Developmental Delay: What Can You Expect From Developmental Service Providers?

None of the training programs generally available for children with developmental difficulties have success at pluging the chinks in their developmental progress. Most training programs focus on teaching as many skills as possible to someone who will be an adult with those developmental difficulties.

Teaching the un-teachable child

Most training programs assume that children with developmental difficulties will always have those developmental difficulties. So, they have stopped hoping that the movement through the developmental stages can be fixed. They have stopped searching for ways to address the chinks in their developmental progress.

Instead, they have settled for teaching the un-teachable child as their paradigm. They select a series of skills that they think an adult with developmental difficulties will need. They struggle for weeks or months or years to teach those skills to their un-teachable students. Of course, the workers in these training programs are very respectful of the special children with whom they work. They just assume these children will never be able to lose their symptoms.

It is in the diagnosis

There is an attitude that there is no cure built into the diagnostic process and even in the definitions of all of the individual issue diagnoses. Everyone involved assumes that this present-tense statement also includes the future as well. There is no cure is thought to also mean that there will never be a cure.

This presents an interesting concern. If someone found a cure, it could not be proved. The definition (for example) of APD includes an item that there is no cure (with the un-written understanding that there will never be a cure). If professionals try to use a pre and post diagnosis testing in their investigation, the post-test (diagnosis) would indicate that the test subject continues with that developmental issue, because the subject obtained that diagnosis in the pre-test. Depending on the treatment, the investigation could certainly show that the symptoms have changed (maybe even gone away), but the diagnostic process does not include the possibility of cure.

If a child has one of these developmental difficulties, and receives a diagnosis for that problem, the child will continue with that diagnosis even if the child loses all of the symptoms of that diagnosis. Even when a child stops having that problem, the diagnosis continues. That is an interesting condition. Investigation to prove that the cure has been found cannot prove it, because the definition does not permit that possibility.

So, what can you expect?

Even if the cure was discovered today, it would be decades before there is enough investigation to overcome the definitions, diagnostic specifications, and the diagnostic prejudice in existence today. This frame-of-reference that there is no cure is so pervasive that little effort is being spent on searching for that cure or expecting a cure to be forthcoming. Parents should not expect the cure to be announced before their own child has children with developmental difficulties (don't expect it for decades).

No medical, psychological, or educational program provider has available, or will send you to, a program that offers a cure. And, the training programs they send you to will have the paradigm that they are teaching an un-teachable child. Parents should not expect the mainstream medical, psychological, or educational programs to provide a cure. They have no experience in that possibility.

If parents want to find anything close to a cure for their children with developmental difficulties, they should not look for that in the mainstream training programs. It is simply not there. They have to look at alternative programs.

If parents want their child to surpass their developmental difficulties, they should search for programs which work with the movement through the developmental stages. Our approach encourages your child's natural capability for growing up. And, we get your children to address the chinks in their developmental progress.

Sustainable Living Articles @ http://www.articlegarden.com 

Please Rate The Above Article From The PARENTING Category
Title: Developmental Delay: What Can You Expect From Developmental Service Providers?

5 out of 54 out of 53 out of 52 out of 51 out of 5 
Not yet Rated

AUTHORS! Bookmark This Article to del.icio.us

Email to Friends

Copy & Paste html for your website or blog