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Re: Help my brother

Posted by Cairo on August 25, 2004, at 12:46:07

In reply to Help my brother, posted by Shoeshine on August 24, 2004, at 14:01:47

If your brother's receptive or expressive language disorder is severe, some of the behavior you see may be due to inability to understand or communicate. My daughter was prone to outbursts when she was younger, but fortunately I knew is was due to mixed receptive/expressive problems and I ignored the first Speech and Language therapist we went to who said it was mostly behavioral because she pointed to a picture of a volcano and said "a volcano is very hot!" What he didn't want to listen to was that with an expressive language disorder, spontaneous speech can appear fine, but speech "on demand" is the problem. If you know in your gut that there's more to his language problems than what they are saying, find another Speech and Language Therapist who is more skilled, even if you need to do it privately rather than through the public school system.

As my daughter's language developed (with lots of Speech and Language therapy as well as testing and therapy for auditory processing), her behavior improved. I think she was frustrated with her inability to understand and communicate. We still have expressive issues, but it has improved immensely. Unfortunately, we are now going through anxiety, depression and social phobia, but no behavioral issues.

One thing you might consider is having your brother homeschooled by a tutor if you cannot find a public or private school that can meet his needs. We live in Florida where it is easy to do so and have variously homeschooled as well as partially homeschooled and had her enrolled in a private school for LD kids. The trick is finding a teacher who is good. I never thought that we would homeschool in a million years, but it has been the best thing for her; one-on-one work tailored to her needs has made all the difference. She is starting high school and we're working for a regular diploma. While it took us awhile to figure out everything that was going on with her, the difficult part is remediation rather than diagnosis. And the one caveat that I have learned over all these years is that intensive remediation is better. The whole once a week speech therapy that the public schools push is simply not going to do it. We went private and found that daily therapy for whatever we were working on works SO much better than once or twice a week. This has been true for language, auditory processing and phonemic awareness for reading, writing, spelling, etc. Integrating therapy into classroom work for severe cases is more effective IMHO than doing language "therapy" which may not transfer to the classroom or real world.

And find a good doctor/clinic who can evaluate the whole child. Kennedy-Krieger in Baltimore has top notch people, as well as Mass General, Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. Where do you live? Seeing a pediatric neuropsychologist could be a useful first step and could point you to other areas that might need further testing, such as auditory processing.

Regarding learning and language issues, here's a couple of sites of interest:

LD Online: www.ldonline.org; check out the "LD in Depth" topics as well as the bulletin boards. They were tremendously helpful to me when I first started looking into these issues and specific remediation.

Judith Kuster's Speech and Language website: http://www.mnsu.edu/comdis/kuster2/welcome.html

Mel Levine, MD, All Kinds of Minds: http://www.allkindsofminds.com/

Caroline Bristol's CAPD website: http://pages.cthome.net/cbristol/

Fast ForWord: www.fastforword.com; a computer program targeting language and processing issues

Dyspraxia therapy Ideas: http://home.comcast.net/~speechguide/sample.html


There's also a good, but basic, book: "Childhood Speech, Language, and Listening Problems: What Every Parent Should Know" by Patricia Hamaguchi.

Your brother is lucky that you are on his side. Don't ever let anyone chide you for not bringing him up right. He's a neat kid just trying his best to come out! Good luck!

Cairo


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URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/20040825/msgs/382161.html