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General characteristics of mentally retarded children
Following are the general characteristics of mentally retarded children:
- Limited Intelligence: In general, intelligence is characterized as the capacity to gain relevant knowledge and skills, adapt to new challenges and situations in life, benefit from prior experiences, participate in abstract and creative thinking, utilize critical judgement, avoid errors, overcome hurdles, and exercise foresight. All of these characteristics are conspicuously lacking in mentally impaired people. Their ability for learning is restricted. According to research, teaching mental defectives is a difficult and laborious procedure. Learning is based on rote memorization rather than comprehension. The faults are repeated again and again. The most severely mentally challenged people can be taught to read and write. Intelligence is a relative rather than an absolute absence.
- Social Insufficiency: In society, mentally impaired children are unable to proper self-care, self-support, or self-management. These youngsters also demand an unreasonable quantity of support. They are fed and dressed until they reach a certain age. Association with younger children is quite important. Adults, on the other hand, are economically dependent on others. The British Mental Deficiency Committee discovered in continuous research that just 14% of males were almost self-sufficient, 46% were moderately self-sufficient, and the remainder contributed nothing. Female defectives had a lower level of self-sufficiency. Adult defectives are incapable of conducting personal and social matters with conventional wisdom, according to subsequent research on this subject. They engage in socially unacceptable behaviour if they are not adequately guided. Stealing, general destructiveness, and sex delinquency are examples of this sort of behaviour.
- Drives and Emotions: The development of urges and emotions varies according to the degree of mental impairment. Even fundamental self-preservation motivations are lacking in some of the lowest grades. External signs of hunger or thirst are absent, and individuals do not attempt to avoid potentially harmful stimuli. Their poor emotional life is extremely visible. At the intermediate level, biological urges are highly developed, but emotional life is mostly limited to the basic emotions of pleasure, fear, rage, and surprise. Most research on mental retardation shows that these persons rarely have sophisticated feelings of honour, social morality, and obligation.
- Personality: We all know that no two people in the world have the same personality. Individual differences appear to be less pronounced in mentally impaired persons than in the general population. Individuals that are lively, charismatic, powerful, nasty, unpleasant, or spectacular are uncommon among the retardates. Many people are colourless and easily manipulated. A bunch of defectives is readily swayed. They are also typically submissive. Defects might be calm, apathetic, unstable and hyperactive.
- Organismic inferiority: Mentally retarded people have broad anatomical and functional deficiencies across their bodies. They do not learn to talk or walk until they are considerably older. Defective speech and a stumbling walk are two of these people’s most noticeable traits. Their sensory perception is less sharp than that of normal people. The defectives are typically painless, and hearing and visual abnormalities are widespread. Normal performance is extremely unusual in mental defectives, and they fall short of normal performance on mechanical ability tests.
