defensive parents

I recently helped out at a torticollis clinic with my supervisor, in which about 9 parents came to find out information about the condition, the presentation, advice and management. During this session I was asked to go around the room and help parents assess their childrens' range, direction of preference and presence of head tilt. One mother that I tried to help had come with her 4 month old twins and was assessing them both with her mother. I started trying to help her with one of the babies, the one that seemed to have more of a preference for looking in a particular direction. During this assessment the mother started to become quite defensive, suggesting excuses for why her baby did not look as far in one direction. I went on to explain that this was an issue when tryingto assess a baby as we can not always get them to do what we want an dsuggested that she try doing another assessment while at home wherer the baby may not be quite as distracted. But regardless after assessing the baby for a short time I considered our findings to most likely be accurate. Again when I asked the mother if she felt her child had a head tilt, she said no even though throughout the assessment I had considered that he had. I tried to point this mild tilt out to the mother, explaining what I was seeing but again she become defensive. At this point I felt that I was getting no where with the mother as sh seemed to be taking everything I was saying as critisism rather than advice therefore I backed off for abit to thinik about what I could do.

Eventually I went to help the mother again, this time trying to explain the common presentations of torticollis and why it was all happening and rather than I guess "preaching" to the mother my thoughts onn her childrens presentation, I instead asked for her thoughts and guided her with her observations. I guess I learnt from this situation that although something might be quite obvious to us as trained professionals, that doesnt not mean that parents and patients will find it so obvious. As a result we need to be very careful with how we present our findings to patients and the advice that we accompany this with. It can be very scary to a parent to be hearing that their is something different about their baby especially when they dont understand the consequences of the findings. It is therefore important to explain not only what you have found but why, the severity and what that means for the child. Anyone with similar situations, comments, suggestions?