Child Find Screening

A few weeks ago one of Carter's Parents' Day Out teachers recommended that we have Carter's speech evaluated through Child Find. She said that they were often having trouble understanding him and that he seemed to be getting frustrated sometimes.

Child Find is the program in Williamson County that identifies children that are having difficulties in hearing, vision, speech, language, social skills, thinking skills, moving and using muscles, and self help. It's run through the school system and is free for participants.

I have always thought that Carter may qualify for some speech therapy but we hadn't done anything yet because the program doesn't start until age 3 and requires a teacher's or pediatrician's recommendation.

Carter had his screening yesterday afternoon at an elementary school. I was a little nervous about Carter being shy or grumpy since the screening was during his naptime, but I told him we were going to a school to play some games and he was super excited. I brought Rylan along but luckily he was content playing with the toys in the classroom. There were three evaluators. One asked me questions mostly about Carter's social skills. The other two evaluators had Carter count objects, put things in groups, identify objects, and lots of other things that I didn't really get to observe since I was answering questions and trying to keep an eye on Rylan. At the initial screening, all areas of development are evaluated and then if anything is low, the child will get another evaluation in that area by a specialist.

Carter scored average or above on everything except for speech and language. He was still in the normal range for language but didn't get credit for a lot of things because of his speech. The evaluators recommended that Carter get a second, more thorough evaluation for speech. Their concerns were that he often deletes the middle and/or end consonants of words and that he sometimes substitutes an "h" sound in the middle of words. They also commented that some words and connected speech was unintelligible.

None of this was shocking to me. I know that he only says the first part of many words and that he can't say several sounds. Carter can't even really pronounce his name. It sounds more like "ca-gar". He gets really excited when a dj says Lady Gaga on the radio because he thinks they are saying his name! I felt like it took Carter longer than most of the other kids his age to start saying more than just a handful of words. His vocabulary has really exploded over the last several months but it's often difficult for people other than Brian and me to understand a lot of what he says.

I'm looking forward to having Carter's speech evaluated further and getting him some assistance if he qualifies.