What is a Paediatric Neuropsychologist?

A Paediatric Neuropsychologist is someone who has undergone extensive training in understanding the relationship between the brain and behavior in children and young adults.  Most first train as a Clinical Psychologist and then participate in further courses, examinations and supervised practice.  The great thing about this is that the Paediatric Neuropsychologist that you see will have a really good understanding of your strengths and learning needs – the relationship between behaviour and its likely underlying neurological causes.  This is key to ensuring that the evaluation that you experience is of the highest standard possible and that the best evidence based treatment interventions or educational supports are put in place. 

My child’s reading has been assessed at school.  Does this tell me that we only need to work on increasing their time spent reading by getting a tutor?

Yes, we know that the more a child is exposed to the alphabet through reading, the better it is for school performance, particularly spelling.  However, there are times where an individual’s difficulty with reading is caused by a lower level difficulty, e.g. attention, memory, language.  If we do not know what the underlying difficulty is, it can be hard to support or provide interventions that will lead to improvement.