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My little guy (27 months) is going for his speech language assessment tomorrow and I have considered cancelling it a few times for all the reasons you mentioned. I know his receptive language is light years beyond his peers. He says what he wants to say when he wants to say it. He gets his point across in 30-40 words.

I'm sorry to hear about your experience. It is so frustrating when our 'mother knowledge' is dismissed.

The one problem with Canadian healthcare is that we *didn't* hire her. We went, in part, because we didn't want to risk turning down the appt and then not being able to get one if we did need it later.

In general, it's really really really great not to have to pay, but the trade off can be less choice.

-Mich

Oh. Well I have no clue how to navigate something like that. Wow. So, not knowing if there's really a problem you have to subscribe now or never. And a schedule would be non-negotiable either way. Ooph. And you don't even know if he needs the services or not. To quote a restaurant napkin I once read. "I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem."

Hi,

For what it's worth, DS (now 3) had speech therapy from 17 mo to just under 2 and I really don't think it did anything. He enjoyed it a lot so it was positive from just the aspect of a person coming to see him (they came to our house weekly, for free, through an early intervention government program, and they were charming with him). The speech therapist was really his first "friend", which was very sweet, she was like a gushy grandma type figure and she came specifically to see him and he really liked her. She didn't do much hands on with him because he was a bit shy then, she mostly talked to me but he knew she was there to see him.

The other great outcome was it made me feel relieved (for example if he'd gotten older and never spoke and we'd never had speech therapy I would have felt like maybe I should have been doing something earlier, would have felt guilty for not beginning earlier).

Interestingly our SLP included all onomatopoeic words (like a grunt type noise to mean pig).

Before starting with the SLP I thought maybe they would have lots of things that I didn't know about. But after seeing what they were recommending I realized I had pretty much researched well beforehand and was already doing everything I should have been.

The SLP had here and there a some ideas I hadn't incorporated. She gave us a plastic mirror which was a toy we didn't have and we made that a bath toy. Another idea was to track words in a formal way, I liked doing that, making weekly lists. Another was to make photo books with his usual foods to make meal times easier and we extended the picture books to include picture-based lists of all his favorite songs etc so he could choose what to listen to(DS unlike some kids was markedly frustrated with his inability to get his points across). (As an aside when he finally did use words to pick songs he did it by number (as in "Mommy play #47 on CD 2, I guess that's a lot more succinct than saying the name of the song).

She also brought one time a tape recorder and that was great -- to play back what he'd just said was fascinating to him.

He did catch up suddenly at around 20 months and the SLP sadly refused to come anymore, too bad as he was really looking forward to her visits by then.

Polly

Sooo.... DH's letter.... WORLKED!!!!!

Like a dream!

Not only did she send his scores (which she had refused to give me, maybe just because she hadn't calculated them, but basically she felt I didn't need to know), BUT she ALSO SENT A FREAKING JOURNAL REFERENCE!!!!!!!!

I'm floored. I would NEVER have gotten a response like that. Hand it to DH, PhD I guess

Now the reference may not say what she thinks it says: In a nutshell, it says
1) don't evaluate 'till 24 mos, it's not meaningful
2) almost everyone late at 24 mos "catches up" by 7 yrs but there is a tiny corelation between late onset talking and later gramatical deficits... tiny gramatical deficits which they explicity say can't necesarily be termed "speech impairments"
3) almost everyone who doesn't catch up is female.
4) that there needs to be more research on interventions, as it is not clear if they have any effect. Some of their data point to a strong genetic effect, but they don't state that in so many words.

BUT... there's a THIRD thing...
In the midst of everything else, there is a HINT. And the hint is that the people who designed one of the possible interventions have a different approach, which they arrived at through what appears to have been empiricle research. They target early sentance formation for therapy, rather than vocablulary building. Now. DS is *not* impaired in sentance formation at this point, *however* I am 100% willing to engage in any technique I can think of that might encourage sentance formation, and I think DS would enjoy that... it's his kinda thing.

So... *if* (and right now it looks like this is not the case) that programme does follow these principles faithfully, we will take it. If not, we will research it, and talk to the SLP about our intent to use some of the techniques ourselves.

RE: explosion at 20 mos.
One of the studies I looked at described a general tendency to a smooth progression of language devt, with a subset of kids who have a genuine "explosion." DS has more than doubled his vocabluary (including onomatopoea, words, signs, etc) in less than a week. That might be what we're seeing too... too early to tell.

Eek... he's woken up and is trying to help me type....

-Mich

We had "explosion" at our house, too. From virtually no words to hundreds of words, and from no two-word phrases to complete sentences.

If our experience is any guide, a kid who tends to move by explosion has that tendency across a variety of areas. So DD went from "can't read a single word" to "can read first-grade books independently" in a week or so. And she never crawled or cruised - one day she just stood up and walked, with enough control that she didn't ever fall down.

It can be extremely frustrating to wonder "she can do all the precursors to X, so why can she not do X even a little tiny bit?" particularly when kids who don't have all the precursors down are attempting X with some level of competence. And then one day the switch flips, and she's mastered X with little or no apparent effort.

Yup. We have seen the tendency absolutely consistently across developmental areas. I actually was stressed about it the first few times we saw it, becuase of the long periods of 0 progress.

Since I wrote the last post, he has met and exceeded the 50-word 20mo low-avg cut-off, a growth rate in excess of the standard "smooth progression" estimates, and had a very dramatic increase in number of attempts to speak a familliar word/hr. That HAD to happen before a vocabulary explosion could reach the 200 word-at-24-mos cut off the SLP said she'd look for (her paper suggests a 70 word cut-off). So evidence is increasing for an explosion event circa 20 mos (rounding from the .5s, right . I've got my fingers crossed that we see a big explosion that has us well over the 24 mo cut offs, but at this point, we've made the 20 mo numbers and he's technically "normal" If he progresses normally, he'll be normal at 24 mos. (if he stalls and starts again, he may still miss the cut-off)

I am not discounting the appt itself as the trigger for this explosion, just for the record (Though it *did* appear to start three days before the appt -- maybe he was reacting to us talking about speech a bunch)

-Mich

Mich - great news! Awesome that your DH's letter got you more! Pretty cool that DS seems to have 'caught on' that speech is important and fun. Kids are so cool that way.

Yippee!!!
Grinity