Well, maybe not everybody, but more and more families today are learning all about Early Childhood Intervention! I entered the world of developmental therapy as soon as my first child came home from the hospital because she had Down syndrome and was 100% tube fed. In my circle of friends with children with Down syndrome, therapy has been part of our normal day-to-day routine since our children’s birth. However, in my circle of friends who have healthy, typical children, developmental delays are far from uncommon and I have watched many friends of typical children enter the world of therapy I once thought was isolated to only children with “special needs.” One of the biggest reasons for this is people are recognizing the advantages of treating developmental delays early.
While it’s not uncommon for a child in any sandbox across the United States to be receiving some form of early intervention, nobody wants their child to have a developmental delay in any area. Watching your child achieve developmental milestones is probably one of the most rewarding things about parenting! When your child isn’t doing something that most of his peers are doing, it can be incredibly discouraging. It’s important to remember that typically, a delay in developmental milestones DOES NOT mean your child is not going to catch up! Most children who receive early intervention services catch up to their peers in their area of difficulty and no one knows the difference from that point on!
If your child does have a diagnosis that is going to stick with him or her long-term, you are far from the end of the world! I have a child who will always be behind her peers in most areas of development, however we wouldn’t change anything about her. In fact, she has brought so much joy and delight to our family, that we are adopting another child with Down syndrome . It took some adjustments because of continuous therapy, but we very much have a life outside of developmental therapy!
So, what exactly is Early Intervention?
- Early Intervention (sometimes called Early Childhood Intervention) was created by the United States Congress is 1986 to provide services for infants and toddlers under the age of 3 who have a developmental delay of any kind or a disability.
What services does Early Intervention provide?
- Physical Therapy {PT} – for children with gross motor delays {late sitting, late crawlers, late walkers, etc…}
- Occupation Therapy {OT} – for children with sensory issues, fine motor delays, feeding difficulty, cognitive delay, or a delay in social or emotional skills. {In very young infants, there is sometimes an overlap between OT and PT, so an Occupational Therapist may also treat some gross motor delays.}
- Speech Therapy {ST} – for children who are late to speak or have feeding difficulties
- Other services early intervention provides: Family education and counseling, Assistive technology devices and services, Audiology testing and services, Nursing services, Nutrition services, Psychological services, Service coordination, Social worker services, Vision evaluation and services, and some provide respite care for families!
What if my child is over 3 years old?
- If your child is 3 years old or older, they do not qualify for your state’s early intervention program. However, they do qualify for services through your public school system! Contact your school district if you suspect a delay in any area of your child’s development after they turn three years old.
Getting started
- If you think your child is taking a little too long in an area of their development, you can make either contact your child’s physician or you can contact your local early intervention provider. You do not need your physician to refer your child for services. You can find your local provider by going to your state’s website. Here is Texas’ listing of early childhood intervention providers. If you have trouble finding your early intervention provider, let me know and I will be happy to help!
- After you or your physician calls to make a referral, your early intervention provider will schedule a visit to your home to evaluate your child and determine if they are eligible for services. If your child is determined to have a delay, he or she will start receiving services shortly after the evaluation. That simple!
- Remember that every child develops at a different rate and do not accomplish milestones at exactly the same rate. If you have questions on whether your child is developing at an appropriate pace, contact your child’s pediatrician or your early intervention provider.
Here’s some more links for you!
Do you know anyone whose child is receiving services from Early Intervention? Has your child received services from Early Intervention? Do you have any other experience with Early Intervention?
- PS: In the spirit of National Adoption Month, I want to sneak this article in here (even though it has nothing to do with the topic at hand!) This article talks about the tax credit the IRS provides adopting families to help make adoption more affordable. Most people don’t know that they can receive up to an $11,000 dollar for dollar reimbursement for their adoption expenses!!
November is National Adoption Awareness Month, so I thought I’d post about adoption this month. One of the biggest pieces to our adoption journey, thus far, has been the home study process. Before we started our adoption journey, I had no idea what the process was like. I vaguely knew it was going to take a long time and I definitely knew it was going to cost a lot of money. When we committed to adopting baby Reese, the first item on our to-do list was to have a home study completed by a licensed social worker. I immediately started researching the process and became quite overwhelmed. The lovely folks at Reece’s Rainbow walked me through the process and it ended up being much less stressful than I thought it would be.
I thought I’d share our experience with those of you who are beginning your own adoption journeys or those of you who are just curious as to how adoptions work. Whether you are adopting domestically or internationally, you will have to have a home study done. There may be some minor differences between domestic and international adoptio home studies and there is most certainly variances between social workers, but I believe that all home studies have the same foundation.
Finding your social worker
- This is the first step. Finding a social worker who is experienced, licensed, and whose eager to help you in your adoption process can take some digging. You can find many social workers at 1-800-homestudy or you can google or look in your phone book. It’s important to find a social worker who is in your price range. The fees for a home study can be anywhere between $600 and $2,500 for international adoptions. Different countries have different requirements, so make sure your social worker has experience with home studies in YOUR child’s country. If you don’t feel a personality connection with your social worker, find someone else. This home study process can be anywhere from one month to several months long, so you want to be working with someone you like. Ask what their turn around time is and what their process is like. Every social worker runs their home studies a little differently, so shop around. If the social worker doesn’t return calls, that may be a sign that they may not be easily reached when you need them.
