Feb 14 2008
To Label or Not to Label
I realized that I forgot to link to a post that I had up at Life Without School back in December, called To Label or Not to Label.
One of the issues that I have seen many homeschoolers wrestle with (and have wrestled with myself) is when and if you should have your child evaluated. How do you know if the problem that your child is having is a “real issue” or if it is just that he follows a different, normal-for-him development timetable? I know that I worried about having my child “labeled”, yet I also worried about “missing” something important.
This is an issue that many homeschoolers wrestle with. One of the benefits of homeschooling is that we do not have to depend on the “experts” to tell us what our child needs. But sometimes it helps to get an outside opinion. The trick is trusting and educating yourself enough to know which is which.
When my older child was diagnosed with learning differences and such, she was in school, so we had strong legal reasons for seeking the label. If we had been home schooling at the time, I probably would have followed a much different path. It’s a complicated question. Great post!
Steph is right. Labels are useful in schools. Unless you feel like nothing is working or you feel a need to know why things are working the way they are, I don’t think a label is very useful.
BTW, I tagged you awhile back as an Excellent Blogger and completely forgot to tell you!
Rated E for Excellent
Stephanie- this is a great article for me to read as it is very relevant for our family this year. I agree that labels are mostly only helpful in an institutional school setting when parents are trying to secure specific services for their children. However, they still have severe limits within those systems, especially with twice exceptional kids. I also think that, at least for me, a lot of my struggles with labels and my own children are actually mostly residual baggage from my own experiences as a labeled child in an institutional school system.
OT: It must be tag Throwing Marshmallows and forget to tell her month, because I did the same thing! http://muddlehood.homeschooljournal.net/2008/02/06/wishful-thinking/