Any experience with Selective Mutism?

In My Humble Opinion
1

My four-year-old has been going to daycare two to three times a week since she was 18 months (currently three days a week for eight hours). In that time she’s hardly talked at all at daycare – she will occasionally talk to a teacher, and pretty much never to any other kid. For a while the daycare was asking me things like, “Can she talk?” Now they know she talks, but I’ve heard the other kids say things like, “[She] doesn’t like to talk.” Recently I think she’s started to talk a little to the other kids, e.g. answering when asked a direct question, but certainly nothing like the way I see them talk to each other.

This same kid talks a lot more when she’s with me or her dad, although she’s never been a chatterbox. She also sees kids at church and a little neighborhood get-together (five or six kids) she goes to for a couple of hours once a week, and she has no trouble talking in those situations at all. This past week we went to an assessment at another school, involving being in a situation with five or six other kids she didn’t know at all, and an adult she didn’t know at all, and she did totally fine, apparently had no trouble talking at all. This weekend she also got in front of an audience of about twenty to thirty kids/grownups to give a one-line scripture at church, and she did fine with that too, much better than other kids her age have done. She loves performing, and is also willing to get up in front of the other kids at preschool and sing a song.

The daycare has a speech therapist who sometimes works with her. Yesterday I got an email from the therapist talking about Selective Mutism and how it might explain what’s going on with her. It does seem to explain why she sometimes is totally fine with talking and other times is not.

The only thing is that apparently they (well, the interwebs) think it’s tied to social anxiety, and I am not entirely sure that I buy that for my daughter? It’s hard for me to believe she’s anxious. She likes school, and she likes performing. To me it seems more like she doesn’t like large groups of people (a trait she shares with her father, who also gets very quiet in large gatherings, although he will talk when asked direct questions). But I don’t really know.

Complicating this is that her milestones are all over the place – she’s always been a little quicker on her intellectual milestones and a little slower on her social and emotional ones. Her social development seems to me to be consistently at least six months behind her peers. (This might also be a factor – her church/neighborhood friends are six months younger, while her preschool friends are all almost exactly her age.)

Do you guys have any experience with this? (What do I do?)

2

At the risk of sounding glib, back when I suffered from this syndrome it was called being shy.

From what you’ve written, it’s unclear why you feel you need to do anything. In my (unsolicited) opinion, she sounds like she’s doing fine.

3

Well, posting in IMHO is soliciting your opinion, isn’t it? :slight_smile: I’m glad that you turned out well, and that you think she probably will.

On one hand, I know other kids who are shy, and my kid does seem rather on the extreme end of that – I mean, she will literally go eight hours at school without saying a single thing to another child except “I don’t want to talk.” (I talked to her teacher this morning, and she will usually answer direct questions with “I don’t want to talk.” This is a substantial improvement over not talking at all, and something we’ve been working on at home – that you need to answer when asked a direct question, but “I don’t want to talk” is an acceptable answer.) The other kids I know who are shy aren’t quite like that. And this seems to be something that cuts in specifically when there are about ten or more kids; fewer than that and she seems to be fine.

On the other hand, I think there’s a very good chance her dad was like this as a kid, and he turned out fine, without any special intervention. (One frustrating thing is that both my parents and his have forgotten everything about our childhoods, so my questions about these kinds of things don’t get helpful answers.)

4

I have no clue about selective mutism, so take this with a grain of salt. But I do have a four-year-old (although mine never shuts up), so I have some clue how they work. And they have only a limited amount of brain space. If it’s all being focused on doing one thing, they genuinely can’t switch mode and do something else too. Also, they don’t have filters like adults; they can’t really distinguish between ‘stuff I should pay real attention to’ and ‘stuff I can ignore’ in the same way we can.

From what you say, it sounds like your daughter may simply get overloaded by large crowds. That’s a whole different thing from shyness or social anxiety. It doesn’t sound like she’s scared or self-conscious, if she’s fine performing and being with smaller groups of strangers. It just sounds like large groups throw so much input at her that all her thought process is going into processing that input; she doesn’t have room to switch into output mode and talk. Does that ring at all true?

If it’s that, then it should get better as she gets older and better at filtering out things she doesn’t need/want to process, leaving her more brain space to put into talking.

5

My youngest daughter had what we thought might be selective mutism at the age of about 2-3. She rarely spoke to anyone outside of her immediate family, including at her day care place, and wouldn’t respond if spoken to.

The weird thing was - and this is what make us think it might be SM versus plain shyness - was that she loved social situations. She would beg to visit her cousins’ house and when there not want to return home, but not actually say anything to any of them the whole time she was there.

Unlike the OP’s daughter, she was not someone who wanted to perform in any setting. But she did want to be there.

