One of the most frequent questions that Rob and I are asked is simply, “how did you know that something was ‘wrong’ with Fiver?”

It’s a loaded question, and one that I have answered a thousand times in my mind.  On one level, a large part of me wants to answer in a way that shows how knowledgeable we are about our son; a way that shows how desperately we love him.  I want to say that we knew right away and we were quick to act on what we thought was different about him.

But the truth is that his diagnosis has been an evolution; it has truly taken his whole life for us to get to a point where we feel like we know whe
re his trouble lies and how to help him.  And to be completely honest, there are days when I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface of what needs to be done.

I have said before that SPD is the umbrella term for the disorder, but, more specifically, Fiver has Sensory Based Motor Disorder. Although he displays some of the other classic symptom clusters of SPD, his most severe difficulties lie with stabilizing, planning, and performing series of movements.  He has dyspraxia and postural disorder.

Dyspraxia . . . is a neurologically based disorder of the processes involved in praxis or the planning of movement to achieve a . . . purpose, which may affect the acquisition of new skills and the execution of those already learned. More specifically, it is a disorder of the process of forming an idea of using a known movement to achieve a planned purpose, planning the action needed to achieve the idea, and carrying out the planned movement.

Dyspraxia can manifest as:

• gross motor dysfunction (large movements)
• fine motor dysfunction (small movements of the fingers and hands)
• oral-motor dysfunction (movements of the mouth)
• a combination of any of these, with any one area dominating