rounded development of the child (invite them to come and watch the children’s activities, by showing appropriate didactic toys, etc.).
In cases where the child shows signs of neglect, cruelty or abuse, we should consult our suspicions with professionals from organisations dealing with these issues, followed by contacting the local socio-legal child protection agency.