Blog on Selective Mutism

Just as the woman who I worked with missed the signs with her daughter, so did we.  Even as an infant, my son would not make the same kind of eye contact that his older brother was doing at the same age.  We talked about it and decided he just did not like to look or focus on our face, like his older brother did.  He would look focus at us and then divert his eyes or turn away. When he a little older, he had a thrusting motion with his tongue, that became a clue to us when he was in preschool that he was anxious.

Thinking back, I should not have written off that simple turn of the head.  It made us think he was shy. So for the first two years, we had already made assumptions about him, we should not of.  We thought about perhaps he had sight or hearing issues and had those checked out. 

He had the loudest cry and piercing scream as a baby.  We use to say it made us sweat when he cried.  Again reassured that it was just a different child than our first and not out of the norm.

I talked and compared with other mothers. It lead me down a path to accept as normal things that should of been the first signs of anxiety or selective mutism, when you look at them in total.

When the preschool teacher came to ask  us how long he was developmentally delayed, it was a shock.  We were clueless, we had missed the cues we saw to give us a hint of the things to come that he did not speak in school came as a total surprise.  How did we miss it?  He was not delayed at all,  but when he was in school without speaking he was to them.

I write this blog as a way of helping other families that may starting on the same roads that we traveled.  If it helps one other family, my time writing this will have been worth it.