Doc blaming our co-sleeping/extended breastfeeding for 2 yo DD's development issues... I need advice

[eskimomama]

Hello,

My DD is 2 (25 mo) and not speaking at all, not one word. She doesn't respond to her name and doesn't point much either (only in her peppa pig books).

Over the past few months I got awfully worried it could be ASD and managed to get refered to a child psychologist. We saw him in August and now again in November. Back in August he said he wasn't worried for ASD but told me I should try to stop breastfeeding at night (she's a bad sleeper) and also to stop co-sleeping.

We tried a few times but didn't manage, it was way too hard and me and DH were just shattered.

Now in November, nothing has changed. She has started nursery but only 1 hour per day so far as she finds it very hard to adapt. Getting better slowly though.

Her hearing is being checked later this week just to rule out hearing difficulties (she does look a lot at our lips when we talk, and touches our lips when she wants a song).

So today the child psychologist basically told me off for still co-sleeping and still breastfeeding at night when she wakes up. I KNOW it's not ideal but it just happened that way (she had bad eczema as a baby due to milk/egg allergies and woke up all the time scractching, only BFing would calm her down) We also moved around a lot (changed homes 4 times in one year, and overseas) and it might have affected her...who the hell knows.

I think its not very valid to blame co-sleeping and breastfeeding for her development issues... it sounds like a piece of old school advice. Most of my friends who have toddlers co-sleep with them somehow, and many moms do extended bfing too.

I don't think I'm overprotecting her that much.....?

The child psychologist thinks she never learned to separate herself from me (she's only been with me until 2, no baby sitter at all, no nursery until 2) and I should let her cry at night to help her understand she is an individual. He says starting nursery now isn't enough, the change should happen at home too.

I'm confused and not convinced, and if I'm not convinced how can I change things...

Thanks in advance for any shared experience!

Have you ever tried a systematic signing method with her? Makaton here. It is very useful for pre-verbal babies and children.

It's a rare genetic condition. Recessive, so noone else in the family had it. Yes, learned to speak very fast once I had hearing aids and have rarely stopped since

You mentioned your DD watching and touching people's mouths - I used to do that a lot apparently, also try and turn their heads towards me so I could see their mouths when they were talking. It used to really annoy my parents, until they realised why, of course.

When is your DD's hearing test?

it's tomorrow... don't want to think too much about it until then, as a hearing issue would be much easier to sort out than anything else iyswim. Anyway, we'll see, and I'll do what needs to be done.

Hi. i'm a first time poster but i just felt i had to say something in the discussion. my son is 24 months and co-sleeping and also breastfeeds at night. his development is just fine, he's a confident and sociable boy and a real joy (if i may say so myself ). i am sorry but that psychologist you saw should be horsewhipped. it is a lazy assumption s/he has made and not borne out by any scientific evidence whatsoever. instead of really looking at what may be going on with your child, s/he just decides to blame a parenting style which is different from traditional "western" parenting but which has so far not been shown to harm children anyway. i grew up co-sleeping, mostly because of our culture and we did not have enough rooms for everyone in the extended family. good luck and all the best to you.

Let us know how you got on at the hearing test, OP. Did your DD have the newborn hearing test?

yes, let us know how test went eskimo

So here are the news.... her hearing is fine.......
I have to admit I'm so disappointed and even more confused, back to square one and spending nights worrying about ASD.

I wanted to ask you ladies about the hearing test though.
Basically what they did is:

• check her eardrums, clean them (tiny bit of stuff to remove)
• put a small ultrasound in both ears with a small machine that looked like an old ipod. DD was crying as they were quite rough. Finally between 2 crying bits she got 8/8 on both ears, which ruled out any hearing issue for them.

It just took 5 min...

She didnt want to cooperate with the musical "toys" (which were scary noisy thingies) and was just hiding her head on my chest.

Is this the type of test she was supposed to get to rule out everything hearing related? It looked very short to me... I had to wait 3 months for a 10 min checkup...

thanks for any feedback...

I remember when I took DD to get her hearing tested when she was about five or six, they used headphones and she had to indicate each time she heard a 'beep' through them. But I guess that such an approach only works for older children - I don't know about younger ones I'm afraid.

Are you in a position to be able to go private and see a Speech and Language therapist/child psychiatrist maybe, or at least a well-respected paediatrician that you've been recommended?

Oh I'm sorry - we had this inconclusive thing too. DS2 (age 3) was exposed to a hearing test similar to what Freckled Leopard describes. But he had a language processing problem so couldn't understand the instructions and was terrified of the beeps. They sent me away telling him I "hadn't talked to him enough about what was going to happen" when the problem was that at that stage he couldn't understand explanations of future events.

so that's the empathy, now I'll turn my thoughts back to your next steps...

1. hearing: I think you are right to be sceptical about this hearing test. Hearing loss is apparently a much subtler more complex thing than one would think. Hopefully an audiologist or similar will post. If not, I strongly recommend you post on the special needs board of mumset. You may find it helpful to have a thread specifically about the hearing test/the way she looks at you/touches your lips, etc, etc ..... (or we'll all get distracted wanting to flog that psychologist man again).

