Hi! I'm Hilary, and my 3 year old daughter is suspected to have spd. I have had concerns about her for some time, and in fact had a local child development center assess her for possible sensory issues last summer, but they could not determine anything amiss during the assessment, and in fact found that her communication skills are absurdly high (I strongly feel that this part of the assessment went particularly well for her b/c it was administered by a man, and she responds much much better to men than to women for some reason). The center suggested putting her in preschool a couple of times a week in order to see if being in a peer group would have a positive influence on her behavior. Instead, at preschool she is unable to sit still and refuses to interact with any of the other children, ignoring them if they speak to her or shoving or biting them if they get in her space. She is supposedly clumsy, often falling and running into the other kids (at home we have thought she has unusually good balance--she loves to climb on things and rarely falls). At school she is constantly in motion, though the OT who observed her commented that though she would appear to be paying no attention to the teacher (for instance, while other children sat and listened, my daughter would lie down and kick her legs and pat her hands against the floor and stare at the ceiling), she would be following directions or very quietly repeating what the teacher was saying. During group work my daughter gets distracted and cannot follow directions, instead doing her own thing (often disrupting her peers), but can do the same work perfectly if she is sitting one-on-one with an adult. The upshot of all this was that the preschool requested a re-assessment for Lucia, and this time her adaptive and social-emotional behaviors were found to be in the 5th percentile (which qualifies her for help, which is good, I guess...). Anyway, although the child development center does not diagnose children, the people I worked with agreed that Lucia seems to have sensory issues.

I am feeling kind of overwhelmed, especially with how apparently unhappy the teacher was with my daughter's behavior (and I didn't know the extent of it, because while she issues at home, they are not so pronounced as they are in the classroom and I think the teacher just assumed I knew how she was acting). An OT from the center will work with my daughter once a week at the school, but I feel like what they want is to moderate my daughter's behavior until she conforms to the standard, and what I am hoping for is ways she can thrive without having to spend all her energy sitting down and being quiet, which for her is a challenge. I understand, too, though, that the class cannot be run around just my daughter and her needs.

Anyway, now I am feeling anxious about my daughter constantly working uphill to get through school and then being labelled a problem child because she can't sit still or follow directions in a room full of other children. I have spoken with the teachers, who say they don't mind working with my daughter, but I have a gut feeling that her primary teacher mainly thinks of her as troublesome.

So I am here hoping to learn from other people's experiences and wisdom. I am hoping to find out what sort of therapy has worked for other kids, and what sort of progress I can reasonably expect to see in the next several months as she works with an OT.