Defining Goals

When I met with the speech pathologist who completed Katie's first speech-language evaluation to discuss her results, I was asked, given her rather lack-luster performance, to describe my goals for Katie. Although I had requested the evaluation in an effort to confirm what I already suspected, the document which carefully quantified Katie's deficits into age level comparisons and standard deviations from the norm did nothing to mitigate the emotional effect of being told "yes you were right. There is something wrong with your daughter." I didn't want to be right.

What were my goals for Katie? I tried to think and to ignore the lump in my throat. Nothing happened. Then I heard myself saying "I don't know enough to imagine what Katie will be capable of in the future. I just want to be able to talk to her." That statement, properly clarified, still does a pretty good job of describing our goals for Katie.

Keep in mind that, at the time, I had never heard of Asperger's Syndrome, HFA, ABA, DIR, Stanley Greenspan, sensory integration or any of the other buzz words, which we've all picked up since then. I had heard the term hyperlexia for the first time one week prior, but had no idea of its relation to autism. No one in my emotional state could have lied so spontaneously, so I must have been speaking the truth. What, then, did I actually say?

When I said I just wanted to talk to her, I meant that I wanted to have a real relationship with my daughter. Katie could certainly speak, but the words and phrases were not her own. All of them were memorized from books or video tapes and their usefulness was limited. She would pull out and repeat whichever script best approximated what she wanted to say. She could sometimes change a word or two to increase its accuracy, but the sentence structure was set in stone. Questions she simply repeated verbatim.

I also said I didn't know how to predict Katie's future capabilities, a statement which is as true today as it ever was. If you ask the parents of a typical child what their goals are, how likely is it that they will respond "We expect our child to be able to solve a set of 20 differential equations with an 85% rate of accuracy by the time he turns twenty-one."? Not very. Those parents will not interpret the term "goal" as an implied endpoint, nor will they create a list of skills or observable behaviors. They will probably describe what kind of person they hope their child will become, using words like honest, loving, responsible, happy. Why shouldn't we?

The primary goal of intervention is to enable children to form a sense of their own personhood.

Stanley I. Greenspan

Next, Necessary Elements - the nuts and bolts of our intervention program.