My son is 2-1/2, and he doesn’t talk. Well, he says a few words. And now and then, he’ll do something odd like pull back the shades and ask, “Did it snow?” He understands everything. He plays well with his brother. He has mastered both the Mac and PC. He uses sign language. He just doesn’t talk.
At the suggestion of some readers, I read Thomas Sowell’s books: The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late and Late-Talking Children. I understand that many disagree with his conclusions, though I’m not sure why. I’m new to this literature. I’ll present his ideas, and I’ll let the debate rage on in the comment section. (I would prefer if commenters did not discuss my kid. Thanks.)
Sowell is an economist who got involved in this topic after writing a column about his son, who was a late talker, but gifted in math and computers. Many wrote to him with similar experiences with their own children. Sowell maintains that many individuals who are unusually gifted in math and music, don’t learn to speak until relatively late. Perhaps their brains function differently. These left brainers are also slow to potty train, are loners, and are generally pains in the asses.
All these children learn to speak eventually, but they and their parents are unfairly stressed out and demoralized by a system that does not know how to deal with different kids and that is hung up by labels.
Our educational system is set up to deal with a “normal” child. Those who don’t sit in circle group or obey commands are labeled. Those with disabilities and those who are gifted equally suffer under this rigid system.
So-called experts put these non-conforming children through an unreasonable battery of tests, especially for their age. Those who refuse to comply may be assumed to be unable to comply. Oddball cases are pigeonholed into categories that are inappropriate. These experts are, in many cases, not even qualified to make such assessments. Some stand to gain financially by applying such labels.
The treatments imposed on misdiagnosed children may do more harm than good. Forcing a child to speak before they are able may do lasting harm on their self-esteem. Sowell recognizes that some children with disabilities are well served by early intervention, but it doesn’t follow that this is the right road for everyone.
I enjoyed Sowell’s book not because it validates every mother’s fantasy that her child is the next Einstein. But because it points at flaws that I’ve seen in the system after only four months of involvement.
Ian’s speech therapy seems to be making little progress. He has gotten more used to people trying to make him talk; there are less screams. He has strengthened his mouth muscles, so when he is able to talk, it will be easier for him. But he hasn’t said any new words. I just don’t think he’s ready for it yet.
His therapist stresses us out. He’s strapped in a high chair for 50 minutes where he is forced to do puzzles that are too easy for him. After every session, she writes up his progress. The daily report card is a record of his poor progress. She urged us to increase his therapy. But that would involve more testing and one less social activity per week. No, he is only two and he has to have fun also. I refused.
Because the state will stop funding his therapy in April, the town must now assume responsibility. I went to the school last week, where a five member panel reviewed his case and struggled for two hours to find a label for him. “He understands everything and plays well with others. No, not on the spectrum. He isn’t a messy eater. Not apraxia. He knows his ABCs. Not mental retardation. Maybe it’s selective mutism.” Uh, no.
Now we’re looking forward to another battery of tests. We also have to endure a visit by social worker who is going to make sure that we’re not beating him. Ian, I’m sorry.
Sowell thinks the best thing he did for his son was to spend lots of time with him. His son received therapy by a highly trained professional, but the boy made the most progress when he was just with his dad playing around with a tape machine. I like him for that.
We’ve become too obsessed with development milestones. We’ve become too obsessed with engineering the perfect kids and patching up defects with therapy. Some defects might work themselves out with age. Some defects are fine and even interesting, like the mole on Cindy Crawford’s cheek. Maybe some defects are part of the cost for having a surplus of talent in other areas.
Sowell offers a much needed questioning of the therapy culture. He doesn’t discount therapy entirely, but he prescribes a dose of common sense, which is what our oddball kids need most.
Apt. 11d 
Growing out of speech therapy
Laura at 11D has a review of Thomas Sowell’s books The Einstein Syndrome: Bright Children Who Talk Late and Late-Talking Children. I read those books a couple years ago when we were dealing with Anna’s speech issues. Here’s Laura’s summary
LikeLike
D also was a late speaker, with less than 100 words at 33 months, and most of those monosyllables that only my husband and I could interpret. (He had no formal signs, but did a decent job of communicating through grunts and pointing.)
