Monday, March 25, 2013

My Son Too? Does My Two Year-old Need Therapy?

In Early Fall, a Speech Pathologist came to my son's daycare:

With everything going on with my daughter I could see this coming. My son’s daycare had a company come in and do free speech and language evaluations for the 2, 3 and 4 year-olds. When I filled out the form, I had every confidence that there is nothing wrong with my son but somehow I knew they would find that he needs further evaluation and treatment.

He doesn’t get every word right and there are some sounds that are off, but it isn’t that he can’t make those sounds. The things they listed that he had difficult with were:

Trouble naming body parts
Trouble putting 2 to 3 word phrases together.

As to the body parts, that’s an interesting story. There was a note they added that his teacher told them he knows and can name his body parts. He does. He just for some reason only wants to play the game of naming them with my daughter. She taught him his body parts and for a while he would not even name them for me. It took even longer for him to name them for his teacher. Not sure how long it would take for a stranger asking.

As to putting 2 to 3 word phrases together. My son just doesn’t talk for just anyone asking him something. For a while his teacher said he would not talk. Later, she said she had trouble getting him to stop talking.

Now mind you I know his speech has some short comings. However, he can sing. He knows some Spanish words. He can count to 10 and identify the numbers. He knows the shapes: circle, square, triangle, rectangle, oval, diamond, star and octagon. He also can identify some letters. He knows a lot of animals and their sounds. I know he understands us and he speaks in sentences regularly.

I need my (game, race car, milk, grapes, banana, apple, chicken nuggets)
I want some milk
May I have it please
Give it back
My God is awesome
Good morning mom
Let’s go people
I’m a survivor
Hallelujah, thank you Jesus
I did it
Go to bed (to his sister when she aggravates him)
Mom, let’s go upstairs
That rabbit is over there
Where did it go?
I have an instrument
Can I brush my teeth
I see a (insert whatever)
I love you
I can’t open it
He also says grace before eating.

I could go on. I’m not sure he has the 450 word vocabulary listed on the milestone sheet they used, but everything else in the list for children between 2 and 3 he does. I picked up his results on the way to an expression/language/reading therapy session for my daughter. So perhaps I wasn't in the frame of mind to hear that then. Her sessions are costing me $60/week (2 sessions at $30 each). Most of you know the story on her. She’s Dyslexic. So I took more time to think about it later and my conclusion is this.

No offense to them, and I imagine having children in the same family with issues isn’t rare, especially from what I see when I take my daughter to therapy, but I wasn’t there and don’t know what they did. They at least do come to the daycare so there’d be no travel or rearranging of my schedule like I have to do for my daughter, but there would be a cost to me and I’ll need a second opinion from an evaluation done in my presence.

I spoke to her and she said she'd come back in three months, but never did. 

Update: My son is still to this day rather quiet at school, but he can recite a book he has heard 4 times, sing just about any song, recognize his name in print, lots of letters, numbers and shapes.  He understands me and speaks well enough to get out of trouble.  He is up to 7 word sentences.  His Rs no longer sound lik Ws.  His "th" no longer sounds like "fw".  I'm told he's ahead on that.  And is he sweet?  Today in real time when I picked him up from school, he asked, "Did you have a good day mom?"  It had been an awful day, but that weight came off of me at that moment.

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