Next week we have to take our kids to the developmental assessment clinic. It is a clinic that evaluates children born premature and how they grow and develop. Our oldest daughter went thru it and now all of our quads are being checked as well. My oldest because she was born at 26 weeks and the quads at 29 weeks.
Every 6 months you go into the hospital to be checked by a series of specialists that see if your kids are developing correctly and on time. They put you in a room and send doctors in one at a time to check on gross motor skills, fine motor skills, growth, and health for 2-3 hours.
I don’t like these days, the doctors test the kids for a short period of time and make a judgment on them from that. The kids are usually kind of grumpy and short tempered because if being in a room for so long and are not allowed to eat or drink the whole time. They never test well because of this and I hate hearing them tell me how my kids are doing on this information, not to mention the information is clearly not accurate if everyone goes thru the same torture. The only reason we go thru this is hopefully the information they collect may help kids in the future, because it really sucks.
Oh how I dreaded our assessments. Our little dude is a 28-weeker, and every 6 months we went down to the Child Development and Special Care Clinic at the hospital and withstood the torture – 6 specialists in 3 hours expecting him to perform. By the time it was all over, we had a super cranky kid.
Sounds like we were luckier than you – at our assessments, I was allowed to be an active participant. So if I knew he wasn’t understanding what he should do, or knew how to get him to do something, I was allowed to chime in. They also ‘interviewed’ my husband and I on what he could and couldn’t do, so if he was adamant about NOT doing something, they took our word for it.
About a month after each visit, we received an evaluation report that we discussed with our pediatrician. We were provided recommendations to help with any skills he needed improving on, as well as some free toys that they found helpful.
Funny story – at our last assessment, he was asked “Can you kick the ball?”.
His response was “Yes, but in a minute. I’m tired.”