He qualified for speech therapy through the school system, and I don’t know whether it was the therapy or just the right time on his unique developmental calendar, but his language skills totally took off over the past year. I’m quite confident that the speech therapy did him no harm — but D enjoyed it, as he saw it as just another person to play games with who gave him lots of attention. I don’t know if I’d have persisted with the therapy if it was something that was making him miserable.
Good luck.
LikeLike
I hear you when you talk about our society being obsessed with milestones. We’re getting this three-fold: the US milestones, the German milestones (I’m German) and the Romanian milestones (we’re expats in Bucharest). Just the fact that these milestones are quite different indicates that many of these milestones are actually society-based and not generally valid.
One example: Yesterday, my mother-in-law asked whether my son A has learned to read yet. I was a bit taken aback — he’s not yet three years old. In Germany, kids generally don’t learn to read before they go to school at age 6+. A’s state-side cousin, who is three weeks younger, apparently recognizes all the letters. Is he behind and a slow learner? Does he have dyslexia? Or is he just a normal, albeit German, kid?
I do agree with you about the labelling problem – the category “normal” seems to shrink quite a bit these days. One additional thought, though: It seems very en vogue lately to have gifted children – and I’m not so sure this goes along with an actual higher occurance of gifted children. Are our kids just not allowed problems without having to make up for it in other areas? What do I do if my kid just has a problem, period?
[Not denying that there are gifted children, and that some problems might be comparative costs for a talent in another area. This does happen, I’m just questioning whether it really happens all that often.]
“[H]e is only two and he has to have fun also. I refused.” Bully for you, Laura. I will keep this in mind and try not to stress over my child who doesn’t sit still in circle time and can’t be bothered to put a puzzle together. Thanks for rightening my world today — I go now and have fun with my kid.
LikeLike
I play tennis with a guy who has told me a couple of times about how he was four and a half before he said anything besides grunting, and then suddenly started speaking in complete sentences with a large vocabulary. (Obviously he doesn’t remember personally the grunting part, but he does say that he actually remembers the day he said his first sentence–it was in the middle of a dinner party and it was something insulting about one of the guests….)
I think you’re right not to bow to the authority of milestones and development schedules and most of all, the unholy interface of therapeutic expertise and the state, which creates a pressure for formal diagnosis, structured treatment, the naming of things. You don’t want to go the opposite extreme, to sort of instinctive rejectionism, but the whole thing is a system, and it will systematize anything that enters its view, whether that’s therapeutically good or not.
LikeLike
My three-year-old twins were not talking in any appreciable way last summer, when they were 2 1/2. I mean, they were saying words and some phrases but not so people outside the family noticed. Now they are talkers, singers, chit-chatterers, the whole bit. I didn’t have time to notice they weren’t talking and get upset about it, I guess; I never complained or sought help. Occasionally I would see kids who were younger who spoke more and get concerned, but I’m glad I didn’t have time to think about it, because it turns out I had little reason to be concerned.
People say twins talk later–but why? Because they get less attention? Certainly my twins got less attention than my older daughter did. Because there’s too much noise in the house? Because they don’t have to–their parents aren’t expecting them to, they’re too busy coping? I don’t know. But I don’t think it ultimately makes a difference. Earlier does not mean better. My older daughter could sing the ABC song before two; but just because she did that earlier, does not mean that she was cognitively more aware at three than the twins are now.
Interestingly, my oldest daughter also could make the appropriate face for all the emotions words before 2, but she still to this day has trouble knowing what emotion she is feeling at a given moment and describing it in words, which is my fault because I am the same way. But one of the twins is crystal clear about her emotions, and with a more limited vocabulary was able to communicate quite effectively even last year. No, I’m not angry, I’m sad. Or, I’m angry. Or, Don’t be mad. Very precise. There are different depths of knowledge, and it seems possible to have the concepts for some things while having a limited vocabulary for them, or conversely to have a large vocabulary but a more limited set of concepts or at least less precision of thinking. My oldest daughter could also read before kindegarten, having taught herself with Clifford Reading Games and other computer games (done completely on her own for fun–absolutely no push from me), which astonished and excited me, but on the other hand she had little comprehension and in a way it was more like a trick; now she is learning comprehension. She also doesn’t seem to much like reading, which I hope changes, because I know so much of accomplishment comes from inclination; I think we over-estimate the role of intelligence and ability and under-estimate the role of will, inclination, and interest. Perhaps sometimes children just don’t want to talk, or are focusing their attention on developing in other areas.
