In the early years of my involvement in child development, I was not sensitive about the physical ambience to be made child friendly when we invite children and families for consultation. A child needs that provision for his or her attention to be drawn by sounds, sights and movements.
A toy shelf was added to the room which made a signifiant difference in observing the cognitive, behavioural and communication levels of children.
I recall how a child friendly ambience provided information about children beyond what parents could describe.
From this stage, we moved on by requesting parents to upload short videos of children taken during solitary and group play, when they request for a consultation, which helped us to prepare ourselves to be ready to make further observations by providing an environment in the consultation room, which would make the child explore and interact.
It was from this experience, we turned to video consultation for parents who had difficulties to travel. We uploaded video tutorials for parents to take the anthropometry and screen for vision, hearing and language ability. We used protocols to get information on sleep, diet and play.
When I retired three years ago, this form of video based consultations were available for parents located in other countries, provided they came at least once for a physical consultation.
Let me confess, it look a while to move to this path and provide a support system for parents that was easier for them to respond to!
I have conversations with Paediatricians on the video platform now, which has evolved into a dependable communication portal for discussion on child development and rehabilitation!
Let me confess, that parents had to persuade me to shift from insisting on physical consultation to video-based conversations as much as possible. Thank you parents.
M.C.Mathew(text and photo)
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