1. Everything else:

I know you feel you're back to square one but stay strong. It isn't rocket science, remember the circle of communication - there are only 6 things in it and you're clearly able to make skilful close observations which will help you work out which one(s) it is with the help of a good professional: at 25 months, if you're not talking, it's because: -you can't hear; or

• you struggle to listen; or

-you can't process what you hear; or

• you're not "getting the point" of communicating in a way appropriate to your age/can't read the signals; or
• you can't formulate a response; or
• your mouth muscles won't work as you wish when you try to talk.

3 If you do reach an impasse on the hearing issue, we can link you to some "all-purpose" materials on enhancing communication that won't send you down an overspecialist blind-alley.

My ds passed his hearing test. As I said above, the problem was with his ears nonetheless.

thanks so much ladies - I must tell you I owe you my night time sleep for these last 2 nights...

CaroleService can you tell me more about your DS hearing problem, how was identified in the end?

lingle Thanks I will def try the Special Needs forum later today.
Would it be a speech therapist's job to assess the points in your "everything else" list? I know if I go back to my old family GP he will tell me to stop worrying and wait & see again...

Yes - speech and language therapists are trained to do this.

However: they are a profession like any other and have specialities. The techniques for dealing with mouth muscle coordination are completely different from the techniques for dealing with auditory processing, as you can imagine.

So it might be sensible to mention that you suspect a problem with understanding (if that's what you do suspect).

DDs hearing test at 2 was her sitting on DH's knee at a table with a woman sitting opposite with a few toys. On either side of her were speakers and dark boxes.

The woman distracted DD with the toys so she was concentrating on the table and another person (out of sight) would press a button to make a noise come out of one of the speakers. If DD looked towards the speaker that made the sound a light turned on in the box and there was a toy inside moving around as a 'reward'.

In DD's case they were looking for a similar kind of hearing loss to Wolfhound's (I have similar though not from birth, a gentic degenerative condition) and she had this kind of test from 1, when she initially wouldn't co-operate, and we had to keep coming back. They said a headphones type ear test wouldn't be appropriate until she is 5 or so.

So I'm not sure what to think of the test your DD had!

Any chance of seeing a different audiologist?

I can't find anything about ultrasound hearing tests, does anyone know how they work? Because if they're just checking that the sound waves are bouncing off the ear drum I can think of types of hearing loss that wouldn't cover...

does any of this help?

I think the ultrasound ones (if those are the ones like the one OP described) are the ones they use for newborns. Certainly my DC had a handheld gadget with a pointy bit stuck in their ears shortly after they were born to check their hearing.

hello, sorry that you have not got any answers yet. Perhaps your DD will suddenly turn round and start talking and you will wonder what you were worried about (fingers crossed).

i am no expert on current children's hearing tests (since mine was a very long time ago). Certainly, as an adult, my annual hearing tests now involve wearing headphones and pressing a button when I hear a sound.

A speech & language therapist (SALT) would be a good start, I think. I would drop the psychologist completely, he sounds a fool (and as if he is reading from a textbook from the 1930s).

It is pretty common I think for children not to be speaking at 2. But a lot less common for them not to respond to their name. Can she obey requests (like 'Go and get your coat, please' or 'Help yourself to a biscuit' - the latter one has the advantage that if they can hear/understand it, they'll almost certainly obey!)? I think those are the points to stress to anyone that you need help/referral from.

Don't get too stressed. Trying to get the right help for your child does tend to be a long road, unfortunately, and the most important thing is maintaining the strong loving bond the two of you have. I think co-sleeping and BF are hugely important and will only be helping her, so don't feel bullied into making changes there.

Thinking of you.

Thanks Tehiwara for the link - yes she has that type called "Automated otoacoustic emissions test" ( A probe is placed in the ear canal and generates wide-band clicks. Acoustic energy produced in response to the clicks is detected by a microphone within the probe. )
I can't remember 100% sure but I think she had exactly the same as a newborn.

I was reading on another thread weeks ago that a mom's DC passed 2 NHS hearing tests, until a private one showed a specific deficiency in his hearing - which of course took months, worries and efforts to find out.

I'm not necessarily denying it isn't her hearing that's wrong, but it looked a bit too quick to me this morning.

wolfhound DD can understand some sentences but doesn't seem to all the time. She always understands daily routine things like "let's go outside" or "time for your nap/time to eat". But no, she won't bring me her shoes or anything like that. She will surprise us every now and then and I never know if it's a coincidence or what.
For instance she was with my dad recently collecting walnuts in a bucket and she threw one away, 2 min later my dad asked her to "go and get the one you threw away, and put it back in the bucket please" and she did exactly that...

I will start looking for a speech therapist now...

I can't remember much about the mechanics, eski . I know that I could see he was responding to noises, but even at the time I thought 'that can only show he hears something, not how well he hears it, or if he can process it'.

He had ear infections every few months - that's why i was convinced that his hearing was the problem - I was thinking glue ear. It was really difficult to draw his attention to something, or get him to interact with us. He was just in a world of his own. Things were bad enough that his nursery called us in and made arrangements for someone to come and assess him. In the end a mega-dose of antibiotics turned him into a happy and sociable child. Maybe his hearing problem was intermittent, but we were told at the time that a child who cannot hear well will not 'learn' to respond to normal auditory cues, and so ignores them even when he can hear. We were given exercises to do with him to teach him to 'listen'.

Where are you eskimo? I know a very good private audiologist in London - don't know if they deal with children, though.

How were her milk and egg allergies identified when she was a baby? How was it decided that she had got over them, or was that the case?