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My daughter has recently been assessed by Educational psycologist and Occupational therapist and they have gave me the following info:- O.T

Very Poor concentration,difficult to follow instructions, found it difficult to filter out irrelevent auditory and visual enviromental factors during assessment, she required alot of verbal prompts and demonstrated some motor planning difficulties, poor desk posture and couldnt sit still, found it difficult to write on the lines and required prompts to leave finger spaces. she didnt always stabilies paper with right hand (shes left handed) when drawing, difficulties with following simple instructions, motor planning, concentration and diffictulty intergrating her visual and motor perception and fine motor tasks.

E.P

poor comcentration, lack of social expectations, vunerable, more comfortable with adults than children, poor awareness of safety issues, high level of concern about her progress, eaisly distracted, requires high level of differentiation in order to access a mainstream curriculum, social vulnerable, goes off in her own world.

Please can someone help me understande what all this mean, clearly i know what its saying but what is wrong with her. Nobody seems to put a name to it. We are still waiting for assessments from clinical psycology and speech and lanuage as she dosnt have the sailent feature when asked to discribe a word??????

i would really appreciate if any can suggest anything as ive been trying to get answers but never get anywhere.

Many thanks

Gemma

Dear Maidofthemoors, Thanks for the infomation, dyspraxia is the first thing i thought when i had a look at different types of learning disabilities. I will have a look at the sensory processing disorder. They have made plans and OT is going into school to do a block of six weeks work with her then they will pass it on to her T.A to carry on the work. Also she has a resource agreement and has been awarded a T.A for herself for 15 hours per week. Can i just ask what is the treatment, is it just therapy? What other Learning disabilities could she have because there are some systoms of dyspraxia that she dosnt have. it does answers a few questions so thanks very much, its just so fustrating have to wait for all these assessments to be done. do you know how long it takes Clinical Psychology to do there assessment? She has been reffered to them for her social development as she dosnt play wwith the other children in school.

Many thanks

Gemma

i think you also need to go back to them and say ok - so this is how she is -= what are the strategies that we need to employ at school and home?
what do you recomend? how can we ahlp her cope? how can we help her to learn? what concretely is needed - how much and when and how ? labels can be helpful eg dyspraxia, ASd etc - but more important is what are the strategies, what does she need at home and school to get by/cope/learn?

i did read the reports as pointing to dyspraxia and reading up on dspraxia might help understand her more.

Hi , I am sorry to hear you are at the stage of not having a diagnosis, things will get better when you get an answer and the correct treatment can begin, I recognise a lot of what you are going through, my son has autism and some of your daughters symptons sound similar and I always asked every professional I came accross, what will he be like when he is older and they just dont tell you their professional opinion as they are scared they will get it wrong or you may not try so hard to help your child develop. I hope you get the help and the answers you need , no matter what they say, just remember, your child makes you happy and she will surprise you in many ways and make you so proud, take each day as it comes and try to have as stress free a day as possible. lots of luck for the future to you both

I know how you feel having no diagnosis. It's distressing not to be able to see a clear way forward. We had the same with our son who had profound and multiple learning disabilities. He had no actual diagnosis for all his 29 years. It took us many years to come to terms with this and understand that the 'professionals' had little more understanding of what was wrong than ourselves. The reality is that you are probably the best expert in your own child's condition and should be recognized as such. You probably understand more about what works for him/her than many of the health professionals. The diagnoses are sometimes useful 'labels' to get access to services, so use them when you need to.
Having the confidence in what you think will help and then calling on the advice of the professionals as you need them is very hard when you've no formal training or qualifications - but people will eventually realize that you are the expert. The ones that don't value your input are probably not likely to be very helpful anyway. I'm sorry I can't give any easy answers but the reality is that often the professionals are flailing in the dark more than you are. A consultant told us that 30% of people with a neurological condition have no formal diagnosis (there's even a support group for undiagnosed!) the key thing to remember is that it isn't the label that matters, it's what you and others do about making the persons life better that counts. Sounds to me like you're doing a good job there. Bernard