by Ayanna Black
I recently felt like I was back in school preparing to take my final exam to get into kindergarten. The triplets are now at the age where it’s time to start thinking about preschool and I’m totally stressed about it.
It’s not the anxiety of letting them go but the pressure I was getting for them to perform. Because the triplets were very premature, they go through an early intervention program to ensure that there are no development delays due to the prematurity.
At their one year follow up it was suggested that they receive some of the early intervention services because an evaluator felt they were behind. So my husband and I signed them up. I was so excited about the next evaluation because they’d learned so much and displayed tremendous progression.
However, I was sadly disappointed when I sat down with the evaluator. The evaluator still stated they were way behind due to their response to her. After going on to explain that my children knew all the things she tested them on because we work on it every day, she was still not convinced based on the test she took. After leaving the meeting I was a little stressed.
My mind started to wonder to other kids the triplets age and if they were doing some of the same things or more. After I thought about it more I realized that this test really didn’t mean much. This was the first time the triplets had seen this person and they needed time to warm up to her. I can only imagine the amount of pressure my children were feeling when going through the evaluation.
Are any of these factor taken into account when testing is in progress? Is it really effective to test a child and grade them based on 15 minutes of interaction? There is plenty of prep time put in to test but because there is so much emphasis to perform well on a test, are our children stressed out or intimidated because they feel they have to do well? I couldn’t help but wonder if this system was set up to fail children.
Have you found that your child is very bright and intelligent but a test says differently? Do you think these test accurately display who your child is?
Ayanna is a married mom of busy triplets in Chicago. She’s a freelance parenting/marriage and technology blogger. Ayanna is also the proud owner of ABlackWebDesign.com and MommyMultiple.com