Originally Posted by DeeDee
Originally Posted by Mk13
While they acknowledged his intelligence as we were talking, none of it is really in the report. He's 33 months old now and these are his scores ...

Expressive language - 18 months level
Receptive language - 6-9 months
Non-verbal cognitive (I'd think this is where the intelligence would come into play, right?) - 28 months

... all this based on about 40-minute assessment. It's as if they only based the report on all the things he does not do and didn't put in anything he DOES do! His "problem" has always been that he refuses to do anything "age appropriate" and chooses to do things beyond his age.

Sorry to weigh in late here. A couple of thoughts.

Why was the assessment only 40 min.? When my DS10 was diagnosed, it was on the basis of 6-7 hours of testing. Did they do the ADOS? Did they do a Vineland to look at whether practical life skills are age-appropriate? IQ and achievement testing? What you got seems far too cursory.

HOWEVER: it is perfectly possible to be both extremely delayed and still gifted, at the same time. My DS didn't ask a question that was phrased as a question until he was 5-- serious pragmatic language delay in certain respects-- yet he was seeking and digesting huge amounts of information.

ABA therapy is incredibly useful, probably the best thing we did for DS10. It is highly tailored to the individual, so you don't have to worry about them trying to teach him skills he already has. But it was essential for remediating a lot of social interaction skills, language skills, motor skills issues-- all of which have helped DS fit better into a mainstream classroom. I don't know where we would be without it, but not thriving as we are now.

In short-- I'd take the therapies that are on offer as well as pursuing a more refined and thorough assessment.

DeeDee

Thanks, DeeDee! I was hoping you'd chime in. You've given me a lot more useful info in my various posts than any of the "specialists"!

The evaluation was ordered by Early Intervention and I guess the one hour (including them writing up a report) is a standard for this kind of thing. I'm guessing if it was through a pediatrician's referral it could be more in depth (and we might still go that route as well). The therapists / evaluators played with him a little and had me fill in a questionnaire while the developmental pediatrician observed from behind a mirror window.

they wrote in the report that he has several repetitive behaviors ... but that's not really what I said to them. ... they asked what he liked to do and I told them he enjoys letters, numbers and counting, puzzles, and such ... and in the report they ended up saying counting as one of the repetitive behaviors, which is not the case ... he enjoys counting as in counting objects, doing simple math addition because he understands what he's doing! Not because he's obsessed with numbers! In fact, he has pretty much ZERO obsessions like my older one had in this age and still does to some degree now. This child wouldn't care less if you change his routines. So, some of their observations are taken out of context.

He'll be out of EI in 2 months and after that we'll have to decide what to do next. Most likely I'll take him for the various therapies into the place where my older one goes. I believe one of their OTs has ABA experience so maybe she might be able to work with him and see what we need to do.