That said, my speech therapist sister was somewhat skeptical as to whether it was really SM, and thought she would probably grow out of it. Which is pretty much what’s been happening. She just turned 6 and still loves socializing but talks as much as any other kid. Still not a big solo performer, but doesn’t really stand out.

My wife says a certain one of her sisters was painfully shy as a child. She is anything but that now - she’s a big time mouth and a big mover and shaker in the company she works at. So maybe that phase runs in the family.

6

No experience with selective mutism, never even heard of it before. I do have a child who is borderline Aspergers, so back in the day I read about autism a bit.

First off, your daughter sounds like she is doing fine. You seem very in touch with her development, too, so that is all good. And Vinyl Turnip’s “shy” comment may end up being the most “on-point” comment in the thread.

Maybe she is very intelligent and is bored by conversation with her peers, and does not know how to respond to them in a way that works for her and is understandable to them, so she fell back on being quiet until you equipped her with the very useful “I don’t want to talk.”

Kids with high-functioning autism/Asperger’s sometimes are much more comfortable talking with adults than with their peers. Also, such kids are sometimes very skillful with words as discrete tools (a really advanced vocabulary, for example, or phrasing themselves in ways that seem more like an adult than a child), but not so good at actually using language as a tool for social communication.

Of course, just now, in reading a little about selective mutism, I see it is said that cases are often misdiagnosed as being on the autism spectrum, so what do I know?

Really, though, such a large part of this is just different shades of gray and shadows. She may very well have inherited some of these traits you see in her father, but not at such a level that she would need intervention.

If you don’t think she is socially anxious, she probably isn’t.

It sounds like your daughter is happy, likes school, and is involved with activities. That is all good. Does the school or the therapist think you need to do anything?

7

My 3 year old daughter never shuts up - its chatterchatterchatter from the moment she wakes until she goes to sleep. There are times I think I’d gladly trade…

If she can talk but chooses not too, can articulate that feeling, gets along with other kids and is hitting her milestones, I doubt I’d worry about it. Everyone exists along a spectrum.

8

Oh, man, this is so helpful. The Dope is so great.

eclectic wench, that totally rings true to me (she also tends to focus a lot in a non-talkative way when she is excited about something) and I would totally believe that that was what is going on. Thank you. That gives me a very useful framework to process her responses in.

Fotheringay-Phipps, yeah, that’s the thing that is so weird! If she hated school, I’d understand it as shyness. But she loves school! (I’m SO glad she does.)

wellanuff, I’ve wondered a lot if my daughter is sort of spectrum-y but not quite enough to be formally diagnosed with Aspergers. We had her looked at at age 3 and were told she was within normal parameters, but everyone who has had experience with kids her age and who spends more than a couple of days with her has noticed that she is not like other normal kids (independent of the talking stuff). And when I read about Aspergers it pings a lot more of my “yep, my kid does that” buttons than anything else I’ve found.

I do think part of it is that she isn’t sure how to respond socially to her peers. She can respond somewhat usefully to younger kids and to adults, both of which are, I think, much more understandable to her than kids her age, who are more socially complex than three-year-olds and less predictable than adults.

The school/therapist, I think, is more worried about what will happen when she goes to kindergarten… and so am I. But hopefully she will have more tools to deal with it by then.

mozchron, that’s a good point. If she were selectively mute, I’d expect her to be… totally mute, not to be able to say that she doesn’t want to talk.

9

I nth the comments about shyness, and also the ones about not having anything to talk about with the specific other kids at daycare. I never quite understood why the grown-ups thought “kids your age” were a monolithic group that all shared the same interests. Especially if she’s farther along in book-learning than people-learning, she may just be interested in totally different things than the chatterboxes.

If she doesn’t seem distressed by the situation, and the adults can get her to state her wishes when asked, I’d leave it alone. If you’re curious, revisit the question from time to time until she can explain why she feels like talking sometimes and not others. A bright kid will eventually be able to parse it out for you.

10

When my Smaller Girl was around 4 or so, she had a friend, “A”, who used to come to music class with us once a week. They’d sing, dance, bang tambourines, that sort of thing.

Little A would come to class, she’d do the stuff; afterwards we’d go down the road for milkshakes every week and she’d happily chatter away with the other kids, with me, with the waitresses.

But she Would Not talk to the the music teacher. Ever. We never figured out why - she was a perfectly nice woman, she couldn’t ever have done anything mean to A, since we were always there in the room at class. The kid just…decided. Apparently she had also decided the building manager of the flats where she lived was persona non grata - again, there’s no suggestion that he could ever have had the chance to deserve this behaviour and she didn’t seem nervous of him, she just…didn’t wanna talk.

