I have an 8 year old son who has a language disorder which may well fall somewhere on the autism spectrum (more on that later). He is presently in the Dutch equivalent of second grade at a Montessori school. He started the year testing at about a year to two years behind his age group. He is now somewhere at or near grade level for reading and writing, and somewhat confusing regarding math as he has a scatter of skills which are a year ahead or more and others which he just refuses to do so it’s anybody’s guess whether he actually can.
He is blissfully, joyfully happy at his present school and is terrifyingly popular with his schoolmates.
The language disorder is significant and affects both of his languages. We started getting him speech therapy when he was three because he had invented a language which had no apparent relation to English or Dutch and spoke it most of the time. No, really, I know this never happens and it’s always a fantasy of the parents and so on but I have documentation and everything. Anyway, whatever, the invented language made it clear (as one doc said to me) that he wanted very badly to communicate but could not in the usual way for some reason. We all thought – his family, teachers, various speech therapists, footie/swim/aikido coach, parents of his riends, et al – that the primary problem was expression of speech and that he understood most of what he heard. We knew he got much of his understanding from body language, because if he cannot see you he cannot unerstand you.
We recently bit the bullet and took him to have him tested at the Dutch equivalent of Johns Hopkins for speech and language, because his teacher continued to say that there was no reason she could think of that he was not working beyond grade level – she felt he could be learning faster/better than he is and wanted some advice from the experts on how to educate him so he could reach his potential.
They said they won’t give her that advice because he need to go to a school specialized for speech and language. During this last round of testing we discovered that we were all wrong and while his hearing is great, the sounds are not translating properly in his brain. He has auditory prcessing disorder at a minimum, for those who know what that is. He hears “cap” when you say "cat, as a simple example, then he goes off taking about hats and nobody knows why. It generally turns out that one word or two in the sentence didn’t get through properly and if youhave the patience to go back and work out which one that is, you can get the conversation back on track. But most people don’t have that time or energy.
The other shock was that he scored very low on his IQ testing which is confusing. I know nobody wants to accept that their kid isn’t as smart as they thought, but as soon as the people who work with him every day saw that score they all said, “That cannot be. Something is not right with that”. Which of course made me feel better. But really, his IQ is what it is and no conversation abotu it can change it. But it was to understate a surprise.
He fits in nowhere very well so they said the best thing is to give him a diagnosis somewhere on the autism spectruum – probably PDD-NOS – in order to secure a place. In Holland if you qualify for speech and language school it is free. And he certainly has a number of the qualifying traits for the autism spectrum so it isn’t that big a stretch. It’s only that he has all these other things which seem to militate the other way.
Thing is, there is one week of school left, then we go away for summer vacation and they want him there on the first school day in the fall. He will go from riding his bike to school to being taxi’d to school, and he will go from a very small school to a very large school (though the classes themselves are smaller, the school is large because it’s the S&L schol for the region). He will go from being possibly the most popular kid in his class to knowing no one. He will go in some ways to being in a small community surrounded by uncomprehending but unquestionable affection to being in a large community surounded by people who understand him and how he ticks and the affection may or may not come. I hope it will.
And in the past several years we have had more changes than you can shake a stick at. Not small changes, big ones. It hurts me to even think about changing one more thing and setting hs life uside down yet again. And yet, the experts seem quite convinced that if we do not we will be closing some doors to him in terms of his education and development, which is after all what school is about. And that if he says at the current school he will not be able to make the jump from reading, writing, and 'rithmatic to history, geography, literature. He won’t have the tools is what they say.
So. Any advice, random thoughts, words of comfort, experiences, attitude adjustments? I’m ready. I think.