Healthy Lifestyle of Intellectually Disabled Children: Planning and Pedagogical Prospects

Abstract

Healthy Lifestyle is one of the potent factors to be healthy and prosperous in one’s life. It is empirically corroborated that a Healthy Lifestyle is a very crucial and important for the disabled individuals especially Intellectual disabled, as the group is usually deviant in their healthy and sound life routine in comparison to normal population unless the same is not inculcated and cogently implemented for the habit formation at right stages. Therefore, it is obvious that the Intellectual Disabled (ID) children are prone to illness and diseases due to their lifestyle pattern. Umpteen researches have been documented on the Healthy Lifestyle of Intellectual disabled on Adults but a little could only be noticed on the children and adolescents of such groups. The present study was undertaken on the Intellectual disabled children of ‘A’ & ‘B’ types of Schools (categorized for the sake of comparative analysis). ‘A’ type of schools has got a unique ExclusiveInclusive system of Education in comparison to ‘B’ type of schools/institutes with the aims to know whether the institutes/schools and Gender have got any differences in the Healthy Lifestyle of the subjects (ID children).Under the purposive sampling, a total of 156 ID children were included in the study. A Healthy Lifestyle Scale (H.L.S.) developed and validated for the subjects, measuring the five areas (Physical Activities, Diet & Nutrition, Emotional, Social and Sleep) was used to collect the information. For the analysis, ANOVA and ttest were applied for data analysis very encouraging and enthusiastic results revealed. The Girls differed in their Healthy Lifestyle from the Boys significantly. The ID children of ‘A’ type schools differed from the ‘B’ type of Schools/Institutes in their Healthy Lifestyle. Overall, the ID Girls were found better in their Healthy Lifestyle than the Boys. The study was concluded with implications and suggestions.