LikeLike
I was the opposite side of the spectrum, early on (the first what we would now call pyschoeducational evaluation) I had was in 1st or 2nd grade. In sixth grade another one with some informal interventions in between. Basically, teachers were noticing gaps between ability and performance. (Thank God ADD wasn’t around yet as a formal diagnosis!) A lot of this focussed around my poor handwriting and inability to copy things correctly off the board or line up math problems into their proper columns, plus being the smallest kid in the class. One teacher decided my hand muscles were undeveloped so I spent half of third grade squeezing a piece of clay when I wasn’t doing anything else with my right hand. Didn’t help. In sixth grade, the tester suggested I needed therapy because I had grandiose ideas (I wanted to be President of the US), both teacher and mom vetoed that. In eighth grade it was writing on a chalkboard at home to practice letters. Ninth grade I learned to type, that helped a lot. But, starting in 7th grade my academic performance started declining. I got kicked out of advanced science class (bio) for not completing labs (I had an A average on tests). In tenth grade, another round of testing led nowhere until I saw a vision specialist. AHA! It turned out I was not using both eyes at the same time. I would use one and then the other. It explained a lot of things, especially why I was constantly tired and thus doing worse in school and why I got head in the head with moving objects a lot. One year of vision therapy later and a pair of glasses and academic success (and a driver’s liscense, no way do I pass the test using one eye at a time) followed.
Which is not to say there were not bumps along the way, I got labelled LD which made me eligible for “resource room” where I was supposed to get extra help from a learning specialist. I liked the idea of this and gave up lunch periods to do it. However, since she didn’t know trig, she couldn’t help me with math (visualizing spatial relationships was nigh impossible, since I couldn’t understand spatial relationships in real life) so she made me do vocabulary worksheets, ignoring my protests about already reading at the college level. To get unlabelled was significantly more difficult but still doable.
Moral? Not sure, but I used to carpool to vision therapy with two other kids, both of whom dropped it eventually and both did not experience improved academic performance. But unlike me, they were not willing participants, to them it was just more icky school.
Now we are supposed to go to get my 2 year old daughter evaluated for speech therapy due to issues related to very a mild form of cleft palatte. Is she is recommended for therapy and likes it, fine. But if she hates it? Don’t know.
LikeLike
Me to husband, then:
“When’s she gonna talk? When’s she gonna talk?”
6 years later:
“When’s she gonna SHUT UP?!”
LikeLike
Have not much to add, except that as a babysitting teen, I remember a few kids who simply didn’t talk much at all; they listened, they understood, they followed directions as much as any kid does, but they just didn’t talk much at all. Their parents said they were “shy” and nobody (except maybe their schools, I guess) made much of it. And they all became normal talkers eventually.
I haven’t read the books you’ve mentioned; does the author set an age past which he thinks not talking *is* a problem? 2 1/2 seems young to be a huge problem; I’ve known 6 year olds who barely said two words in a day.
anecdote: as a kid, I distinctly remember struggling to learn to write my own name; I could read ok for my age (4 or 5) but for some reason I was intimidated by writing. I *didn’t want* to do it. I was scared to try. My sister patiently helped me and encouraged me to just write my own name, and I cried and fought her on it, but then I did it. And I remember my feeling of amazement that it was so easy. I was a bright kid–why was it so hard for me? But I was also a really sensitive kid (the crier of the family), and I think I was just easily stressed and overwhelmed by milestones or anything new. I wonder if kids who hesitate to talk aren’t just feeling something similar, overwhelmed by the intensity of learning to communicate.
LikeLike
We’re going through the same thing with an almost-four-year-old boy. His speech was slow to mature – comprehension was good, but he has always expressed himself through pre-learned phrases and sentences – from favorite books or TV shows (Dora, Blues Clues, etc.). Not an autistic repetition, an expressive and often ironic use of learned phrases to communicate. Clearly articulated too, for that matter.
His lack of interest in other people’s scheduled transitions from one activity to another is, apparently, devastating for a well-regarded preschool. They go to great lengths to claim flexibility, and child-centered curriculum, but they expect children to be emotionally mature, independent and docile. So all the interesting toys and paints are left in full view, and 3-4 year old’s are expected to restrain themselves when told, simply, ‘we’re not doing that now’ Refusing to do circle time is difficult for the teachers, but the entire program assumes all children will either nap or go home – with mom, dad, grandparent or nanny – children who won’t nap or stay quietly on a mat (in a sunny room full of interesting toys) are problems.
