Maybe this is unfair of me, but I'm not sure that I want someone that doesn't work with HG kids doing any cognitive testing of my DD-- especially if she doesn't establish any kind of rapport with her first.
My DD is pretty sensitive to interpersonal relationships, and if she feels weird about the situation or the doc, she will definitely shut down. She has NEVER been alone with a medical practitioner. She has always had one of us in the room with her.
To think that she can do cognitive assessment AND all of the rest of that in about four hours also seems to me to be pretty naive, but maybe I'm wrong. Hmm.
The other reason I'm wary is that we don't have previous numbers to compare with, and we've even noticed the drop-off in cognitive ability lately as a direct result of sleep deprivation and inadequate nutrition. It's not that she's not still functional at an 11yo level. She is. It's just that she's not functional at a PG, high-schooler level the way she ordinarily is.
So I worry a bit that her scores will reflect current circumstances more than they reflect native/ordinary ability, and if that is the case, I'd rather not have them. I think that the psych MIGHT be better off seeing a portfolio of DD's earlier work in that case.
I don't really have any aversion to knowing the numbers-- just the manner in which they are being obtained seems a little off-kilter to me, and I worry that it could do more harm than good, maybe even damaging DD's position with her school. (ie-- if her scores drop down into the 130 range, which is quite possible at the moment, it might 'appear' as though her placement is 'too high' when the reality is actually the other way around, given what we've seen this year.) Honestly, I'd love to have the real numbers in front of us. I just have a little skepticism about the level of experience that the person administering the assessment has; in addition to that, I have some concerns about the inherent validity of any value determined while my DD is clearly in some kind of crisis.
Ugh.
Besides, we think that we may have gotten to the root of at least SOME of the problems here-- it seems that our devious princess has been staying up all night in order to sneak onto the computer in the night so that she can play Pokemon and hang out in chat rooms. Oh, and YouTube... working on her YouTube account and PMs from gawd-knows-who... We really don't even KNOW exactly what all she's been up to since she's so effectively been lying to us about it, and she is so savvy that she has been able to repair the wireless LAN when we've disabled it, clear her cache and clean it of incriminating evidence, etc.
:EEK:
Yes, my 11 yo daughter.
<hair on fire>
Okay, well, this certainly explains the sleep deprivation. That, in turn, probably explains at least some of the appetite suppression, too (this is pretty common in sleep deprivation in my family), and DEFINITELY the executive function shortfall recently...
Oh, and she also informed me late last week that she's just plain "Tired of" her dad and I thinking that we are "better than her" just because we are adults. Yeah, she apparently doesn't think that adults should have any right to tell her what to do. Regarding ANYTHING. (Yes, I know. I explained to her that at eleven, she's not exactly self-sufficient yet. I even enforced this lesson by cheerily leaving her to walk the fifteen minutes home from where we were at the time, much to her shock.)
Just thinking out loud here. DD is emotionally pretty extreme, so as JamieH notes, this could just be HG intensity meets PG need for autonomy meets adolescent girl hormones meets probable S.A.D. meets inappropriate educational placement/setting and completely "normal" within that context. I don't have a lot of faith that the average psychologist is going to see it in that light, however. But maybe I'm being too cynical.
