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Honestly, sometimes I think there's a vast conspiracy of health-care-related sub-specialists out there whose sole aim is to discover what my husband and I have done to fuck up our children. Group speech therapy is not the first time we've gone down the childhood-imperfection disorders road, no ma'am.

There was the little dance we did with a couple of developmental psychologists the year that Sam was in first grade and his teacher, among other people, noticed that his bottom never actually touched the chair. Sam's now-ex-pediatrician told me that Sam had a hot-zinger case of attention deficit disorder and would be on Ritalin "for the rest of his life." (To date, the kid's never taken anything stronger than children's Tylenol.)

Then there was the educational testing to which we subjected our daughter, when another bright bulb in the education racket informed us that she apparently processed information in a disjointed way typical of children with learning disorders. So off we shlepped to the neuropsychologist for a battery of tests, only to be told, among other things, that Rose "has difficulty attending to a task unless it is something she is interested in," and showed no "evidence of hallucinations, delusions or disordered thinking." Duh.

But group speech therapy at least addresses something real. And OK, so maybe the head honcho at the clinic did sit me down on the first day of group speech therapy and ask me, in a very gentle, non-threatening voice, if I thought that just maybe there might be something in Sam's history or perhaps in our family's past that just might account for what she called his "verbal intensity." You mean in addition to the regular beatings his father gives him? Just kidding. "The cords on his neck stand out whenever he speaks," she said, "indicating extreme tension and anxiety." Gee, now you tell me.

The kid's loud, OK? That's why we're in group speech therapy to begin with. Or, in the words of the report: "Therapy should focus on the reduction of high-intensity talking, yelling and screaming. Also, Sam should begin to develop self-monitoring skills with respect to vocal intensity, particularly while interacting with his siblings. Inclusion of his brother and sister in the therapy sessions will facilitate transfer of these self-monitoring skills to the home environment."

This is how it works: The kids go into a room together with their speech therapist and ascribe numerical values -- "1" for whisper all the way through "5" for screaming -- to each other's tone of voice. When they come out, they're covered with stickers.

The real fun begins the rest of the time -- the approximately way-too-many hours a week when they're neither in group speech therapy nor at school, but at home, torturing each other. It is during these hours that I am supposed to track their vocal behaviors daily, rating them by frequency and logging them onto a little graph. Among the behaviors that I am supposed to track:

• Vocalizing under muscular tension
• Talking for an extended period of time
• Using the across-the-room voice
• Laughing hard
• Arguing with siblings
• Calling others from a distance
• Vocalizing toy, animal or other non-linguistic sounds

Oh yeah, and I'm also supposed to graph the underlying quality of each of my children's three voices.

The problem with this little task, as I told the therapist, is that it might be kind of hard for me to track these and other behaviors when I am simultaneously helping my three kids get their three different homework assignments done, doing the laundry, trying to get dinner on the table, having a little telephone tiff with my husband and battling my own daily ontological meltdown. Not to mention that the whole thing is stupid. What kid doesn't make farting or pig noises, at least on occasion?

"You really must try," she said. So I came up with an alternate solution, involving the age-old method of threats combined with bribes. When my kids really turn up the volume, I threaten them with any number of punishments, including missing dessert for up to a week; but when they speak in reasonably quiet voices, they get a star on the star chart that I create weekly and tack on the fridge. If they get a total of five and a half stars a week, I take them to McDonald's to pick up the high-fat, high-cholesterol, high-hormone kids meal of their choice, and on the way back home, I eat their french fries.

When I told the speech therapist about the alternative graph I had constructed, she didn't seem impressed. But to date the kids and I have earned enough stars to collect enough little plastic figurines based on characters in movies we haven't seen to open our own toy store.

Now, that's what I call a happy ending.
salon.com | Nov. 2, 1999

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