In week three of preschool, the teachers told us they were concerned that the child was not making friends. All the other children are developing special friends, pairing off, and they didn’t want our son to be left out. At three. In a school that prides itself on inclusiveness, and that insists that it has no expectations that children learn specific academic skills because it would be wrong to pressure them. Apparently easing the noncomformists out the door is not “academic pressure” even though the social pressure is turning a bright, open, friendly child into an anxious mini-adult. Who, by the way, is speaking ever more, and ever-more complicated sentences, at his own pace.
On the other hand, we have a friend whose son became really unmanageable and violent at about three and a half, and by seven was finally diagnosed with both vision problems (the alternating eye thing) and speech trouble (he pronounced only three consonants). Since starting both therapies he is again the lovely, curious and charming child he was as a toddler. So perhaps the speech therapy is worth continuing – at any rate, feel supported whichever you ultimately decide. Two (more) parents are in your corner, and empathize.
LikeLike
Karen, what you describe is called scripting. My son quoted from books incessantly at age 2 and 3. He didn’t have access to the words himself so he used memorized phrases and sentences. Used them appropriately, too, to communicate with us, albeit in a very unusual way. You call rote repetition autistic, but what you’re describing is also consistent with autism, just a milder form, and one probably indicating a very bright child. The other things you describe are consistent with it. He may well not be autistic or Asperger’s, he may simply have what’s called shadow syndrome, which means he’d have some traits in common but not as strongly.
Damian talks up a storm these days and as I write, he’s having a raucous play date with a buddy from his kindergarten class. But it’s taken a lot of therapy to get here. I can understand hesitating to label a child but please don’t hesitate to seek testing. It can only help. If there is a problem and you do nothing, the damage is potentially irreparable. There’s this wonderful window of opportunity when young children’s brains are so plastic. It gets harder as they get older.
Please feel free to email me privately to talk about this, even if it’s to tell me how very wrong I am about your child. I’ve been there too.
To make this more general and pertinent to Laura’s post, I want to say that I know kids can get overdiagosed and I suspect some boys in particular get slapped with the ADHD label when they’re just being boys. We demand so much from our kids these days. But there’s a huge danger implicit in this line of thinking too. Because I’ve talked with or heard about an awful lot of parents who are in deep denial about their children, and these are kids who have no receptive language or who have severe behavior problems. Sowell’s book becomes an excuse for them, another reason not to seek help or at least testing. And an awful lot of these kids are therefore not getting the therapies they desperately need. I don’t believe a label defines a person. My son may be autistic but he’s also loving, smart, sassy, imaginative and sweet as anything. He’s got a lot of reason for pride, too: he’s overcome some major neurological deficits at an early age. For me, his autism diagnosis wasn’t the end of the world, it was more like the beginning.
LikeLike
Tamar – I understand that catching problems early on is best for some kids. We do have Ian in speech therapy, but am not confident that it is beneficial. All the stress induced by the pressure to improve him quickly before that window closes certainly isn’t good for us. All the testing is taking a toll on both of us.
We’re going through the system, but with some scepticism on my part and a lot of disgust at the morons that we’re encountering along the way.
LikeLike
Laura, I think if I were in your situation, I’d be more conflicted too. Ian’s problem is obviously much less encompassing and therefore raises issues of how much to do — and how to do it.
I realize full well that getting into the system isn’t always the rainbow at the end of the road. We’ve been very lucky, we stumbled into some excellent people, but we’ve also had to ride other therapists and agencies and fire still others. It’s a complicated process and as a parent you have a huge responsibility. Which is what I was really saying about getting started with this, but it also applies after you’re getting therapy. Especially state-run or district-run; bureaucracies aren’t always looking out for your child.
BTW, the window doesn’t close, it just gets harder after age 5 or so if the groundwork hasn’t been already laid. Interestingly, there’s another window, another time when brains are unusually flexible, sometime around adolescence.