Before your home visit
- After you’ve selected your social worker, he or she will start you on a paper chase. This will include locating your marriage license, birth certificates, divorce certificates (if applicable), filling out background check forms, having a medical exam, asking friends for letters of recommendations, having your fingerprints taken locally, and submitting financial records (note: you do not need to be rich to adopt, you only need to show that you are able to provide for your family). Your social worker will also schedule a home visit to meet your family, see your home, and conduct interviews. This may be scheduled before or after you obtain the necessary documents.
What to expect for your home visit
- The home visit was the most intimidating part of this process. We scheduled our home visit and it was canceled by the social worker last minute. It was very frustrating because I had slaved over my house and it was sparkling. It was rescheduled for the next week and again, I devoted myself to scrubbing and cleaning my house. Our social worker arrived and was very friendly. We gave her a tour of our home and she took a picture of each room. She didn’t look in any closets (which I had spent hours cleaning) and didn’t even look at our master bathroom. She looked at our backyard and didn’t look in the garage (whew!). She said that she wasn’t there to inspect my cleaning abilities, but was there to make sure there was adequate space for our child and that our home was safe, which made me feel better, even though my house was the cleanest it’s ever been! We then sat down to have an interview. She asked my husband and myself individually about our motivation to adopt and about our childhoods. Specifically, she asked about our parents’ discipline, activities we participated in, whether we had any history of abuse, etc… She wanted to know what schools we’ve attended and what jobs we’ve had as adults as well. She was pretty specific, but I did not feel like there was a “right” answer or a “wrong” answer. She then asked us individually about our marriage and our parenting style. She wanted to know if we would treat Reese like our other children and how we planned to incorporate Reese’s culture into our family. After she conducted individual interviews, we were done. Our kids are too young to be interviewed, however they were there the whole time, playing and fighting with each other. We ate some pizza and salad, visited for a while and then she left. She was at our house for about 2 1/2 hours. I jokingly asked her if she was going to at least look at the fire escape path I made for her visit. She laughed. I had read that we had to have a fire escape path drawn out, so I did that and it wasn’t necessary in my case. I know this sounds simple, but it really was this simple!
What happens next?
- We are now in this stage of our home study process. Our social worker left the home visit with the necessary documents and we received a draft of our home study about two weeks later. I sent her some corrections I wanted her to make (minor things like misspellings and wording errors, etc…) and she made those revisions. We found out that our Child Protective Services clearance had not arrived, so we are now waiting for that. Once that is received, she will UPS official, notarized copies of our final home study to both us and to our local USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) office. From there, we will hopefully receive an invitation from USCIS to have our federal fingerprints done and an approval from the US to adopt soon after that.
This is a very nutshelled version of our homestudy process, but it truly was this simple for us! Something that was incredibly overwhelming to me has been smooth and simple, except for the minor delay with our CPS clearance form.
Here are a few resources for you as you begin your adoption home study process:
For those of you who have had a homestudy, what tips do you have for prospective adoptive parents?
About a month ago, I started having horrible nausea. This nausea is unmistakable. It is the exact same nausea I had with my pregnancies. It consisted of the dry throat, the marker stomach turns, and the hope that you’ll throw up because you think it may relieve some of the nausea. For me, it came on worse in the afternoons and kept getting worse until I finally gave in and went to bed. No, I was not/am not pregnant! However, the only way I could describe this nausea was comparing it to morning sickness. This nausea was exactly like the morning sickness I experience with my pregnancies. Anyone who has had morning sickness knows it comes with its own unmistakable trademark.
Ahhhhh….I had just committed to adopting baby Reese. Calling it “morning sickness” makes a little sense. My body was reacting to the fact that we are preparing for a baby and we had just made a very HUGE committment and were walking into the unknown journey of adoption. So, I started googling. I could not find ANYTHING about other adoptive mothers experiencing symptoms similar to morning sickness. So, then I just assumed I had gone off the deep end and created the nausea in my head.
However, then I started thinking about it a little more and decided I wasn’t completely crazy. Here’s some things I know that made me realize this was not just “psychosomatic morning sickness.”
- I had just begun preparing for a new baby. Even though my body was not pregnant, it makes sense that preparing for a child through adoption could trigger hormonal reactions, which could have triggered the nausea I experienced.
- I was under a lot of stress during those first two weeks and was anxiously trying to understand what our next steps were supposed to be in our adoption process. I will credit the fact that stress, anxiety, and life changes can cause nausea.
- Sometimes men have “sympathetic morning sickness” when their wives are experiencing morning sickness which tells me that if a man’s body can have a similar reaction just by osmosis, an adopting mother’s adoption morning sickness can definitely be a real thing!
So, knowing these three things, I started feeling better about myself. I will admit that I am a bit dingy in some areas, like I leave my keys in my front door when I come in from running errands (don’t tell any robber friends!), I have a tendency to bump my leg into my table corner at least once a day (there’s a constant bruise to prove it), and I sometimes call a friend at 5pm to tell her something only to be reminded that I already told her that in our morning conversation (yes, that happened today!) However I don’t think I’ve officially lost it. I think my theory on “Adoption Morning Sickness” makes sense.
We are now a month in to our adoption process and everything is going so smoothly! I am no longer experiencing nausea anymore. I guess you could compare this stage of our adoption process to the second trimester of a pregnancy! I feel good again and things are moving along.
What do you think? Am I just in denial about my mental health or do you think I have a theory going? Have you adopted and did you experience something similar in the beginning?
