Kid needs speech mother denies???

Clarissa

Thu, Nov 08 2007, 9:14 pm

sthillmom wrote:

Clarissa wrote:

Actually, I heard from someone that the people who evaluate and do these tests often don't recognize shyness. The kid doesn't respond to commands and requests (shy kids often won't) and the evaluators diagnose delays.

I have never heard of such a thing. a critical part of an evaluation is interviewing the parent or caregiver BECAUSE the child may not be showing his full potential at the evaluation! Therapists do not benefit from saying your child needs therapy. In general the therapist who evaluates your child will not be the same one who treats your child. There are more than enough kids out there who need therapy. I get called daily to take on more cases, and my friends and peers say the same. We are not looking for more cases. We would never say a child needs therapy that does not need it. It seems some of you have really terrible false impressions about speech therapists. I hope you meet up with an honest one soon, so you can see that it isnt as you pictured.

I think you misunderstood my comment. I didn't say that speech therapists are dishonest. And I never said my child didn't perform at his full potential during evaluations. Actually, he was very much himself. The doctor who told me this said that there is a certain kind of shyness that toddlers can have that makes them less responsive to commands or instructions, and this can be interpreted as not comprehending or processing the instructions. And therapists (not just speech but OT and PTs as well) can sometimes just see a kid resisting instructions, and say that the child is delayed, or more delayed than he/she is.

I have several friends who got terrible evaluations that said that their child's situation was much more dire than it was.

gryp

Thu, Nov 08 2007, 9:22 pm

Quote:

The doctor who told me this said that there is a certain kind of shyness that toddlers can have that makes them less responsive to commands or instructions, and this can be interpreted as not comprehending or processing the instructions.

I can totally see this happening to my son if I would have gotten him evaluated last year. When he's shy he puts on a dumb look, freezes up, and just motions dumbly. It can be embarrassing so I have to try and kind of shake him out of it which doesn't always work. Anyway I chose to give him more time to absorb what he hadn't picked up himself, and he's had tremendous strides of accomplishment, but I wouldn't say he's like any other kid in a social setting.