LikeLike
My second child talked at a year, could sing “Happy Birthday” by herself at 15 months. She didn’t walk until 19 months. She crawled and sometimes furniture cruised, but for the most part she wanted to be my little monkey, balanced on my hip. She also liked to hang upside down. In two, kind of, a full back bend where her feet touched the back of her head. I would be standing there holding her and she would throw herself back. Complete strangers would leap to catch her, not realizing I had a good hold of her waist. They wanted to test her on all sorts of things. However I could see that it wasn’t that she couldn’t walk, but didn’t want to. Thankfully she was my second child, and I was a little more laid back. We just waited, and eventually she walked.
Today she is 11- math is not her strong suit-she is very creative. She is a wonderful writer and artist and does gymnastics.
My point is, what? Oh yeah, stick to your guns, you are the mom,you do know your child. Oh and maybe my child talking early showed good right brain function. While her struggles with math show left brain isn’t as strong.
LikeLike
My son was a late-talker too, and we went through a frantic gauntlet of unhelpful diagnoses (from “selective mutism”–wrong–to “developmental delay”–no duh) from “experts” from the time he was about 2-1/2 to kindergarten. (I too spent a lot of those years rereading Sowell’s Late-Talking Children just to keep calm.) We tried lots of things, but in our case I’m not convinced the “early intervention” stuff (speech therapy, playgroup therapy, early childhood programs) helped all that much, because nobody quite knew what they were trying to fix. In kindergarten and first grade my son made dramatic progress (particularly after going through a 3-month afterschool program at the beginning of kindergarten targeting “auditory processing disorder”, which has turned out to be the most plausible diagnosis for what may have affected him), and in second grade is no longer considered “learning disabled”, although he still benefits from speech and motor skill therapy. My subjective, anecdotal conclusion based on this experience is that the “experts” aren’t, and children develop at their own pace, and the important thing is that you care and are paying attention. Best wishes.
LikeLike
I’ve probably told you this before, but David S’s note reminded me of a conversation with a former graduate student. She’s an expert on (and critic of) educational provision for the gifted child, and has an interest in low performing high ability children. She started describing a kid with Aspergers — as she went through the symptoms every single one of them applied to the 5 year old I was when in primary school (my teacher, then, thoguht I was educationally sub-normal, which was the terminology for such kids). Then my student started telling me typical educational interventions all of which would, when I was 5, have seemed to me like torture. She saw me going white as she spoke, and asked what was wrong –so I spilled the beans, with a kind of existential relief that my teacher had merely dismissed me as a dunce not worth paying attention to.
By the age of 8 by the way, I was considered entirely normal, apart from being the fat kid and a bit prone to giggling.
LikeLike
I’m sure you’ve seen this essay a thousand times. It is one of those that goes through the internet e-mail groups like wildfire. It’s by Anna Quindlen and I refer back to it constantly.
———————-
On Being Mom
by Anna Quindlen
If not for the photographs, I might have a hard time believing they ever existed. The pensive infant with the swipe of dark bangs and the blackbutton eyes of a Raggedy Andy doll. The placid baby with the yellow ringlets and the high piping voice. The sturdy toddler with the lower lip that curled into an apostrophe above her chin. ALL MY BABIES are gone now.
I say this not in sorrow but in disbelief. I take great satisfaction in what I have today: three almost-adults, two taller than I am, one closing in fast. Three people who read the same books I do and have learned not to be afraid of disagreeing with me in their opinion of them, who sometimes tell vulgar jokes that make me laugh until I choke and cry, who need razor blades and shower gel and privacy, who want to keep their doors closed more than I like.
Who, miraculously, go to the bathroom, zip up their jackets and move food from plate to mouth all by themselves. Like the trick soap I bought for the bathroom with a rubber ducky at its center, the baby is buried deep within each, barely discernible except through the unreliable haze of the past.
Everything in all the books I once pored over is finished for me now. Penelope Leach., T. Berry Brazelton., Dr. Spock. The ones on sibling rivalry and sleeping through the night and early-childhood education, all grown obsolete.
Along with Goodnight Moon and Where the Wild Things Are, they are battered, spotted, well used. But I suspect that if you flipped the pages dust would rise like memories.
What those books taught me, finally, and what the women on the playground taught me, and the well-meaning relations –what they taught me was that they couldn’t really teach me very much at all. Raising children is presented at first as a true-false test, then becomes multiple choice, until finally, far along, you realize that it is an endless essay. No one knows anything. One child responds well to positive reinforcement, another can be managed only with a stern voice and a timeout. One boy is toilet trained at 3, his brother at 2.
