How in the world can you tell - who do you go to comfirm this? We have always been on the edge about the SPD diagnosis when he was about 3.5- his doctor said he seemed to fit some of the description and he sent us to an OT who did some assessments and said that he had SPD - he seemed to fit some of the characterisitcs but not completely - it just was the closest explanation to what we were seeing.
My son never seemed to fit all of the characteristics of SPD or motor dyspraxia. I just found an article about working memory in children with developmental coordination disorder and it mentioned some study that showed that children with DCD appear to be impaired in all four areas of memory function and this is definitely not true for my son. There is only a problem in motor memory. It is like there is a lag in his motor memory that is worse sometimes than others because he is highly sensitive or overexcitable or whatever, and this exacerbates the lag.
I remember reading that kids with motor dyspraxia have trouble with sequencing and this was true for him when he learned dance routines. He could learn them, it just took longer than it did the other kids.
But when he and I listened to a list of instructions on how to transfer video files from one cell phone to the new one we just bought using a bluetooth, he was the one who remembered all of the verbal instructions and was able to do the transfer without any difficulty. He is my technical translator. He remembers all of this technical stuff and explains it to me in terms I can understand. It is embarrassing sometimes. His adult sister calls him when she needs a walk through on how to do things on the computer that she hasn't done before and he tells her step by step while she is on speaker phone and he is simultaneously playing a video game. His friends call him for advice on getting to the next level on games and he gives step-by-step advice on that even though he hasn't played that particular game in a long time. He was always one of the fastest to memorize lines in his musical theater class, faster than the older kids. He could do mental math that I couldn't do. I think he had to have good working memory to solve simple algebra equations mentally without looking at the problem. I could give him the problem verbally while he simultaneously bounced on an exercise ball and played a game on his PS3 so there is a multi-tasking ability that I would think shouldn't be there if he has motor dyspraxia. He remembers things he read years ago or heard on the news. He and I spent over four hours in the car with my husband and another supervisor from his office and it seemed like any time there was a discussion about anything, he was able to add some interesting or relevant bit of information that he happened to know. I loved the look on the supervisor's face when she talked about some of the books she had read and mentioned that she would like to read Animal Farm and my son sounded more like a college student than an 11 year old kid when he gave a quick analysis of the book and then made a joke that sounded like something his dad would say. She told my husband the next day that she really enjoyed talking to him because he was such a good conversationalist but she thought it must be very difficult for him to find peers who would understand him because he would be talking way over the heads of kids. It is hard to think of this as a disorder or a learning disability when he learns and retains so much more than I do without even trying. It makes me feel like I have a learning disability but I usually made straight A's in school without having to study very much. I relied on my note-taking ability. He can't write fast so he relies on his memory. No matter how hard I try I can't talk the way my son does. On a written vocabulary test I could probably score as high as he does but I can't use all the words I know in my speech with such facility or make all the history and political and cultural references that he uses so easily or come up with jokes the way he does and that is another thing. Physically, his timing is a little off sometimes but verbally, his comic timing is perfect.
For example, last night his dad made up some silly story about "cow tipping" and my son immediately said "Okay, and I guess you could use your "tip cow-culator" on your cell phone to "cow-culate" the amount of force necessary to "tip" the cow. The two of them do this all the time and it is almost like a verbal tennis game where the ball is missed if you can't immediately come back with something equally funny to say. My son is very good at this kind of "sport" but would never be good at a physical game of tennis.
I also wonder how you can determine mental age for kids who seem so mentally above the rest but have difficulty in doing physical things. I always thought mental age was what determined IQ and that mental age had more to do with your level of comprehension and mental ability and not physical ability, yet I know that my son would score lower on any kind of test that required good visual motor integration and I think that would cause his IQ to be lower than it would be if he didn't have motor dyspraxia so I don't think an IQ score would accurately reflect his intellectual ability.
Was your son tested all in one day? I think testing will be hard for my son because he is used to working for a while and taking breaks throughout the day. He is scheduled for 8 tests in one day and I don't know what all they will be testing. I continue to have more questions than I have answers.
