Early Intervention for Children in Guatemala

During the first quarter of 2022 a total of 242 therapies were served to 45 children between 0 to 6 years old in our early intervention program. 7 new children join our program in this new year. In January, 38 asessments for diagnostics were developed to children integrated since last year in our program with the aim to create a beseline to build their individual plans for this new year and to monitoring their improvements during their participation in our program. 

Each therapy is planed to support each child according their conditions and individual needs, their skills and planned objectives. Each plan is built to create challenges that let each child develop themselves and create interest in activities beeing motivated to participate in planned therapies without frustation when they can’t reach their goals.    

Group therapies are beeing implemented with the aim to strength social relations and interaction between children. They are learning about rules of courtesy, following instructions, teamwork, values, respect and mutual support. 

The involvement of the family is fundamental and key to achieve children development and success in therapies. Families are participating more and more in activities, they know their children plan and goals. They know what their children are perciving through their senses and they also can know and feel therapies are like. Families are implementing exercises in home with their children, they are now treating differently their children, their communication, their emotions and games had change, they are aware of their condition and monitoring their progress.  

Nico, Nicolas Life Story

Nico join ADISA in January for first time. Nico is 3 years old and he enjoy attend to his therapies or as he calls “clases”. When Nico was born everything was right with him, he started his development as other children, crawling, playing, walking. Nico is very smart… but, when he was 2 years old, Nico begins to appear shy, he didn’t want to play with others, he stops talking and when he talked Nico stuttered and getting frustrated to not express their needs and he cried a lot. He couldn’t touch some textures either.

Nico has undergone the corresponding evaluations and as a result, he has a slight delay in his development, he presents some difficulties at the level of control of his balance, control of the movement of his body, fear of interacting with other children, strange sensations at the tactile level with some textures and mainly language. Evaluations continue to find out Nico's diagnosis, while he is being followed up through the timely stimulation program and also in the animal-assisted therapy program.

Nico's progress is evident, he is currently discovering new sensory stimuli, relating in an excellent way with the therapists, reproducing sentences with meaning, expressing how he feels, telling stories without fear and his stutter has decreased, which at the same time makes the control of his emotions is better regulated by him.