I need a shoulder more than anything. Sorry, this is long, but I want to get it all out.
My son is 6. I've been trying to get someone to look at his speech since before he was 2, and was fobbed off with the 'he'll grow out of it' until he was 5. He did outgrow the limited and copied speech mostly, but there are still a lot of issues that they were (and are) ignoring. Finally, a health visitor for his younger sister talked with him during a visit and agreed to pass on his details to the local speech and language services. I thought we were finally going to get somewhere.
How disappointed I've been. The GP we had to see to get on the waiting list agreed on his speech issues, but pretty much blamed the fact he didn't go to nursery or playgroups for long enough (He did for a little bit, but the staff couldn't deal with his lack of speech and understanding questions, it sent his speech skills and behaviour back months, it took us nearly a year after pulling him out to get him to where he was). After months of waiting after that, the first therapist seemed to understand the problem and was discussing a diagnosis of receptive language delay or disorder. He can hear what we say just fine, but he often doesn't know how to respond and will blurt out the first thing that pops in his head if he thinks there is an answer expected of him, especially if it is a specific answer - he desperately wants to be right. He's also very uneasy asking anything but the most basic black-and-white questions and gets unnerved in conversations outside of his black-and-white sphere.
We were told he would start seeing one regularly at home to work on his problems. Months pass. Then we got his assessment form back with his 'targets'. They were ridiculous - almost like they don't want to deal with his problems, so they'll nit-pick on the outer edges of it to look like they are doing something. They saw him at home once a week for 3 weeks, then the fourth appointment got lost in the December holidays. We haven't heard from them again until week before last, they wanted to do another visit with him to close his file. My husband agreed, thinking it was just a formality.
She walked in and promptly had my son do an assessment, which almost seemed designed for a child with his issues to fail. And again, when I tried to discuss his issues as a whole, they were brushed off and replaced with her concerns on tiny ridiculous things. She wouldn't hear that he normally uses ordinal numbers or his/her correctly in day to day life when he didn't think an answer was expected from him, that his issues centred around something other than not picking the second from the right rather than the second from the left when she asked him pick the second balloon without a qualifier. And again, I felt the finger of blame as she asked very pointed questions and remarks made about his early years and current socialization (He's home educated, none of the local schools provide any speech and language help anyways until secondary level so he'd be getting the same service regardless).
She said as she left that she would arrange further help. I really want to just turn it down when the letter comes. It is not helping, it's creating more issues for him if anything (he now gets quite nervous if he gets his hes and shes wrong as the visiting therapists banged on about it to him quite a lot), and I'm just sick to the back teeth of them ignoring his real issues and blaming us. My husband worries that turning it down will get us into some sort of trouble, social services or something, but as his educational work and progress has been assessed and approved by our Elective Home Education Officer who knows about his needs, they can't really say we're not providing for his special education needs when what we've done without them was pretty much LA approved.
I want help, something to help him would be lovely, but the speech and language services here and just not doing it and I don't know if I can put him through it anymore.