Dr. Eva Germanò
Researcher Medical Director,
UOC of Child Neuropsychiatry – Department of Pediatric, Medical and Surgical Sciences, University of Messina

It is a fairly common experience of parents for children to complain of difficulty with homework, memorizing poetry or content, and maintaining concentration in the classroom . With the beginning of the school experience, even mild, underestimated or undetected cognitive disorders emerge as learning disorders .

School discomfort seems to be a growing phenomenon in parallel with the progress of the level of schooling. This can be related to problems related to the psychophysical growth of children or to educational and didactic management or to the onset of real learning or emotional-behavioral disorders.

Learning disorders in developmental age are characterized by difficulties in acquiring, memorizing or using specific skills , due to a deficit of cognitive functions such as attention and memory that affect academic performance.

Learning disabilities can be traced back to non- specific conditions or specific deficits .

Non- specific learning difficulties may depend on deficiencies in the educational and cultural stimuli of the home environment, on global or sensorineural cognitive deficits and on psychological or psychiatric disorders.

Specific learning disorders (DSA) , on the other hand, concern only some areas of the cognitive organization; the best known are dyslexia and related disorders that interfere with the acquisition of reading, writing (dysorthography) and calculation (dyscalculia) skills, which are very frequent. The DSM-5 reports a prevalence of 5-15% among school-age children of ASD (APA, 2013).

These disorders are closely linked to dysfunctions in language and memory skills .
Other disorders of the neuropsychological organization are also very frequent in developmental age, such as disturbances in attention and executive functions (eg ADHD).

Furthermore, very often learning disorders are associated with each other or with other deficits in cognitive functions such as attention (Wilcutt et al, 2019).

The conditions described involve considerable difficulty in learning , and can generate demotivation towards school up to school refusal and emotional disturbances such as anxiety and fears . In fact, the child will take much longer to perform the tasks, will experience tiredness and frustration , not obtaining the expected results if not adequately supported. Academic and social adaptation may also be affected.

For this reason, when a child exhibits poor academic performance, slowness and difficulty in acquiring school skills, attention and memory difficulties, reduced adaptation to the school environment, these difficulties should not be underestimated and indeed it will be necessary to provide specific aid and, if risk factors exist, a specialist assessment should be carried out.

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References

• The American Psychiatric Association’s (2013) Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental. Disorders (5th ed .; DSM-5)
• Groves NB, Kofler MJ, Wells EL, Day TN, Chan ESM. An Examination of Relations Among Working Memory, ADHD Symptoms, and Emotion Regulation. J Abnorm Child Psychol. 2020 Apr; 48 (4): 525-537.
• Willcutt EG, McGrath LM, Pennington BF, Keenan JM, DeFries JC, Olson RK, Wadsworth SJ. Understanding Comorbidity Between Specific Learning Disabilities. New Dir Child Adolesc Dev. 2019 May; 2019 (165): 91-109.