Way back in January, my colleague Tana over at the LDS Adoption Blog put up an excellent three-part post on the importance of early developmental assessments for adopted children. I bookmarked it when she put it up and kept meaning to get back to it.

Tana lays out in great detail how a good assessment should work, and I wished I had had this information before I embarked on my efforts to have my older child evaluated seven years ago.

Early intervention programs were mandated by Congress in 1986, and general oversight now belongs to the U.S. Department of Education.

When I brought home my older son, adopted at 18 months, I was still living in New York state, which has a fairly robust early intervention program. After consulting with my then pediatrician, who had practiced medicine in Russia before emigrating to the United States (talk about lucky finds!), I opted not to pursue a motor skills assessment. My older son was, and is, at the lower end of the growth curve, but highly agile--you should see how he scales a rock wall now.

But the verbal intervention proved one of those exercises in the Kafkaesque that frequently happens to adoptive parents. My son's language skills had to first be assessed by a Russian-speaking social worker. So we rode 45 minutes on the subway to Brighton Beach, a neighborhood that was revived by Russian émigrés. The woman opened a book and asked my son to point to the sabaka (dog). No reaction from my son, so she asks again, and again. Finally, I said to her, in English, "You know he has been living in an orphanage, don’t you? I doubt he has ever seen a dog or heard the word." The rest of the assessment followed that pattern.

Six months passed before we were assigned a speech therapist, and by then, my son's speech was on par with other kids his age. He hit every two-year-old speech milestone, just as if he had always been living here. I wound up saying, thanks but no thanks to the whole program.

The odd thing is, my friends who have adopted from China have had nothing but positive experiences with New York's early intervention program. My friend Lauren still raves about the physical therapy intervention her daughter received. So maybe it was just the Russia team.

I adopted my younger son after moving out of New York, and intervention in our new locale has proved a whole different ball of wax. More about that later…