Preparing your child for the assessment
Parents and teachers often ask how they should talk to their child about coming for testing and being part of a neuropsychological or neurodevelopmental evaluation. Below are some suggestions for you on how to prepare your child for coming to see us.
Key message
The key message to get across to your child or teenager is the main point of their assessment is to ‘learn about how they think and learn’ so that:
Teachers know how best to teach them
Parents know how to support them with expertise on how they think
They themselves have a good picture of what their strengths and weaknesses are
When your child comes in for their assessment, we will carry out activities to help us better understand how they work with different types of information. We will do puzzles, play word games, chat about what they like to do and try to figure out why hard things are hard. We might also do familiar tasks for them such as reading, writing, and maths.
For young children, it may be important to let them know we are ‘talking doctors’, who help them learn about their brain and how it works. It will be important to let them know that there is nothing wrong with them – there will be no scans, injections etc
Older children may need a reminder that this is a confidential process, focused on finding solutions. Their thoughts and concerns are essential to figuring out what will be the most helpful for them and encouraging them to be open and honest with us is likely to be beneficial to the process. It may be helpful to know that together we will agree what information they share can go in the report.
Getting your child involved
Enabling and facilitating your child to articulate their own assessment questions before we meet will hopefully give them some control over the process and guide the assessment to where we need to be. If your child does not understand the diagnostic terms yet, that is fine, we can work out the best way to discuss it with them after the assessment if it’s appropriate.
Your child may need time to mull their concerns or questions over and get their thoughts together, so don’t be afraid to ask a few times. It is helpful to let them know that you and their teacher will complete questionnaires online before we meet them so will already know quite a bit about them. We will also complete some online or paper questionnaires with them either before we meet them or perhaps with us, as part of the assessment.
What if my child doesn’t want to be assessed?
Sometimes children and young people are reluctant to come in for an assessment. They may be worried about what is going to happen and might struggle to articulate this. The most helpful thing we can do is to be honest with them about the purpose of the assessment and how it will run.
Tips
Tip #1: Use your own child’s words to describe the problems they cope with
Sometimes children resist the assessment because it feels like adults don’t get it. For this reason, it can be helpful to think about how your child is describing the problem.
For example, instead of telling you that ‘writing is hard’ they may say ‘writing is boring’ or ‘my teacher is unfair’. By using their language, you are assuring them that we will help them solve their problem, not just ours. See below for ideas.
Tip #2: Talk over ice cream
Some children may be worried they’ve done something wrong, or that there is something wrong with them or that they will get into trouble at school. For this reason, talk to your child about the plans for the assessment in a place where it is obvious that there is nothing wrong and they are not in trouble. How you broach the subject is likely to influence how they feel about it too.
Have a bowl of ice cream, taking the dog for a walk, or playing a favourite game are all good ways to have a conversation without it feeling too ‘serious’.
Please let us know if you have any additional questions by emailing:
“I’ve noticed that you really don’t like your math teacher this year, I’m wondering if there’s a way we can make that class better for you”
“I’ve noticed that we are in a bad nagging cycle around homework. I know you don’t like it and I don’t like it either. I wonder if there’s a way we can break out of it”
“I’ve noticed you’re getting in trouble a lot with your teachers this year. It doesn’t seem to make sense. I wonder if there’s a way we can figure it out together”
