Developmental Ped?

Rachel Sonnier

So, we are finally seeing the developmental ped soon, for the first time. 

What should I expect? 

What kinds of things should I be asking?

Is this the doctor who holds the answers (dx)?

Am I wasting my time, and is he going to send us straight to the neurologist like all of the other drs suggested?

MirandaHobbes

For us the dev. pedi was the guy. I even recently requested a referral to a neuropsych and he declined, said it wasn't necessary (he would refer to a regular psych), but I suppose that varies considerably. Our eval was frustrating, but it's supposed to be. They want to agitate your little one to see how he responds to negative stimuli. Ours was 3 hours in a tiny little examining room. Lots of questions, despites the mountains of surveys we filled out in advance. Bring all of your other school records, they want to see everything. I was first interviewed by an educational psychologist, then the dev. pedi. Good luck- I actually felt great after getting our diagnosis by the pedi. For a year (from age 2 to age 3) we wondered if the school district was just casting a wide net to grab any child who might potentially need services. Hearing it straight from a doctor and a medical perspective was refreshing. He had a lot of great ideas that I hadn't thought of.

kcisthebombdotcom

The developmental pedi was the diagnostician here. my kiddo had an eval with a neurologist and he never even suspected asd. it was a neverending appointment. the doctor asked a million and one questions that i had filled out prior on paperwork while she observed dd at play with an intern. after that's she did some testing of her own and it was over. definitely bring a snack and drink. its pretty exhausting but you'll get a lot of good info.

Naynaysgal1205

I love our child development spec! She is my "GO TO" and has been since the first time we saw her. Expect to be there awhile- your first visit especially. Be patient wit that...you want them to get a really good idea of who your child is and what they struggle with. We all too often expect a doctor to help us when they only see our child 30 min to an hour -we have to work hard to be good historians and be able to identify what we need help with and why. Good luck! We see our child dev guru on Monday

mommytoconnor

I had to be on a waiting list for over 7 months to see our dev peds. In the meantime my reg peds referred me to formal hearing eval, OT,ST,PT eval, and a neurologist so that during our wait we would be all set for our deve peds. Our first eval was about 1.5 hours and was filled with mostly questions for me and a very little bit of them actually evaling him. She had already reviewed all his reports from everyone so I felt this worked out better to have all this done first then the devel peds can give her eval based on everything all together. I feel like this was a much better overall pic. She agreed with all the others that he has SPD and speech delay.