First paed appointment in a month

[28tsw]

Anyone got any tips for a first appointment?

DS is 5 in March and troubling behaviour at school (not at home) which I know is opposite to usual. Teacher thinks dyspraxia (I agree - can’t cycle, struggles with stairs, always bumping into things, can’t use cutlery, struggles to dress self) and is “somewhere on the autism spectrum”. I’m not as sure about this as he’s social, enjoys new activities, plays with others (not well, but he’s interested), is expressive. When he’s tired or has a virus he appears classic ASD with meltdowns and avoiding noise - he also refuses to eat food hot.

Anyway I expect he will enjoy seeing the doctor and appear “fine”. He did this when we saw speech therapist who was bewildered by his referral last summer. I’m a little concerned we will be told there’s nothing wrong but he’s pushing boundaries every day at school and I’m v worried he’ll end up excluded. Last day of term he hit someone then ran off when the teacher came leaving premises!!

Take a list of all your concerns so that you don't forget what you want to say. You could maybe keep a diary of behaviours over the next month so the pead has a better idea of how often things are happening and, in the case of meltdowns, how long they last.

Have you read about sensory processing disorders? 'The out of synch child' is a good place to start and it has checklists at the end of each chapter to help you decide if/where your child is having problems.

If you're worried he's going to do that really annoying thing of actually managing to walk in a straight line when asked by the doctor... yes DD2 I'm looking at YOU here (she went into "why is everyone looking at me" mode and walked perfectly straight the first time I raised dyspraxia as a possibility with our GP)... record footage on your phone. I did this of things like her using cutlery, walking (she walks like a teenager trying to hide the fact she's been necking the vodka), dressing herself and I also typed a sheet with my observations on various things - think it was things like coordination and I'd noted down dates I'd spotted things like her not doing stairs with alternate feet yet etc, speech with sounds I had noticed were being substituted, sensory quirks... just meant that as far as DD2 was concerned she did some drawing and I chatted to the lady - because I could show a lot of the evidence on my phone.

To give you some idea of timescales (DD2 is almost exactly a year ahead of you - down to the March birthday) - we saw paeds in February, they referred on to OT for an assessment - which was about June time and reported back to paeds who had us back in at the very start of September (we had a course of 4 OT sessions between then which were really really useful) and got the diagnosis of DCD then. Letter confirming this finally appeared in the post the day before Christmas Eve!

Very useful thank you. Did you have any issues with behaving at school at all?

Not with DD2 - she's a very placid compliant kid and her naughty streak is so bloody cute with it that it's very much mischievous rather than naughty. Because she is so eager to please in school it's actually much harder to get taken seriously - any sadness she's feeling (there are issues with social exclusion in her year group - made worse by her poor speech as she has verbal dyspraxia as well and lack of any concept of personal space and clumsiness) tends to come out at home and gets dismissed with a "oh she's such a happy little girl" at school until I really started pushing school to notice what was going on

There's another lad in DD1's class who I know has dyspraxia (not through any glaring breech of confidentiality - his mum told me) and he has got into the loop of being disaffected and frustrated at school and lashing out and then getting more disaffected at school as a result - that's what we're trying to prevent with DD2 - although I think she'd fall into being the class clown more than anything else.