I'm not sure I understand the huge avoidance/dislike of labels. Maybe due to not being in the USA, our systems work differently. But here, there's no central database (that I know of anyway, who knows!) where they are storing every diagnosis/label and sharing it across the board with every medical professional and school in the area. Unless we choose to share what we learn via various tests/assessments, then no-one has to know.
I always kind of thought of a diagnosis/label as a tool that helps me to help my child - or to get him the help he needs. As we have moved away from some "labels" I'm finding we often jump to another, and I'd guess it's going to probably continue like this for a while as we seem to have layers of issues and as we deal with one we start to notice another.
IME... I wish we had taken DS7 to an OT earlier for a sensory evaluation. I wish we had worked on his issues earlier, before K instead of at the end of K, start of 1st. I think that would have made for a much easier start to his school career. That said, the school is just completely unwilling to consider anything other than ADD as a reason for poor concentration, and they only have 1 answer to "ADD" = medicate. So maybe we would still be where we are now. But looking back at how the meltdowns/shutdowns disappeared, I still wish we'd done the OT earlier. So I'd side with the get-in-early crowd I guess.
