The development of school-age children born to parents with serious mental disorders was assessed on a variety of perceptual-cognitive and motoric tasks. These same children have been followed up from birth as part of the Jerusalem Infant Development Study. Children with schizophrenic parents, when compared with children with healthy parents or parents having other psychiatric disorders, were more likely to show neurobehavioral dysfunctioning in perceptual-cognitive and motoric areas. Forty-four percent of the offspring of schizophrenics (11 of 25 subjects) showed such dysfunctioning. Male subjects were overrepresented in this poorly functioning group. A stable subgroup (40%) of the offspring of schizophrenics (six of 15 subjects) showed dysfunctioning during infancy and school age. None of the offspring of nonschizophrenic parents showed dysfunctioning during both age periods. While most of the poorly functioning children with schizophrenic parents showed perceptual-cognitive and motoric signs, only perceptual-cognitive signs were strongly linked to parental diagnosis and infant dysfunctioning. Motoric signs, but not cognitive signs, were related to pregnancy and birth complications. These findings provide further support to the schizotaxia hypothesis that some neurointegrative deficits may reflect vulnerability to schizophrenia and that these deficits are clearly apparent at school age, long before the onset of illness. However, these signs are not exclusive to schizophrenic illness, although they occur with a greater prevalence in this group. Definitive statements about the validity of early neurobehavioral signs as indicators of genetic vulnerability await further longitudinal follow-up into the age of risk for actual schizophrenic breakdown or when a diagnosis of schizotypal personality disorder may be made.

Because neurobehavioral impairment may be marking genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia spectrum disorders, clinicians treating children whose parents have schizophrenia need to thoroughly evaluate symptoms of mental disorder--but also neuromotor and neuropsychological functioning.

No abstract

A new approach, the social control of learning disabilities, argues that the child's disability affects mainly his parents and then teachers, school officials, and professionals in such a way that their activities to help him are thwarted by the same complex of symptoms as those of the child's disability. The symptoms of failure, anxiety, hyperactivity, distractibility, rigidity, and emotional lability are examined from this perspective and specific patterns of controlling these symptoms are suggested.

A simple analysis of variance indicated the presence of significant differences in the number of categorizations in an object-sorting task by middle-class, culturally deprived, mentally retarded, and learning-disabled children. T-tests for differences between the means revealed that middle-class children categorized significantly more than culturally deprived children, retarded children, and learning-disabled children. However, culturally deprived children categorized significantly less than retarded children, which is the reverse of the expected performance. It would appear that the teaching methods for culturally deprived children in a development town in Israel are so poor that they cannot even achieve the level of performance of retarded children.