When my first child was born, parents were told to put baby to bed on his belly so that he would not choke on his own spit- up. By the time my last arrived, babies were put down on their backs because of research on sudden infant death syndrome. To a new parent this ever-shifting certainty is terrifying, and then soothing.
Eventually you must learn to trust yourself. Eventually the research will follow.
I remember 15 years ago poring over one of Dr. Brazelton’s wonderful books on child development, in which he describes three different sorts of infants: average, quiet, and active. I was looking for a sub-quiet codicil for an 18-month-old who did not walk. Was there something wrong with his fat little legs? Was there something wrong with his tiny little mind? Was he developmentally delayed, physically challenged? Was I insane? Last year he went to China. Next year he goes to college. He can talk just fine. He can walk,too.
Every part of raising children is humbling, too. Believe me, mistakes were made. They have all been enshrined in the Remember-When-Mom-Did Hall of Fame. The outbursts, the temper tantrums, the bad language, mine, not theirs. The times the baby fell off the bed. The times I arrived late for preschool pickup. The nightmare sleepover. The horrible summer camp. The day when the youngest came barreling out of the classroom with a 98 on her geography test, and I responded, What did you get wrong? (She insisted I include that.) The time I ordered food at the McDonald’s drive-through speaker and then drove away without picking it up from the window. (They all insisted I include that.) I did not allow them to watch the Simpsons for the first two seasons.
What was I thinking?
But the biggest mistake I made is the one that most of us make while doing this. I did not live in the moment enough. This is particularly clear now that the moment is gone, captured only in photographs. There is one picture of the three of them sitting in the grass on a quilt in the shadow of the swing set on a summer day, ages 6, 4 and 1. And I wish I could remember what we ate, and what we talked about, and how they sounded, andhow they looked when they slept that night. I wish I had not been in such a hurry to get on to the next thing: dinner, bath, book, bed. I wish I had treasured the doing a little more and the getting it done a little less.
Even today I’m not sure what worked and what didn’t, what was me and what was simply life. When they were very small, I suppose I thought someday they would become who they were because of what I’d done. Now I suspect they simply grew into their true selves because they demanded in a thousand ways that I back off and let them be.
The books said to be relaxed and I was often tense, matter-of-fact and I was sometimes over the top. And look how it all turned out. I wound up with the three people I like best in the world, who have done more than anyone to excavate my essential humanity. That’s what the books never told me. I was bound and determined to learn from the experts.
It just took me a while to figure out who the experts were…
LikeLike
Just a note of encouragement from another mother who’s been there… My son hardly spoke at all till he was almost 3, when he suddenly came forth with complete sentences. He’s now 3.5 and his vocabulary is quite advanced, he can discuss concepts in a way I don’t remember his older sister doing at this age.
Sowell’s book was encouraging to me when we were going through the “will he ever talk” phase. Our family fits Sowell’s profile well, several late talkers on both sides, along with engineers, mathematicians, and musicians on both sides. My son was like yours, also, in clearly understanding everything and being able to communicate non-verbally.
In our case I think we were fortunate to have a pediatrician who advised waiting past 2.5 years for evaluation and therapy. My son was born 7 weeks prematurely, so he was also given a little extra leeway because of that.
We did do some work with him on our own, and well-meaning friends and relatives had to be discouraged from pestering him all the time about talking. We also heard a LOT that our daughter (12 years older than he) was “talking for him so he doesn’t need to talk”. Balderdash!
We found, though, that the little bit of work we did with him offended and frustrated him deeply. This is another reason I’m glad we escaped having to deal with intervention. It’s hard for me to express how he reacted since he didn’t do it verbally! But it was obvious that he felt demeaned or insulted, as though he KNEW his mind and thoughts were deeper than we could comprehend. I had forgotten those looks and expressions of his till I read your description of your therapist’s methods and thought how my little guy would’ve reacted…
LikeLike
I’m carrying on a mirror discussion about Sowell (and my kid) on a special ed. listserv at the moment. These parents are being much harder on me and on Sowell than you all are. Since they have a lot of experience and wisdom in these matters, I thought I would summarize their points.
