Best early intervention therapies for intellectual disability?

[isisreturning]

My DD was treated for brain cancer at age 6 months. She has many side effects as a consequence of treatment: bilateral moderate - to - severe hearing loss (caused by chemo; she wears hearing aids), severe receptive and expressive language delays, minor gross motor delays, and serious delays in social/emotional functioning and self-care/safety/adaptive behaviors.

We are awaiting results from neuropysch assessments / ped neurologist appts we had last week, but we suspect that she has an intellectual disability (aka cognitive disability/mental retardation). We don't know how severe. It was likely caused by the tumor itself and/or the radiation to that part of her brain.

She is 3 yo now and I am eager to get her connected to the best intensive therapies to support maximal learning, language development and social/emotional/self-care adaptive functioning. She will be going to developmental preschool four mornings a week through the school district starting this Fall, but I imagine she will need additional support beyond that.

I don't know what I'm doing and I feel panicked. I suspect that she will be able to make wonderful progress and gain many important life skills with good and early intervention, but I don't know what those should be. Internet searches of "intellectual disability" lead me to sites about adults and/or autism spectrum disorders, so I'm having a hard time identifying the latest and greatest thinking that would apply to my DD's issues.

What are your recommendations? I need help!

[34me]

Make connections with other parents. I work in Adapted Recreation and I find other parents are the best resource.

[sbgrace]

Brain Gym or similar programs might be really good. You might also look into (especially as she ages) interventions for specific areas affecting. I.e. if working memory is affected you do interventions that target working memory, if visual/spatial reasoning you do things that work in that area, if auditory processing you work with intervention specific to that etc. But I think that's going to be hard to narrow down right now and brain gym is (I think, we've not done it) far reaching.

The most important thing is that the brain can heal and continue to change and progress. This is true of everyone and especially kids.

For Social/emotional Relationship Development Intervention (RDI) is really great. It's presently being used successfully for a wide variety of areas beyond autism--including ADHD, bipolar, Schizophrenia, and on so I think it's appropriate and helpful for kids with a wide variety of dx's related to brain functioning differences. Floortime is good (and can be done on your own without a professional so cheapl) if there are social issues that are autism like. OT is good for self care and adaptive as would a behavioral type approach (behavioral approaches are typically the most pricey of all I've mentioned but you could learn and take from the approach on your own to target specific adaptive or self help goals and I think that's the best way to use that approach anyway.

[askew]

We belong to NACD and absolutely love them and their approach. They are called neurodevelopmental programs. They assess your child every three months and give you a program you do at home in the time you tell them you have to give. Ours takes about 2-3 hours a day but we don't always get it all done. The tasks are short, like 1-2 minutes but repeated often. My child has a brain injury and a chromosome deletion both of which set her up for potential ID. I can't even begin to tell you how much it makes me feel like I am making a huge contribution to her success in life. I also find the program pretty fun to do. www.nacd.org

[PikkuMyy]

It will really depend as she gets older and you see what her specific strengths and challenges are, but I'm also a big fan of RDI for social/emotional, and communication development. You can get books about it and learn to do the activities yourself so you don't have to pay for it, but you can also take some training courses if you want.

Floortime is also really good and easy to learn to do through reading/watching videos.

[isisreturning]

Thanks everyone for your suggestions, I will check into those ideas. - Isis