Home The Spectrum Center, Bethesda, New York, Chicago. Bethesda, MD. 4715 Cordell Avenue, 4th Floor, Bethesda, Maryland 20814 New York, NY. 307 East 53 St., NY,NY 10022 E-Mail: info@spectrumcenter.com Phone: (301) 657-0988

Early gross and fine motor development is consistent with expected early developmental milestones. Difficulties may appear with more complex motor behavior, such as climbing a jungle gym or nesting cubes. Use of utensils may present a problem and manipulative tasks such as doing and undoing buttons and zippers may prove impossible. There are however, children who present with advanced motor skills. These are the children who climb everywhere without apparent judgment (though they never get hurt). They are also the children who figure out how to operate the VCR or the computer at age two. As it is often the case in Autism/PDD, certain areas of development may excel while others lag way behind (such as language).

Motor planning disorder, known as Dyspraxia is common in children with Autism/PDD, though it is infrequently recognized. Motor planning or “praxis” is the ability of the brain to conceive, organize, and carry out a sequence of unfamiliar actions. Praxis enables us to deal with the physical environment in an adaptive manner. In Dyspraxic Syndrome there is a reduced ability to carry out non-learned movements, even though adequate physical and conceptual capacity exists.

Praxis is believed to be a single function involving three basic processes: ideation - generating an idea of how one might interact with the environment; motor planning - organizing a program of action; and execution - the actual performance of a motor act.

Difficulties in praxis are often the cause of the increased sense of frustration that the Autistic/PDD child experiences during his second year of life. Rather than just experience the world, the child is now called upon to master it. Toys become increasingly complex, requiring more sequenced behaviors than the child with Dyspraxia can organize. Self-care activities require increasingly longer sequences of movements. Speech also becomes more challenging, requiring a more complex sequence of oral motor movements. Language itself is heavily dependent on the ability to organize and sequence. As life becomes increasingly complex the child with Dyspraxia hits major road blocks in his development.

Praxis provides the foundation that enables the child to internally represent objects and events and thus acts as a bridge between non-symbolic and symbolic thought. The ability to play with toys symbolically is certainly largely absent or severely limited in autistic and PDD children. They have no internal representation and therefore cannot use external symbols. Many children with Autism/PDD cannot make the symbolic leap to such abstraction. They are trapped in a lower level of development. They can spin the wheels on a car, yet they cannot pretend to make the car go down the road. This blocks the ability to develop normal cognitive and linguistic structures such as “Make the car go fast/slow, over/under etc.” Their ability to perform may have no proportional relationship with their cognitive level, which often is quite intelligent. This again can be a cause for significant frustration and low self-esteem.
 

Next