Over the summer

Having our child all set to start school gave us a certain amount of relief. We felt confident that we had made a good decision.

Meanwhile, we were starting to get a bit worried about his language acquisition. We knew that it was coming quite slow, but school had him for half a day and said that he was already academically ready for reception year (whatever that means), and they weren't worried about his language at all and felt sure he would be fine by September.

We had arranged to meet with a noted language development specialist when we were out of the country, and looked forward to hearing what he would say. A friend recommended that we see a friend of his as well - a psychiatrist at a prominent medical school, who was also a psychoanalyst, for any additional insights.

As it turned out, both the meetings went well. The language specialist said our son had disordered language, but that he was very clever (he administered non-verbal IQ tests) and that he would most likely have his language normalise by the time he was 8 or 9 years old.

The psychiatrist/psychoanalyst met with us and our child several times and said that our son was a quirky kid, but not autistic, and that the language specialist was probably correct that it was strictly a language based problem.

We were relieved and spent the rest of the holiday enjoying seeing friends and family.