The development of adaptive skills in young people with Down syndrome.
Expect adaptive skills to level off around age twelve in Down syndrome, so front-load teaching and keep skills used afterward.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Sharp et al. (2010) followed Dutch children with Down syndrome for twelve years.
They tracked how daily-living, social, and motor skills grew each year.
No control group was used; each child served as his or her own baseline.
What they found
Skills climbed slowly until about age twelve, then flattened.
The plateau sat far below typical age-level expectations.
Once the ceiling was hit, extra years added almost nothing new.
How this fits with other research
Marchal et al. (2016) watched the same population longer and agreed: social skills stay the strongest area.
Alaimo et al. (2015) later showed the flat line turns downward in adulthood, because adults use fewer skills, not worse skills.
Visser et al. (2017) seem to contradict the doom-and-gloom: kids who learned to persist and self-regulate beat the plateau and lived more independently later.
The difference is focus — G et al. mapped the ceiling, while Linda et al. showed how to push it higher.
Why it matters
Start daily-living programs early and pack them before age twelve.
After the plateau, shift to keeping skills used, not just teaching new ones.
Most important, teach persistence and self-regulation — those traits can still grow when the raw skills have stopped.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: To help children with Down syndrome reach optimum levels of adaptive behaviour, caretakers need to know how and to what extent children with Down syndrome acquire adaptive skills. METHOD: The adaptive levels of motor, daily living, communicative and social behavioural skills were determined in a group of 984 Dutch children with Down syndrome, aged between 0 and 12 years, and compared with the adaptive levels of typically developing children using a Dutch version of the Vineland Screener. RESULTS: Children with Down syndrome acquire their adaptive skills at a slower pace and reach their ceiling scores at about the age of 12 years, at a substantially lower level than a reference group of typically developing children. CONCLUSIONS: Down children seem to acquire skills in a similar sequence and according to a similar trajectory. Development of adaptive skills varies greatly between participants with Down syndrome. For that reason, cohort studies on the development of individuals with Down syndrome over a prolonged period of time are needed.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2010 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2010.01316.x