Child Advocates, I had no idea they existed. A child advocate is an essential part helping get your child all the assistance they require in the school system. I had no idea of this until my daughter had all her testing done. Knowing how difficult her journey/challenge would be going forward, this was the best recommendation the psychologist gave to me. She had many recommendations and explained to me that these people know all the laws in your state to help and give assistance to children with learning disabilities. This was the turning point in my daughter’s life and if you take any piece of advice from me in any of my “ramblings” this is it. You finally have the law on your side, you find out how educated your teachers REALLY are. You will be very surprised. I found out that two people knew what Nonverbal learning disability was. All my daughters symptoms were so typical of this learning disability. One other very important piece of information came from this evaluation, 95% of children that have ADD/ADHD have some sort of learning disability. Wow, what an eye opener especially since I also found out that a good percentage of children that are adopted have ADD/ADHD. Most of the pregnancies are impulsive, a characteristic of ADD/ADHD, and all of us who have children with this disability know this. No thinking before they react!!!! Hmmm curious! Needless to say, the advocate which I hired, which I will say, was a godsend! She was sympathetic, sincere and knew my daughters rights. What a change in the PPT meeatings for my daughter. Once the school put a new program in place for my daughter we wanted someone to come in and evaluate it’s effectiveness with my daughter. Well, another eye opener, it was not tailored to her. She made fabulous revisions, so much so for the last 3 years she has been on the honor roll. She has classes teaching her socialization skills. Who knew that socialization skills are such an essential part of our lives!!!! Important Pragmatic Language: this refers to the social language skills we use in our daily interations with others. They include what we say, how we say it, our body language and whether it is appropriate to the given situation. Pragmatic skills are vital for communicating our personal thoughts, ideas and feelings. Children, adolescents and adults with poor pragmatic skills often misinterpret other’s communicative intent and have difficulty responding appropriately either verbally or non-verbally. Key to life!!!! How could we, as parents, not pick up on this. How could school misinterpret this? Well that summer they gave a course to all the psychologists in the school system to educate them. That’s how important this is!!!! Until my next blog! There’s always hope =)