February 15, 2007
Late Talking Preschool Children
One reason it's taking me so long to read All Quiet on the Western Front is because I've been reading relevant non-fiction at the same time.
I ordered Late Talking Preschool Children from Amazon because I wanted more information about PDD and how to deal with it. I was hoping I'd get some good information from this book. It certainly was expensive enough, almost $30.00. What I got was a cheaply bound thing similar to what you might get at a conference or something. As if that wasn't annoying enough, more than half the book was devoted to teaching reading readiness. If I'd known that was going to be the bulk of the book, I would have skipped on buying it.
Here are a couple of lines from the opening chapter:
Children who don't seem ready to talk when their peers talk are often a challenge.
No! Ya think?
It is our experience that these children have very worried parents.
And worried grandparents--but there's good reason to be worrying, right? So far I'm learning nothing here.
Finally, something new:
Most of the late talking children we see have a characteristic in common. It is our experience that the late talking or PDD children...are risk avoidant. They fail on purpose, even when it is apparent they can do the challenges presented to them...
I remember thinking that some of the tasks Tomas was given to do during his psychological evaluations should have been easy because I'd seen him do them before. Yet he not only refused to try, he wouldn't even look at whatever it was. The book says labels like PD, autistic, and retarded are applied "when the child in a new situation (the testing situation) refused to do much of anything, pretending to be totally inept."
Interesting.
There was a good suggestion for how to deal with a risk avoidant child. The author recommended that the child be given 9 tasks he or she can succeed at for every challenging one. That makes sense--if the child can complete a task easily then he or she is more willing to take on more challenges. This short chapter was followed by a huge chapter about flash cards and reading readiness. 
At the very end, there was a redeeming chapter that provided some more insight into what Tomas might be thinking or feeling. For example, the author described children who have a hard time separating from their parents--i.e. to go to school. She gave an analogy that made plenty of sense to me:
Imagine how easy it would be for you to attend an obligatory cocktail party (or more exactly, months of cocktail parties) where no one but one friend was speaking the language you speak, and then your friend decided to leave. You would not want your friend to leave. This may help you to empathize with the young child who cannot unscramble the words of all the unfamiliar people...
A new situation would mean something like--a new place, new people, and demands for new behaviors. The author recommends that a child be exposed to not more than two of the 3 situations. How to do that? Well, in Tomas's case, we visited his class before he started school and met his teacher and classmates. Before he rode the bus for the first time, he met the driver. Yes, he still had meltdowns afterwards but I sort of suspect if he'd had more opportunities to visit and maybe a trial run on the bus with his mom or me present, it would have gone a little easier for him.
So the book wasn't a total loss. But there have to be much better ones out there so I'll keep looking.
Posted by Cassie at February 15, 2007 01:17 PM | TrackBack