Reply to Preschool teacher recommends developmental evaluation of 3 year old

Forum Index » Kids With Special Needs and Disabilities

Reply to "Preschool teacher recommends developmental evaluation of 3 year old"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP, I have a few replies to specific comments that have been made.

I am very pro-early intervention and I have no patience for the wait-and-see approach but I don't see any huge red flags in what you have written. Is your child happy, learning, growing? These are important questions, too, when deciding to be evaluated. Despite what some people have said here, 3.5  is young for an ADHD evaluation and, unless he is showing a lot of very hyperactive behavior, it is quite possible that he won't get a diagnosis even if he in fact does have ADHD because there is a huge range of normal behavior, because kids change and develop, and because the evaluation process is indeed better suited for an older child. My child, to give in example has severe ADHD and was not diagnosed until age 6, despite several evaluations. The evaluators were not wrong before then, they certainly picked up on other issues that we worked on. But attention issues are complex and can be hard to diagnose in a younger child.

I understand that one of the PPs had a bad experience with her child's evaluation. I completely agree that it sounds inappropriate. But I would like to say that in the several years that I have been working with multiple therapists and clinicians and even school officials, this has not been my experience at all. Even in the therapies that I don't feel were particularly beneficial for us (OP), we almost exclusively came across very committed, hard-working individuals. Maybe I have been very lucky, probably I have, but I have also done my homework and gone to highly recommended folks, even when it has meant I have paid more money. I realize that not everyone can afford this. My husband would argue that we can't. But to me, it has been absolutely critical to work with people we trust. We have made many financial sacrifices but I consider them to have been very worthwhile.

Last, there are a lot of casual comments about ADHD on this and other threads that are very misleading. If you are worried I urge you to do some reading on the subject. It truly isn't about being an "active child" (I'd say my child is very average in this regard), nor is it about being able to sustain attention when listening to a story or music (my child is highly impaired and has remarkable attention, hyper-focus, with preferred activities including stories, etc), nor about being social or not being social. I am only giving my kid as an example because his characteristics contradict some of the popular stereotypes but, in truth, I think people who "know someone" with ADHD are sometimes the worst at identifying it in others if the child does not have the same profile. These children are very different from one another.[/quote]

Not OP, but this is a very helpful and informative post, especially the last paragraph.  Thank you for that.[/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