Disability Awareness

And I'm going to start out by asking you, what qualifies a child for a disability?

Well, disability, we'd like to even say just different abilities, but a child can have an intellectual disability, a physical disability, language disabilities, concerns, areas and the areas of sensory or regulatory concerns, adaptive concerns, such as an ability to have regulation during sleep or

feeding,

or just problems with their activities of daily living.

And they can also have behavior problems that can affect their ability to be educated as a typical child.

So at a child's well visit with their PCP, you know, starting at infancy, they perform this thing called the ASQ.

And it's a screener.

And that gives the PCP an idea of if the child is developing a long trajectory that would be considered in line with other children their age.

And usually a PCP will not necessarily refer a child immediately, but if they see that over their couple of visits that they're still showing low scoring on the ASQ, then they will usually mention to the caregiver that we'd like the child to be further evaluated because of their delays in certain areas.

All right, that makes sense.

So what options are available for children with the type of needs that you've just described?

Well, they can go a couple of different routes.

They can definitely look into individual therapies, like going through a children's hospital in the area or clinic.

Let's just say that their child had a physical disability, that they're not doing what they should be doing physically.

Then they might refer out to physical therapy or home health.

A therapist may come into a home.

Or they can be referred to early intervention, which is a free program in the state as long as they're under the age of three.

Again, if they're older than that, then they would probably go the more traditional route of going through individual therapies, depending on their disability.

But if they're under three, the best route would be to go the early intervention route.