“Wait and see,” the ______ said. (You can fill in the blank with teacher, doctor, therapist, adoption worker.) But regardless of who says it, it’s just plain wrong!

This point was driven home for me as I watched LuLu work through a computer-based program that tests her on some academic basics in math and language. LuLu is currently working slightly behind grade level in math, but further behind in language. In the last two years her language abilities, including speech, reading, auditory processing, etc., have been tested and retested. And regardless of who summarizes the reports, the truth is that she has language problems.

And her inability to comprehend the written word and apply this knowledge is highly frustrating to her. So, I watched as she became increasingly agitated over a vocabulary practice test, while she breezed through a decimal practice test and we haven’t even covered the unit on decimals yet. She just extrapolated the knowledge she’s gained from her work with fractions. In other words, she gets it!

As I mulled this over, it ticked me off! How long we’ve “waited to see” what would happen with her language issues based on “professionals” deciding that she just wasn’t impaired enough or (and this is the one that really gets to me) that her disabilities aren’t truly disabilities but related to her “emotionality”. What the heck does that mean anyway? How can I explain her “emotionality” any other way but to say that she was grunting and kicking the computer desk yesterday when she kept getting the vocabulary questions wrong, but she was completely calm and respectful five minutes later when doing the decimals.

Mostly, I’m ticked off at myself for not getting it sooner. For years I wanted to believe what professionals told me about her outgrowing some of her issues or about her issues being all about behavior. I didn’t understand the first axiom of behavior (even though I could have probably recited it for you) “Behavior communicates something.” The problem was that no one was understanding what it was communicating.

Many behaviorists will tell you that children exhibit a behavior for two basic reasons – to get attention or to avoid something. This is such an overly simplistic view of how complex our human brains are. I mean, how many of you, dear readers, do everything you do in a day to either get attention or avoid something. Yes, we follow the speed limit to avoid a ticket, or we call our spouse on the phone to get his/her attention. But can we really reduce our own behaviors to having one of these two motives? What makes us think that children’s brains are more simplistic than adults?

I didn’t get it, because I wanted to believe that some day, by some parenting technique or classroom management system, LuLu would “get better” and her behaviors would diminish (become extinct). I wanted to think we could change her in that way. So I didn’t realize that what I was buying into with this “it’s all about her behavior” theory was a huge “wait and see” shell game, where we didn’t give her any of the intervention supports I now understand she truly needed – namely the speech and language interventions that would have helped her…and can still help her.

We started speech and occupational therapies under her IEP in her virtual school a couple weeks ago, services she hasn’t received through the school system since preschool (actually she never received the OT). Her new speech therapist, after meeting her, was stunned that she hadn’t been receiving these services all along. My heart always breaks when a professional says this, looking at me with that shocked expression as to how I could have allowed my child to not be given what she needs.

The therapist wasn’t trying to assign blame to me. But I willingly take it. I bought into the “wait and see” many times when LuLu was younger. I realize now that “wait and see” is usually either about the professional not knowing what to do or not wanting to do it (often because of cost). That “wait and see” is rarely in the best interest of the child.

I mean, really. What if LuLu had received intensive speech therapy or sensory integration work from the time she arrived home at 20 months until now. Would she be any worse off? No. It would not have harmed her. Could it have helped her? Probably, but how much we have no way of predicting.

See my point? Medical professionals are bound by an oath in which they are to “do no harm”. Most take this to mean that they shouldn’t do anything that isn’t medically necessary. But what if you err too far on the side of caution? What if you “wait and see” through a child’s whole life? Isn’t that doing harm?

“She’ll outgrow it,” is a dangerous assumption when a child is developmentally delayed. A safer assumption would be to give the child all the support and intervention you can to help them “outgrow it”.


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