She was quite a confident and strong-willed child. Eventually we just decided it was a bit of a control thing, and just ignored the whole situation. She seemed to grow out of it ultimately - anyway, they moved out of that building and music classes finished, and she didn’t pick anybody else to give the silent treatment to.

11

When I was a little older than your daughter is now, I moved to a new school for 1st grade. And did not utter one word at school. I talked at home, with family, with neighborhood kids, and at other non-school activities.

At first, I think the teacher thought I was simply a shy girl; understandable because I was in a new school. It seemed to take a while before any adult caught on that I never spoke at school. I have a clear memory of the teacher coming up to the table where I sat with three other girls and asking them if I ever talked. The other kids were pretty nonchalant about it, “nope, she never talks” and the teacher asking them other specific questions, like what about at lunch? What about at recess? What about on the school bus?

Because I was talking just fine elsewhere, my mother was amazed when she got the call from the school about this, and even asked a few times if they were sure they had the right kid. Both my parents asked me about this, and I couldn’t give them any real explanation at the time.

So, keeping in mind that it’s hard to know if I am accurately remembering how I felt about this at that age … and please note that I’m describing it now as an adult, and wouldn’t have been able to articulate a lot this at the time …

Initially I didn’t want to talk at school because of the anxiety related to being a new kid in a new place. But by the time my parents were asking about it, I had adjusted well (other than the talking) and didn’t feel nervous or anxious about school. When they asked if I didn’t like school or was nervous in school, I kept saying no, because I wasn’t, at the moment. So yes, anxiety was a part of it at first, but enough time had passed that I didn’t even associate it with the not talking. I can imagine that, like you described, my parents didn’t think anxiety was a factor because I really didn’t seem anxious in any other way.

Weirdly, the biggest reason I can identify that I continued with the no talking was that it had become a habit, and it felt odd to me to change it at that point. I had a vague sense that if I started talking in school, it would be A THING that people (teachers and other kids) would notice and comment on, and that seemed like more hassle than it was worth. Some kids can be very committed to their own personal status quo.

Maybe if you feel this is something that your daughter would be likely to think, I would talk to the school therapist and ask what she thinks of asking teachers and other adults not to praise or make a show of being encouraging, even when she does speak at school.

After the summer, going into the next grade, I was speaking normally. New classroom, new teacher, it seemed like a whole new environment.

12

…

13

I’m very glad if it’s useful :slight_smile: Like I said, my kid is a talker, but I notice the same thing in reverse: she can’t hear if she’s busy yapping. So she’ll be talking ninety miles an hour about whatever let’s-pretend story she’s on right now, and I’m trying to get her to get her socks on, and I’ve told her four times and she’s still bouncing around yapping and doing nothing sock-related…and it’s not because she’s deliberately ignoring me or disobeying me, it’s just that she genuinely hasn’t heard me because all her brain space is going into yapyapyapyap. I have to get her to stop talking so she can switch mode enough to hear anything.

14

This sound almost exactly like my son. When a daycare employee had dinner with the family (my wife worked daycare at the time), she was amazed that he talked. The summary is that he is now 27 and doing fine socially. Thru his teen years we had the issue of having to wait until he was ready to discuss an issue (prompting rarely worked) and then the floodgates would open.

Heck, I’m 55 and I talk a lot more in some situations that others. Unless there is something else (really resistent to even attending) I wouldn’t worry about it.

15

I don’t know anything about your daughter, but I was raised by actors and I can say many of them have some sort of anxiety or social issues. Not all of them, of course. And some of them have stage fright on top of everything else. But anxiety issues and performing are not mutually exclusive. Just FWIW.

16

Arabella, yeah, that’s very likely. Thanks!

Aspidistra, hmmmm, that’s a very interesting story. I wonder if control is sort of an issue here too… perhaps she feels a little out of control when there are so many kids around.

delphica, it was really interesting and helpful to get the kid’s side of it, so to speak :slight_smile: That could well be the case, too… she’s been at the same preschool this whole time, and even with the same set of kids for the most part, so maybe she’s just comfortable with not talking there.

eclectic wench, heeee. Again, this was really super helpful – when I think about the way she thinks and processes things, I think something similar to this may well be going on with her.

tim-n-va, ha, that was exactly the reaction the daycare supervisor had when she was talking ninety miles a minute to me one day when we were in the office (with no other kids around). Prompting also rarely works with her. I’ll have to watch that when she becomes an adolescent as well; thanks for the heads up :slight_smile:

Merneith, this is very interesting – I wouldn’t have guessed that!

17

I have no idea whether your daughter is showing signs of selective mutism or not, being neither a psychologist nor a speech therapist. But it’s a possibility I would take seriously. I was an elementary teacher for many years, and I knew three kids (all girls, all quite bright) who had this disorder–and disorder it is. It’s not just “being shy,” and it causes a number of complexities that can’t be fun for the kid.

Let me start by saying that I only taught these kids as a specialist teacher; I was not a classroom teacher for any of them. Let me also add that I expect all three of them are at LEAST reasonably okay at this point. (One would now be in her late twenties, the other two just finishing up high school.) All three were getting psychological/speech-and-language treatment when I knew them (kindergarten, 1st grade, 4th grade if memory serves), and the families were all trying to be helpful and supportive.

The first grader had some big traumatic event in her past–never knew what it was, but it was believed to be the trigger for this behavior. The other two, the parents were baffled. My understanding is that this bafflement is not unusual–there is often no particular event that seems to spark the condition. The first grader had an anxious stance, staying close to the teacher (without speaking to her) and seeming to want to shrink into the woodwork; the others did not come across that way.

Anyway. The K and 1 students did not speak at all during the school day, but the parents said they talked all the time at home. The 4th grade students would talk to her friends at school but not to teachers, and would not participate in class discussions except by whispering an answer to the girl next to her, who would then relay it to the class. (The psychologist told us not to permit this, btw.) None of them ever spoke to me or to any of their other teachers for any reason.

I found working with these children to be a challenge, their classroom teachers even more so–especially for the 4th grader. It was difficult to figure out what they knew and didn’t know, how they were feeling about their work, and so on. I sometimes got what I’d consider strong “embarrassment vibes” from the kids, especially the older two–they wanted in some important way to be able to speak in class, but for whatever reason couldn’t–and sometimes got even stronger “frustration vibes,” especially from the oldest one. It can’t be pleasant to have something to say, whether to the class or to the teacher, and feel yourself to be unable to say it. With the K child I got less of that and more a sort of “manipulation vibe,” where she was in some sense appearing to enjoy having kids and teachers wondering and worrying about her. (If I don’t talk, everyone will pay attention to me…) But whether this was really the case or not I don’t know. The notion of needing to “be in control” of a situation was absolutely brought up in this child’s case–possibly the others as well.

tl;dr I think it was very difficult to be those children. While they managed the classroom reasonably well, I felt bad for them and I think school was a rather scary placed. If I were you, I would not make a big deal out of this in any way just yet, but I’d keep a close eye on her as she grows a little older.

18

Since the serious and important OP question has been pretty well answered, I’ll mention that, every time I glanced at this thread title over the past several days, I thought it said “Selective Muslim.” I expected it to be about Muslims who follow their faith’s tenets selectively – indulge in a little social alcoholic drinking, skip most of the daily prayers, that sort of thing. :slight_smile:

19

Wow, I started reading your post and I thought maybe my wife had gotten an account here and posted that. The only thing that made me think different is when you mentioned church as we don’t go to church. My daughter, also four, has the same sort of condition you are describing. We were told by her daycare teacher that she never talked to other kids and would only sometimes talk to the teachers. This came as a shock to us as she talks a lot at home, although as you said, I wouldn’t label her a chatterbox. She loves going to school and being in social situations, so I don’t think it’s just shyness. Like your daughter, I’ve always told my wife she seems to be about half a year behind her peers in her physical/emotional development but according to her teacher, her academics are near the top of the class.

We’ve taken her to see a speech therapist and they did an evaluation and nothing too atypical was found. She was a little behind on her ‘l’ sounds, but the therapist said that was pretty normal. The therapist recommended us to take her to a child psychologist, which is where we are at right now waiting for the appointment in a few days.

From what I’ve read on selective mutism, it fits her symptoms almost exactly, even down to her being extremely empathetic and artsy.

I’ve observed her in a few social situations and I’ve seen other kids try to talk to her and she’ll just stare back at them, almost stare through them. It’s a behavior that I’ve never seen her do with adults. It’s odd. But she’ll come and tell me what the others kids told her, so I know it’s registering. It’s like her brain freezes up when she is expected to talk to other kids.

I really hope it’s something that she’ll just “grow out of”, but to me it’s risky to think that way and do nothing about it.

20

This mirrors my own experience fairly exactly. I too, starting in a new school about age four, wouldn’t talk at all – I’d only nod for yes, or shake my head for no. The school eventually called my parents in, to their great astonishment, since I was so chatty at home.

But here’s the difference between 1970 and now: these days, selective mutism can get you a long course of therapy. Back then, your parents would simply tell you to knock it off. I was called in, told by my parents to say hello to my teacher, and my teacher subsequently made me say hello to the class. And the spell was broken.

As delphica said, I think it was a case where, having embarked on a course of conduct, I found it hard to change. I was secretly grateful to my parents for getting me out of this stupid rut I had made for myself.