I will say that testing has been very useful for helping me to understand DS8, and we will test DS5 as soon as he's old enough for the WISC.
For DS8, testing showed that he's not "dawdling," that's his normal speed and I need to find ways to work with him on that. Without testing, I am sure that my natural impatience would have made for many, many unnecessary problems in both of our lives.
For DS5, I suspect that he's 2E, and I feel like I really have no handle whatsoever on either his strengths or whatever weaknesses he has. I am hoping that testing will be one more helpful bit of info to aid us in figuring him out. I am sure that testing will be just the beginning of a long journey.
In both of our kids' cases, we're not testing toddlers, of course. That does matter. Unless you must have test results for some school or program, I probably would never recommend testing kids younger than 5 or 6, at the very youngest. If young kids must be tested, I would put very little stock in the results.
But I think it's important to note that testing is one tool among many to make sense of our kids, and it can be a *VERY* useful tool.
Sorry, but I just don't want any newbies to read this and think that there is no reason to test. There can be some very good reasons to test and some very useful answers can result. Without testing, we would be in a miserable place right now, I'm sure of it.
Testing didn't change my child, nor is it the final word on ANY child, but testing did change my ability to see what was right in front of me. In our case, that was vital!
