Reply to Just got PDD-NOS diagnosis at 4.5 years -- too late for behavioral therapy?

Forum Index » Kids With Special Needs and Disabilities

Reply to "Just got PDD-NOS diagnosis at 4.5 years -- too late for behavioral therapy?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]Three weeks ago, we received a diagnosis of PDD-NOS for our wonderful 4.5 year old son.  His Dad and I feel absolutely terrible that it has taken this long for us to catch on that his problems were greater than a speech delay.  But now that we have the diagnosis, we are taking him to two different, well-respect autism clinics in our area for evaluation for services.  One clinic specializes in the Lovaas method (ABA), the other follows the Early Denver Childhood model (I think that's the right term, anyway).  Both clinics have intake coordinators who have warned us that children usually begin with at least 20 hours per week of behavioral therapy, then scale down slowly from there as progress indicates.  Our son has very good self-care skills for a special needs child his age: he is toilet trained, can dress himself, eat normally with a fork and spoon, etc.  He also has a fair bit of language though his overall expression isn't very good.  As one of our friends said, he is a child that you wouldn't notice at first as being any different from the other little ones in his class, just a bit quiter/shyer maybe.  It's only after watching him for a while that you would realize something is not quite right.

Basically, I am wondering if all of this -- age and current level of skills -- mean that we are just too late for behavioral therapy to make a real difference to our boy.  We are happy, even eager, to do it; we've already agreed unanimously that I will leave my job and stay home with DS to coordinate school, therapy, care, etc.  And thank God, insurance will cover everything (or very close to it).  But I am wondering if the fact that DS already has some language and self-care skills mean that he is already too 'hard-wired' to benefit from behavioral therapy, if we have already missed his window for it to do the most good.  Obviously, we'll be asking his evaluators this question as well, but I was hoping the Moms on this board might have some preliminary feedback for us.

One other question, too: is 20 hours of behavioral therapy, 1 hour each of Speech and OT therapy, and 15 hours per week of an inclusive 4K class (that includes weekly speech and OT) too much for a 4.5 year old?  Part of me feels absurd even typing the question -- how can 37 hours per week of school and therapy NOT be way more than is good for a child that age? -- but that is, I swear, what the math is adding up to if we were to do all that is being recommended.  Do children actually keep schedules like this and benefit from them?  How will we know if it is too much for our child, or even counter-productive?

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics