Newbie..therapy @ home? Moving advice?

iVillage Member
Registered: 07-29-2005
Newbie..therapy @ home? Moving advice?
1
Fri, 07-29-2005 - 6:32pm

Hi! My shortly to be 4 year old daughter is in the process of being evaluated. Her Neuro said she is "definitely somewhere on the spectrum" and I'm thinking she's probably going to be considered PDDNOS, although I could be mistaken. She is somewhat verbal, although much of her speech is echolalia or whine. She's cognitively delayed about a year. She doesn't seem to have many sensory issues, although she is very tactile and oral. We just got her off the bottle, and I'm working on potty training her. We homeschool, and I don't want to put her into the school system. I'm trying to put together a plan of specific things I should work on with her every day but I'm about lost right this minute. How do you decide what is most important to give it priority? How do you how much is "enough" ie: working on gross or fine motor skills or vocabulary or articulation?

Also, we are military (US Coast Guard). We are about to move to NC in seven weeks. We'll be staying at Grandma's house for awhile until we find out own place. Megan still hasn't adjust to our last move a year ago (she'll cry and say she wants to go home). She understands "going to Grandma's" and I have a calendar on the wall with the day marked and we mark the days off at night. But she'll ask quite a bit if it's time to go to Grandma's. Any advice?

Oh..and Megan has three siblings. Sarah is 9, and is being evaluated for Asperger's Syndrome. Logan is 5; and Gracie is about to turn 2.

iVillage Member
Registered: 12-24-2004
Sat, 07-30-2005 - 9:12am

Hi Joyful. I am a former psychologist (no longer work outside the home because DS needed me to be his personal therapist/teacher/etc.). We do a "program" with DS at home that is a combination of OT, special ed preschool, "floortime", and RDI. Either floortime or RDI would be good for you to start with. Floortime is an approach by Stanley Greenspan, M.D. and Serena Wieder, Ph.D. The book, The Child with Special Needs Encouraging Intellectual and Emotional Growth by Greenspan and Wieder, is excellent. It can get you started with how to do floortime. Floortime sessions are primarily child-led, but you learn techniques to get your ASD child to respond, and you learn the direction they need to develop in, how to facilitate development, etc. Greenspan recommends about 3 30-min sessions per day, and you may be able to incorporate your other kids into the sessions eventually. It is o.k. to cut back on sessions during times of stress and upheaval, so don't get scared that you have to always do 3 30-min sessions per day. We do what we can do at our house. Greenspan has a good website on floortime, www.floortime.org.

RDI (Relationship Development Intervention) is another approach for kids with ASD's. It is by Steve Gutstein, Ph.D. RDI is more like a "program," and it takes a little more work that floortime. RDI has a pretty detailed developmental set of stages to follow that you walk your kid through. You work on engagement and social referencing first, using very little language. If you want to get started with RDI, you should visit the website, www.connectionscenter.com. Subscribe to their newsletter, which is free. Other RDI things cost money. Some people hire consultants, which are IMHO rather expensive. At the very least, you should read Gutstein's book, Solving the Relationship Puzzle. His activities books (shown on the site) are very helpful in getting started, and I would highly recommend the DVD ($150, but very much worth the price). Now that the dVD is out, the workshops are less important, I think. We also invested in 8 beanbag chairs, a crawling tube, some small beanbags, beachballs, hoolahoops, and a few other things for RDI work, and we set up a room in the basement to do our gross motor work in. For us, RDI is largely gross motor and dramatic play, but it may differ for you if your DD has better fine motor skills than my DS.

We do quite a bit of OT at home today with DS, even though he does see a good OT and gets OT at school. I suppliment with practice every day on things like, using tongs, scissors, pen/pencil work (dry erase books are great for this), tactile play, motor planning work (e.g. obstacle courses), building with blocks/duplos/magnets/etc., various craft projects, etc. Much of our work in fine motor dovetails with self care (feeding, dressing, toileting, bathing, pouring, etc.).

We also do a lot of homeschooling type stuff at home, but I won't go into that here, as most people know what sorts of things this entails. I send DS to a 4hr per day program in the public school system too. He will be in 1/2-day Kindergarten next year, and I am really going to assess whether it is good for him. If I was not expecting a baby right now, I probably would be homeschooling him in the upcoming year.

I keep things organized by posting our schedule on a dry erase board every day and keeping a sort of diary of notes. The diary is also a checklist of what we have done. If you want a copy of the checklist to get started on your own, I can email it to you. My email is mom2cassian@yahoo.com. I only have one child at the moment, but we will have a new baby in a few weeks, so things are going to be different for us. With every upheaval, I find I have to drop back and work on some skills I thought we had mastered. I suspect you are seeing a similar regression in your DD right now because of the move. When we moved last year, it took about 2 mos for DS to adjust, and he was very inattentive and stimmy during most of that adjustment period. He has also shown some regression since my pregnancy began.

This is a pretty long post. If you have other questions, please do feel free to email me. I answer quite a few personal emails from people on this board, regarding specifics of our program.

Suzi