A wide range of factors can have powerful, enduring adverse impacts on children's developmental and educational achievement. Among others, these include genetic disorders, physiological and metabolic disorders, ill health, infections, central nervous system insults, and disordered environments with a number of counterproductive influences. These factors, separately and in combination, can produce disabilities and substantial risks for developmental difficulties. Those disabilities in turn often negatively affect children's adaptation and learning as well as threaten their families' functioning and wellbeing. Society's response to children with disabilities and those at severe risk for disabilities includes funding for basic and applied research to understand more completely and precisely the causes, course, and treatment of disabling conditions; actions and policies designed to prevent the occurrence of disabilities; and programs to address children's developmental problems.

This chapter presents a rationale for the use of educational programs for young children who have disabilities. In addition, the chapter describes the behavioral perspective that is used as a foundation for many educationally oriented intervention programs, discusses the contributions derived from that orientation, and identifies the challenges faced by those programs. The chapter then describes additional models for conceptualizing intervention efforts and draws implications from those perspectives. The chapter concludes by discussing how such programs are likely to be structured in the future. This chapter focuses primarily on infants and young children who have identifiable disabilities rather than on children who are solely at environmental risk for developmental problems.