What Can You Expect?

Few of the programs available for children with developmental problems have success at re-starting the developmental process. Most programs focus on teaching as many skills as possible to someone who will be an adult with those developmental problems.

Teaching the un-teachable child

Most programs assume that children with developmental problems will always have those developmental problems. So, they have stopped hoping that the developmental process can be re-started. They have stopped searching for ways to re-start the developmental process.

Instead, they have settled for teaching the un-teachable child as their frame-of-reference. They select a series of skills that they think an adult with developmental problems will need. They struggle for weeks or months or years to teach those skills to their un-teachable students. Of course, the workers in these programs are very respectful of the special children with whom they work. They just assume these children will never be able to lose their symptoms.

It is in the diagnosis

There is an attitude that there is no cure built into the diagnostic process and even in the definitions of all of the individual developmental problem diagnoses. Everyone involved thinks that this present-tense statement also includes the future as well. There is no cure is thought to also mean that there will never be a cure.

This presents an interesting problem. If someone found a cure, it could not be proved. The definition (for eaxample) of ADHD includes an item that there is no cure (with the un-written understanding that there will never be a cure). If researchers try to use a pre and post diagnosis testing in their research, the post-test (diagnosis) would indicate that the test subject continues with ADHD, because the subject was diagnosed as ADHD in the pre-test. Depending on the treatment, the research could certainly show that the symptoms have changed (maybe even gone away), but the diagnosis process does not include the possibility of cure.

If a child has one of these developmental problems, and receives a diagnosis for that problem, the child will continue with that diagnosis even if the child looses all of the symptoms of that diagnosis. Even when a child stops having that problem, the diagnosis continues. That is an interesting situation. Research to prove that the cure has been found cannot prove it, because the definition precludes that possibility.

So, what can you expect?

Even if the cure was discovered today, it would be decades before there is enough research to overcome the definitions, diagnostic specifications, and the diagnostic prejudice in existence today. This frame-of-reference that there is no cure is so pervasive that little effort is being spent on searching for that cure or expecting a cure to be forthcoming. Parents should not expect the cure to be announced before their own child has children with developmental problems (don't expect it for decades).

No medical, psychological, or educational service provider will send you to a program that offers a cure. And, the programs they send you to will have the attitude that they are teaching an un-teachable child. Parents should not expect the mainstream medical, psychological, or educational programs to provide a cure.

If parents want to find anything close to a cure for their children with developmental problems, they should not look for that in the mainstream programs. They have to look at alternative programs.

If parents want their child to surpass their developmental problems, they should search for programs which work with the developmental process. Re-starting the developmental process and becoming age-appropriate should be the goal of programs for children with developmental problems.