They said that Sowell is a small-gov’t right winger who has the secret agenda of downsizing special education programs. Sowell believes that gov’t shouldn’t be involved at all in these matters, and that parents should cover all the costs and responsibiity for educating their kids. They are angry that Sowell’s book has been used by penny-pinching bureaucrats and by parents in denial to cut off services for kids.
They also add that our therapist sounds especially bad, and that I would have a better experience with someone who practiced more gentle methods.
I find all the politics of special ed fascinating and have learned a lot from these discussions.
The administrators and experts that we’ve come across specialize in special education. It is not in their interest to underdiagnose kids, because their jobs are dependent on having kids in the system. Maybe the higher ups would like to reduce the number of special ed kids, but not the ones that I’ve come across so far.
My main point is that all this therapy and testing is taking a toll on us. I can’t work with the schedule that has been imposed on us. We’re stressed. And Ian may be getting very self-conscious about things. He’ll only try to say words now, if he whispers them.
I’m really not 100% sure that his life is better or will be in the future because of this labeling, testing, and therapy.
The laid-back approach definitely seems right for some kids, but not right for others. I’m not sure where the line should be drawn.
Harry- You were never fat. I don’t believe that for a minute.
LikeLike
Kristen, what a great Anna Quindlen essay. I had never seen it before.
Laura, I’m really glad you brought up this topic. I’m mostly a noninterventionist when it comes to kids but we did enroll my preschool daughter in speech therapy when she was three and a half. It seemed to be the right time for her–she absolutely adored the teacher and the activities and now, less than a year later, seems to have improved her speech to the point that she wouldn’t now qualify for special ed services.
I know there is this recurrent idea in the therapy community that earlier is always better, but maybe it’s not. One of my friend’s sons started in speech therapy pretty early, a little after two. He wasn’t talking at all then. The therapy didn’t do much initially and was very stressful for him and his mother. Our experience with speech therapy was totally different because my daughter already had many words, she just pronounced them incorrectly.
Isn’t it a little strange that so many of your readers have experience with late-talking children? I have come across so many blog writers with children who talk late.
LikeLike
Laura, my mother has often told a story in my hearing about how I never talked until I was three or so. Fortunately, I grew up in one of those poor rural towns where they don’t worry too much about your mental development, since you’ll probably just work in a canning factory or start turning tricks in one of the trailer parks. So no one tortured me with any therapists. But they did wonder if I might be deaf, since I’d had a lot of ear infections when I was a baby.
Then one day I told my father to have a nice day at work in a complete sentence and after that they couldn’t get me to shut up.
I’m no Einstein, but I do have a Ph.D. in economics and work in a technical field. It’s anecdotal evidence, I know, but might be comforting nonetheless.
LikeLike
It’s not a secret small-government agenda. His day job is with a conservative think tank. We’re being crankier because we’ve been living this for a couple of years, and b/c we don’t like to see parents waste time.
We’re also being crankier because we’ve all heard the stories about our cousins/uncles/friends. My uncle didn’t start speaking until he was four. My older brother was so self-willed that my mother took him to the League of the Hard of Hearing to have him tested, and it turns out his hearing was perfect: he just didn’t feel like answering. I got reassurances from all the people who loved us. Didn’t help. Lost me and her time.
FWIW, I used to test people for LD’s when I was in grad school (that would be my second job to help pay the rent). When my daughter was first tested, I remember being very challenging to the examiner. I also had the same reactions re the checklists and what I saw as the rigidity of the scoring. I absolutely ripped that first report apart. And I remember saying something like, “To a hammer, everything looks like a nail.” And I may have been right about some issues (e.g., she did have pretend play), but bottom line: if she was scoring low enough to qualify for services, she did have a significant delay. I was worried enough about my younger kid that I also took him to be tested. Result: minor gross motor delays that didn’t qualify him. There are shortages of qualified therapists: they’re not looking to give services to kids who don’t qualify.
LikeLike
Laura – I was one of the three fattest boys in my high school cohort(out of about 70 boys). Its true. As a young adult I was fatter — I’m now 45 pounds lighter than when I moved to the midwest 12 years ago…
I also, and I know I’ve told you this before, had a friend who never spoke till he was 5, and then spoke only full sentences. My understanding is that his parents didn’t notice, being too wrapped up in what they had to say. He is, in fact, immensely clever.
