How do spinal cord injuries to children 6-12 affect their development? - Sara Klaas, MSW

For our school-aged children who sustain spinal-cord injuries, it's particularly important that they continue to be involved in community activities that they would have been involved in had they not sustained their injury. So for them, to be able to get out into their community, participate in Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, team sports, individual sports—whatever their interest were prior to their injury. It's important that we continue to encourage those interests. For school-aged children, we really want to see them beginning to develop some independence. They start to want to be independent, both emotionally and physically from their parents, and we want to encourage that as much as possible. So, a child who has sustained a spinal cord injury often has a bit of a setback. They have to have their parents or a primary caregiver, who has to take over some of their physical care initially. For those children who have levels of injury that they can be independent, we want to ensure that they are as independent as possible. We want to make sure that they learn their own care, they learn about their medications, they learn how to take care of their bodies, and that they progress through that sort-of stage as independent as they can, because that's what they'd be working on normally.