Hi, Parents:
Tonight was the parent dinner for both groups, and it was reasonably well-attended. We had four parents from the kids’ group and five parents from the teenage group. During the evening, I showed videos of both the kids’ group and the teenage group as to what has been happening throughout the year, and also shared a project that I have been working on with the kids that involves “the best thing that happened to me in the past year was …” We talked about language and how we work in the group with kids on the effectiveness of their verbal communications, and being able to use language as a socialization mechanism.
Additionally, we talked about the role of executive functioning. Parents heard how many of their kids kind of got the instructions wrong, and sometimes had difficulty making their point clearly and succinctly. I reviewed how I work with the kids to have their conversations with a proper amount of detail, rather than excessive degrees that act like a prepositional phrase that goes on and on. Parents remained interested. Their were quite a few questions in general about overall diagnoses, and we talked about those in terms of the functional behaviors that they represent.
Parents asked about the summer group program, and we will be doing our end-of-group surveys in April, with a follow up to occur in June. Overall, as the parent meetings go, it went smoothly. Perhaps the only exception was that, in the buzz of conversation, we sort of forgot to order dinner, and the server didn’t take our orders until 6:45 p.m. The meeting broke up a little bit after 7:30, and parents could still be seen engaged in conversation fifteen minutes later in the parking lot.
We have group later this month, and then our last parent meeting, in the office, come this May.
