Therapy

A lot of these kids need therapy to get them caught up developmentally. That was touched on in our foster care training, but the experience taught me a lot more than actually just hearing about it. Our son needed some phsyical therapy, speech therapy, and occupational therapy. My girls did speech and occupational therapy too. My advice is to find a home health agency that will come to your home to do it weekly. The more they spend in therapy and have time to practice, the better they seem to do better with it. We started with a therapy company and they'd come out a couple of times a month and then we switched to a different agency that came out twice a week per therapy group and it seemed to help the kids a little better. Yes, it was hard to live around a therapy schedule for so long, but I just did it and we made it work. It helped that I really liked our therapists and that they became friends too. :-) After doing therapy for the last few years, we just got our last girl all graduated from therapy last week. Happy dance although it's bittersweet to say good-bye to the therapists too.

 We did some behavior therapy with them too over the past couple of years and it just wasn't working. I'm a Mom who doesn't stop looking for answers so we stopped doing the therapy and once we started counseling last year, she confirmed to me that the conventional behavior therapy classes just do not work on our kids. At the beginning of the year, we had gone to our counselor and I was venting about how I was just so frustrated with behaviors going on in our house. I didn't know if it was a case of "I can't" or "I won't" learn that things just aren't acceptable to do. She told me of a partner that she worked with that was a neuropsychologist that could do some brain mapping and give us some answers. There was a lot of answered prayer in that visit. He didn't take our insurance or the kids form of Medicaid that they have as their secondary insurance and so he tested them for free. Last week, we got the test results and it was very neat to see that he described our kids to a T just based on neurological data and he wasn't familiar with our kids like our attachment therapist is. The dr. listened to my concerns after he presented the results and he offered to take my kids and do neurofeedback therapy with them. The only thing is that we had to be committed to starting out with 3-4 visits a week until things got moving and then we could come in 1-2 times a week. Since I have a handle on the girls and my son seems to be escalating, we're going to start with my son. He said that there is a small percentage of the population that doesn't respond to therapy, so we are praying that he will respond. But, due to that, he's giving us the first 10 visits for free. I was concerned about paying out of pocket for treatment as again, he doesn't take our insurance. However, he told us that one of the things that impressed him was that we are strong advocates for our children, so he'd work with us on payment, he just wanted to help. So, we will start therapy this week or next. I'm SO excited.

Parents, we can't give up on advocating for our children and for trying to help them all we can. And if you find one person that doesn't seem all that in tune with trying to help your children, don't be afraid to look for answers somewhere else. There are people out there...I know they're not always easy to find...but don't give up. Keep praying and asking for guidance. :-)

 Lord, I lift up the parents that are trying to do all they can for their children, some may not know where to turn anymore, some of this may all be new to other parents too. Just give us all guidance to know where to look and provide us with doctors and therapists that are willing to listen to us and to help our children. Amen