When to consider speech therapy and other types of educational support

About a year ago my youngest daughter, who was holding a book, turned to me and said, “Mommy, it is really interesting — I can see this letter in my head, but I cannot manage to write it on a piece of paper”. I was intrigued, and like a good French person, went straight to my doctor who gave me a prescription for an orthophoniste (speech therapist). Turns out, she did indeed have an audio-visual issue and has been having regular sessions ever since, which has improved her reading and writing immensely.

Now here is the interesting thing: I think about 25% of my daughter’s class here in Paris have been referred to speech therapists. They deal with everything from speech impediments, to reading, writing and maths issues. Because these types of therapies have been recognised by the French social system, they are treatable for free. In other European countries these types of problems are not recognised, so they are not treated in the same way.

The therapy is in the form of games, and other letter and word recognition-based techniques — basically training the part of the brain that is being placid (forgive me for my very layman terms of describing this). One of the exercises I find interesting is that the therapist often asks my daughter to close her eyes when she is not able to read a word and to visualise it and write it down with her eyes closed.

I find it fascinating as I don’t even know if my daughter would really have suffered if she had not received the therapy. After all, her school work was fine and her teachers had not recognised anything out of the ordinary. She is a much slower reader than her sister — but on the other hand, she is much better at maths. It has, though, made her into a much more confident reader and is also helping hugely with her spelling.

One of the great advantages is that because seeing a therapist over here is such a common thing, there is absolutely no stigma attached to it, neither for my daughter nor for her parents. I found the whole process more interesting than worrying, and am very happy seeing my daughter skip along to her weekly sessions. She normally gets a crepe to eat on the way back home, so possibly that is why she likes her sessions so much.

As often I find with parenting the lines are so very fluid — when do we just go with the flow and let our children be who they are and when do we intervene with therapies, exercises and training? I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Emilie

from kid games toys http://ift.tt/2jqkyRx via kid games toys
from Tumblr http://ift.tt/2iMrTZD