Parents are concerned that their child’s intelligence will be worse than normal and will affect their future studies, employment and marriage. In fact, we can also see individual cleft lip and palate patients who are withdrawn, reluctant to communicate, or even dull-eyed and unresponsive. A person’s excellence is influenced by both congenital conditions and acquired learning. What exactly are the congenital conditions of children with cleft lip and palate?
Every year after the college entrance exams, some of my former patients would come to me happily for second-stage revision surgery because they had been admitted to better universities through their hard work and efforts. One year, four children in one ward all scored more than 600 points in the exam. To be honest, I was more excited than them in those days.
Research has shown that the IQ of people with cleft lip and palate is not lower than that of normal people.
Like normal people, cleft lip and palate patients are bound to face the challenges of schooling, employment and marriage as they grow older. Some survey results show that about 25% of children with cleft lip and palate have delayed enrollment in school, and that children with cleft lip and palate generally do less well in school than normal children, in addition to attending college at a lower rate than normal people. Some believe that this is due to the low intelligence of children with cleft lip and palate. However, most scholars believe that there is no significant difference in the IQ of children with cleft lip and palate compared to normal children.
The following findings can be illustrated: 1, the IQ test of children with cleft lip and palate compared with normal children has only a small difference in absolute value, and there is no statistically significant difference; 2, the proportion of children with cleft lip and palate completing compulsory education is equal to that of normal children, while the proportion repeating or dropping out of school due to too poor grades, bad conduct is also lower than that of normal controls; 3, the proportion of patients attending high school and vocational school is not significantly different from that of controls There was no significant difference, and in some areas, it was also higher than the control group.
Therefore, we believe that the reasons for the delayed enrollment and lower-than-normal performance of cleft lip and palate patients are complex and cannot be simply attributed to patients’ low intelligence based on these alone. In fact, their deformities are likely to cause depression in thought, emotion, behavior, and personality, and they are easily discriminated against by other students or teachers as “abnormal people”, and people around them are reluctant or rarely interact with them. Both the cleft lip and palate deformity and voice dysfunction seriously hinder them from asking questions to teachers and discussing with classmates, which greatly affects their classroom acceptance and after-school practice, thus resulting in delayed enrollment or low achievement. In addition, these phenomena can easily lead to the misconception that they are unresponsive and slow in thinking, and even their parents sometimes think so, which adds to the psychological discrimination against them.
If the child receives the ideal treatment before his or her personality and psychological development mature, so that his or her appearance and speech are normalized and the excessive psychological impact on him or her is avoided, his or her academic performance is not worse than that of normal children, because their IQ is not lower than that of normal children.
Currently, the age of cleft palate surgery is advanced so that they can learn to speak in a normal physiological structure and achieve normal speech; cleft lip emphasizes nasal morphology during early surgery and further nasolipoplasty is done before school age to achieve a better appearance, all of which are aimed at reducing the inferiority complex of the affected child and discrimination by the people around them to ensure the child’s psychology.