Could it be Dyspraxia???

Dyspraxia is what I am currently looking into in regards to Handsome.

The symptoms in pre-school children - 3 to 5 year olds

Children with dyspraxia may demonstrate some of these types of behaviour:Dyspraxia entails the partial loss of the ability to coordinate and perform certain purposeful
movements and gestures in the absence of motor or sensory impairments.

Developmental dyspraxia (referred to as developmental coordination disorder (DCD) in the US) is a life-long condition that is more common in males than in females, and has been believed to affect 8% to 10% of all children (Dyspraxia Trust, 1991). Ripley, Daines, and Barrett state that 'Developmental dyspraxia is difficulty getting our bodies to do what we want when we want them to do it', and that this difficulty can be considered significant when it interferes with the normal range of activities expected for a child of their age. Madeline Portwood makes the distinction that dyspraxia is not due to a general medical condition, but that it may be due to immature neuron development. The word "dyspraxia" comes from the Greek words "dys" meaning bad and "praxis", meaning action or deed.

Dyspraxia is described as having two main elements:

Ideational dyspraxia - Difficulty with planning a sequence of coordinated movements.

Ideo-Motor dyspraxia - Difficulty with executing a plan, even though it is known.

Assessment and diagnosis

Assessments for dyspraxia typically require a developmental history, detailing ages at which
significant developmental milestones, such as crawling and walking, occurred. Motor skills screening includes activities designed to indicate dyspraxia, including balancing, physical sequencing, touch sensitivity, and variations on walking activities.

A baseline motor assessment establishes the starting point for developmental intervention
programs. Comparing children to normal rates of development may help to establish areas of
significant difficulty.

However, research in the BJSE has shown that knowledge is severely limited in many who should be trained to recognise and respond to various difficulties, including Developmental Coordination Disorder, Dyslexia and DAMP. The earlier that difficulties are noted and timely assessments occur, the quicker intervention can begin. A teacher or GP could miss a diagnosis if they are only applying a cursory knowledge.

Developmental profiles

Various areas of development can be affected by developmental dyspraxia and many or all can
persist into adulthood. Often various coping strategies are developed, and these can be enhanced through physiotherapy.

Speech and language

Developmental verbal dyspraxia is a type of ideational dyspraxia, causing linguistic or phonological impairment. This is the favoured term in the UK; however it is also sometimes referred to as articulatory dyspraxia and in the USA the usual term is apraxia of speech [2]. Key problems include:

* Difficulties controlling the speech organs.
* Difficulties making speech sounds
* Difficulty sequencing sounds
o Within a word
o Forming words into sentences
* Difficulty controlling breathing and phonation.
* Slow language development.
* Difficulty with feeding.

Fine motor control

Difficulties with fine motor co-ordination lead to problems with handwriting, which may be due to either ideational or ideo-motor difficulties. Problems associated with this area may include:

* Learning basic movement patterns.
* Developing a desired writing speed.
* The acquisition of graphemes – e.g. the letters of the Latin alphabet, as well as numbers.
* Establishing the correct pencil grip
* Hand aching while writing

Whole body movement, coordination, and body image

Issues with gross motor coordination mean that major developmental targets including walking,
running, climbing and jumping are affected. One area of difficulty involves associative movement, where a passive part of the body moves or twitches in response to a movement in an active part. For example, the support arm and hand twitching as the dominant arm and hand move, or hands turning inwards or outwards to correspond with movements of the feet. Problems associated with this area may include:

* Poor timing
* Poor balance (sometimes even falling over in mid-step) Tripping over one's own feet is also not uncommon.
* Difficulty combining movements into a controlled sequence.
* Difficulty remembering the next movement in a sequence.
* Problems with spatial awareness, or proprioception
* Some people with dyspraxia have trouble picking up and holding onto simple objects [3] due to poor muscle tone.
* This disorder can cause an individual to be clumsy to the point of knocking things over and
bumping into people accidentally.
* Some Dyspraxics have difficulty in determining left from right.
* Cross-laterality, ambidexterity, and a shift in the preferred hand are also common in people with dyspraxia.
* Dyspraxics may also have trouble determining the distance between them and other objects.

General difficulties

Dyspraxic people may have Sensory Integration Dysfunction, a condition that creates abnormal
oversensitivity or undersensitivity to physical stimuli, such as touch, light, and sound [citation
needed]. This may manifest itself as an inability to tolerate certain textures such as sandpaper or certain fabrics, or even being touched by another individual (in the case of touch oversensitivity) or may require the consistent use of sunglasses outdoors since sunlight may be intense enough to cause discomfort to a dyspraxic (in the case of light oversensitivity). An aversion to loud music and naturally loud environments (such as clubs and bars) is typical behavior of a dyspraxic individual who suffers from auditory oversensitivity, while only being comfortable in unusually warm or cold environments is typical of a dyspraxic with temperature oversensitivity.