To be a mom is to be alert. At. All. Times. You always have to watch out for imminent dangers, foster a safe environment and be your child’s number one advocate. 👍🏾

Whether it’s at school, the doctor’s office or the store, parents have the final say. I trust my instinct first—even if it goes against an “expert”—because discernment is real and hasn’t let me down yet.

If I would have just went with the flow of what others suggested for me, my firstborn would be bored out of his mind in kindergarten (we jumped through hoops to skip him up a grade), that same son would be unnecessarily medicated (I corrected a doctor’s prescription on two separate occasions), and my second born would be classified as having a speech delay.

Speech delay? How, Sway? Here’s how.

During a routine visit to the pediatrician, my husband filled out a developmental questionnaire for our second son, Micah, who was about to turn 2 years old. Based on his answers, the doctor suggested that we call an early childhood intervention center to possibly get him into speech therapy.

I mean, yes, Micah didn’t talk as much as his older brother, but his brother is the ultimate chatterbox with the biggest imagination. In fact, big brother Jayden would often come crying to me saying that Micah called him a name (as Micah would blankly stare back only knowing how to say “Hi!”)

Micah may have not talked a lot, but he understood everything we said. Plus, we didn’t know the “normal” speech level for a 2-year-old because Jayden was talking at 9 months, and that was all we knew. 🤷🏾‍♀️

So we entertained the idea of an evaluation. Anything to get my guy on track, right?

I called the center and scheduled a time for them to evaluate Micah at my home. Weeks later, the center’s coordinator and a speech therapist pulled up to my house.

We exchanged pleasantries, I voiced the concerns of the pediatrician, and the diagnostic play session began.

“Micah, do you want to play with this toy? Can you jump for me? What sound does a cow make? Put the blocks in the hole. Blow mommy a kiss!”

As each activity concluded, I became less comfortable with the process.

Please note that I didn’t say I was uncomfortable with any of the ladies—just the process.

First of all, my kids don’t take to strangers. How in the world do you think that he’ll open up to show you what he knows after five minutes?

He was getting things wrong that I knew he knew how to do. However, since a stranger was telling him to do it, he was looking at me like, “Mama, who dis?”

Simple things like hopping or blowing a kiss or saying his name were not happening because (1) he was confused as to why he was having to do it and (2) he’s a bit on the stubborn side, so if he feels forced to do something, he’ll lose interest in doing it.

Micah continued playing, and I continued to go with the flow and observe. But then I discovered another unusual activity that set him up for failure.

“This is papa’s girl and this is papa’s boy. Where’s papa’s girl? Point to papa’s girl.”

I even had to look up on that one. What are you talking about? I get that the speech therapist was trying to have Micah recall objects that were just identified to him, but there was a bit of a vocabulary discrepancy here.

We don’t say papa. What’s a papa? Is this what people are referring to when they say that standardized tests have cultural biases? Because I for sure knew that we don’t talk like that.

And if we don’t talk like that, how could we expect Micah to know it?

That, mixed with some other preconceived notions that I feel they had about him, caused me to wrap up and the evaluation, thank them for their time, and proceed to take matters into my own hands.

They claimed he was about six months behind on his speech development and recommended that we pay about $400 a month to see another stranger once a week for a one-hour session.

Oh, okay. Alexa, play “I’m Every Woman” because I’m about to morph in Hope, CCC-SLP.

I pulled out some flashcards that we previously used with Jayden, and we started going to town on letters and their corresponding words. My mom, who watches him during the day, used the flashcards with him too.

I kid you not—within a month, this boy had gone leaps and bounds from where we was. He’s talking much more. He can identify all of his letters, tell you the words the letter starts with, count to 12, say his name, and say his age.

Most importantly, he has a new confidence about speaking; and he’s excited to learn new words and repeat them to me.

The moral of the story is that I’m basically a self-made speech-language pathologist. HA! Just kidding. The real lesson I learned is that I failed him.

It’s hard to see that in writing, but I did. To make myself feel better, I’ll say “we” so that my husband can get in on this guilt as well.

We didn’t stay on top of him to learn the ABC’s and 123’s like we did his older brother. We allowed his more observant personality to dictate when active learning should begin instead of exposing it to him at an earlier age.

Our bad.

But he’s good now. His speech improves by the day, and his sentences are getting longer.

Please don’t take this as an excuse not to seek early intervention for your child if you feel there’s a problem. I’m not knocking the program. I just know what my discernment was telling me.

Sometimes you have to trust yourself and be your child’s biggest advocate—even when the “experts” are saying otherwise.

Oh, I have some tales to tell about other times “experts” looked me dead in the face and gave me a wrong recommendation or diagnosis, but I’ll save that for another time…

The podcast detailing this visit is now up! It even features my little shining star. View it here.