Abstract:

The first 1,000 days are considered to be important in a child’s life as they lay a solid foundation as a child grows and develops throughout the lifespan. This is in line with the neuroscience that puts emphasis on the period from birth to seven years as a critical period for a child’s massive physical, mental, emotional, social and moral growth and development. During the early years, children learn to acquire basic concepts, skills and attitudes that shape them as they develop. This calls for care, and encouragement during this period from parents and caregivers to ensure that children reach their developmental milestones particularly those children with special needs. However, not all parents who have children with special needs often know during the early years that their children have such challenges, and at times this often delays early identification, intervention and support in ensuring that children reach their developmental milestones regardless of their conditions. This may contribute to the challenges experienced by Early Childhood Care and Education (ECCE) practitioners when the young children are enrolled in their centres as they do not have an adequate history of the child from home. The situation is worsened by the ECCE practitioners’ inability to identify the child who presents some challenges. This may challenge children with special needs as they may be neglected in ECCE learning programmes. In addition, this may partially contribute to children illiteracy as children with special needs may not benefit from ECCE provisioning as they are denied access. The challenge of ECCE practitioners who are not skilled enough to accommodate and integrate such children in their mainstream ECCE programmes may jeopardize the development of children with special needs. At times, this situation may be exacerbated by the parents and caregivers when they are in denial of their children’s conditions, and they may withdraw them from the ECCE services that may benefit them as they develop. This is despite the effort made by the South African government of introducing the National Integrated Early Childhood Development Policy in 2015 that ensures a better start for every young child irrespective of their differences. Literature suggests that if children with special needs are identified timeously they may be accommodated in ECCE programmes as long they can be provided with additional and specialized support when learning depending on the nature of the identified challenge. Sometimes the challenges that these children may present / manifest may require short to long term interventions and support from home and ECCE centre depending on the identified challenge. Hence, in-class accommodations are essential to ensure that they learn like other children. Children with special needs are at times victims as parents or caregivers and ECCE practitioners don’t have a child’s interest. Sometimes, the parents/caregivers may not be supportive of the endeavours made by the ECCE practitioners in ensuring that their children with special needs develop like their peers. There may be various factors attributed to this and will be discussed further in the proposed chapter.

Keywords:

Children with special needs, Childhood illiteracy, Diversity, Holistic development, Inclusion, Mainstreaming.