“A person, who has a combination of two  or  more disabilities is considered to have multiple disabilities. For example, a child may have difficulties in learning, along with controlling his/her movements and/or with hearing and vision. The effect of multiple disabilities can be more than the combination of two individual disabilities. 

      A child, who is multiple disabled should receive help as early as possible so that she/he can be helped to achieve her/his potential so that her/his disabilities will not become worse.

     The child will be slow to make progress and will have difficulty in generalizing. It is important that we are patient and we set realistic goals that are small and achievable, as the child can learn only in small steps with a lot of practice and repetition. Because children with multiple disabilities have problems with all muscle movement, with understanding and often with seeing and hearing as well, communication is very difficult for them.

     Often we may not know how much a multiple disabled child is understanding, and the attempts to communicate may be unfamiliar to us and may pass unnoticed. For these reasons we may wrongly label a child as being intellectually disabled when he/she is not. We must try our best to assess a child's understanding and expression to ensure that she is not wrongly labeled.

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Some examples of multiple disabilities are: