A Review Of My Child Wasn T Born Perfect

Imagine being in a high school cafeteria and not knowing why no one is sitting with you. You arrived exactly at the time lunch started, sat down at a free table, waited, yet no one came. Imagine that no one wants to be your partner for a group project. Everyone has to be in a group, you have a reputation for doing flawless school work, yet everyone seems to pair up without you. Imagine this happening every single day from 1st grade to junior year of high school. This was JD Mocini’s life.

For my free choice book project, I read, My Child Wasn’t Born Perfect by Kimberly Bell Mocini. This nonfiction book was written by a mother-son duo, explaining the hardships of being different. Right from birth, the Mocini family knew their son was

The first 60 pages are dedicated to describing the positive impacts speech therapy has made in JD’s life. I have never read something so complimentary of this profession and the people in it. These sections of the book provided me a new insight to the role of a speech pathologist in a school. I have been taught that speech pathologists play a role in IEP meetings, but I wasn’t too sure exactly how large of a role that was. JD’s speech pathologists saw him during the school day for therapy, but were additionally responsible for educating all of his teachers about different accommodations that were needed for him to succeed. Group projects were a reoccurring difficulty in JD’s life. His mother and the speech pathologist made the entire school faculty aware of how damaging it can be to a child’s self-esteem to be left out of a group. I had never thought of this before. JD’s story made me aware that leaving students responsible for forming their own groups has the potential to do more harm than good. Moving forward, I will be more conscious about assigning partners for activities in my graduate and professional

It made me both smile and cry and I went on the journey of JD’s life throughout the book. Though parts of bullying were difficult to read about, important lessons about advocating and self-acceptance came out of the hard experiences. I had the pleasure of meeting Mrs. Mocini when I purchased this book. Since being published, JD has graduated high school, met a girlfriend, and is employed fulltime by a computer software company. She emphasized that none of this would have been possible without a team of speech pathologists and family. On her end since being published, she has formed many support groups for other families in the area who are going though similar situations. At the end of every chapter in this book, she wrote different bullet points of advice that she would have wanted to know at the time. This book left me with a few take away points. Professionally, as I have written above, I learned more about a future role I can play in a school and different ways to be successful in that role. I gained a new set of eyes for looking at an elementary school. It is easy to assume that all children are nice because they are young, but sadly, bullies are everywhere. I also gained new perspective for day to day life. Just because someone is not outwardly struggling, does not mean that a struggle is not there. JD often sunk back into the shadows at school because he did not know how to express himself. I was