LikeLike
My first two kids were early talkers, very precocious. My third child was still not talking very much when he was three years old. He would say a word now and then, but mostly he was silent. I just assumed that this was because he was the third child in the family. His siblings often talked for him. I never got him tested or anything because I figured he would catch up eventually.
I waited until he was almost six before I sent him to kindergarten and by then he had caught up to his peers. The one remnant that remains from his non-talking days is that when he gets frustrated, his first tendency is to start screaming. For years I’ve had to remind him to USE WORDS when he’s frustrated.
Anyhow, he is now junior high and does well in school. He is exceptionally gifted at math, which does seem to fit the pattern. I have had to work with him at home a bit on how to manage his anger — again, how to use words instead of lashing out with screams or something like that — but otherwise, he is a normal kid.
LikeLike
Mommy-blogs
A fascinating story about parenting blogs in Fashion
LikeLike
I read Late Talking Children about 5 years ago, when my 2 1/2 year old wasn’t conversing (what Sowell calls engaging in back-and-forth talking)even though he had a good-sized vocabluary, mostly nouns. I think Sowell is probably right, there are any number of otherwise typical kids who just talk late. The problem is, it isn’t all that easy to tell which kid is a kid who is just a late talker and which kid isn’t talking because of some major issue — like my kid, who has autism.
So the prudent thing to do is to get late talking kids evaluated and treated. Because other than the expense, speech/language therapy can’t do any harm (it should be fun in fact, and if it isn’t, you need to fire the therapist and find a new one). And not treating a kid who needs it does do a lot of harm.
When you think about it, it is not much different than when the dermatologist removed that funny-looking mole from my husband’s arm. She couldn’t tell just by looking if it was cancerous or not, so she removed it first, asked questions (biopsy) later. Turned out it was benign, but none of us wanted to risk doing nothing. I imagine dermatologists remove a lot of benign moles — in effect, they cast a wide net to make sure they don’t overlook the dangerous moles. Yes, we all wish medical science was more advanced, but it isn’t.
One last note, it is true, Sowell is well-known as a far right winger who is against any sort of public schooling, including public special ed and related interventions. If he was only interested in advancing the argument that we need to do more to sort out the kids who need help from the kids who don’t, he would have devoted some attention to what we do know about identifying the various conditions and syndromes that result in impaired language development. But he pretends there are no good evaluation methods.
LikeLike
Thanks all for your kind comments and personal stories. I find the whole thing fascinating.
Yes, Anne it is interesting how many bloggers have stories about late talking children. Since bloggers tend to more educated than the general public (and my readers are especially smart), it does seem to fit the model of smart people = late talkers.
I’m not sure if Ian will turn out to be simply a late talker or have more involved problems. Time and tests will tell.
But all this attention to his speech delay has not be without cost. It hasn’t simply been a trip to the dermatologist. It has been very stressful. Even if we had a better speech therapist, he would be undergoing many treatments and tests that he might not need. He’s old enough now to be aware of things. He knows he’s different. How much happier would he be without the rigors of a speech program? Without people talking in front of him about his speech delay? Without my family worried senselessly?
Yes, I understand that there is a small window of time to make progress in kids. I am taking care of things,, but with every treatment comes with side effects.
Laughing at your description of your son, Jo(e), because Ian has perfected his scream to convey a variety of needs. One scream means Jonah is bugging me. One scream means I want the light on. Another scream means don’t leave me with grandma. The boy is a very expressive screamer. I hope that it doesn’t last as long as high school though.
LikeLike
A good speech therapist is fun. How many kids don’t enjoy an involved and entertaining adult who gives them their undivided attention and wants to play with them for an hour? My kid enjoyed speech therapy and OT. His younger sister was jealous, so much so that I had to ask the therapist as a favor to do a little fake therapy with her.
And can a two and half year old really know he’s different and be stressed about speech? It could be that mine was exceptionally clueless and out of it, but he wasn’t at all.
I was worried, I was stressed, but he wasn’t.
LikeLike
You’re probably right, Allison. With a better therapist, my fears will most likely disappear. Thanks!
To others: This blog is a place for me to think through different ideas with input from readers. I’m sorry if I have inadvertently offended some, but I believe in a free exchange of ideas. Debate is good and healthy. Let the better argument win, I say. It makes everyone stronger.
Comments are now closed on this post.
LikeLike