What are the symptoms of Alcohol Related Neurological Disabilities or what used to be called Fetal Alcohol Syndrome?
Many of our adopted Eastern European children may be suffering the effects of alcohol-related neurological disabilities. Unfortunately, many of the parents of those children have no access to maternal history, birth history, or early life history of their children which is necessary for a definitive diagnosis. Children with the obvious facial and physical features of Fetal Alcohol can be evaluated and diagnosed by a physician specialized in this field, but for those children who don’t have a lot of physical symptoms, it becomes much harder to pin down the diagnosis. To complicate matters, many other neurological disorders (AD/HD, sensory integration issues, language/auditory processing disorders, learning disabilities, executive functioning problems) share symptoms with alcohol-related neurological disorders. Teasing all these issues apart is a little like untying the Gordian knot. Many times, the closest we can get to determining if maternal alcohol consumption has interfered with the
