Question number one: When should I seek out an evaluation?
Answer: Many times parents believe that their child’s lack of performance in the classroom is due to poor teaching or a lack of responsive to problems by their school’s administration. Other times they look at the disruptiveness of other students and attribute the lack of progress to those external factors. Often parents adopt a wait and see approach waiting until the next school year before moving forward with an evaluation. Sometimes the strategy works but other times it just delays the support the student could be getting from research driven interventions and accommodations that can be generated from a comprehensive evaluation. Often a good indication of whether you should engage in a comprehensive a valuation is whether there seems to be more irritability, physical complaints such a stomach aches and headaches the night before or morning of a school day, disruption to sleep, change in diet or weight gain or loss. These are signs that the compensatory strategies that the child has used in the past is not working to its fullest potential.
Question number two: I tried lots of different expensive programs but nothing seems to work. Why is that?
Answer: Many of our parents have tried numerous strategies to address the difficulties the student is having in the classroom and with completing homework. They’ve tried to organize their workspace, improved diet and the degree of exercise, try to get a better sleep schedule and decrease screen time. From my experience, the lack of progress with many of these interventions suggests that there may be other underlying difficulties that have not come to the attention of teachers and parents. This is another reason to conduct an evaluation to look at all the possible contributing factors to a child’s academic and social emotional decline.