We always thought our daughter, Camryn, was just really shy until one day when I happened to come across an article in the Houston Chronicle when she was about 3 ½ years old. The description of a child with Selective Mutism fit her to a “t.”
At home, Camryn, who will be 9 on March 25th, is a very vivacious and energetic little girl. She loves to play with her friends, collect Littlest Pet Shop pets, is inseparable from her many stuffed animals, watch the Disney Channel, shop for “fancy” clothes, and sing to Hannah Montana, High School Musical, Cheetah Girls, etc. She talks non-stop. We have to make her stop talking to eat and go to bed. She loves to talk on the phone to her friends when they call (a recent success!). She is a gifted artist and even has her own website to showcase her art.
Away from home, Camryn sees herself as “the girl who doesn’t talk.” She doesn’t talk to her teachers or other adults outside of the family. The only other adults beside her father and me that she talks freely to now without any warm-up time, are both sets of her grandparents and a mentally-challenged neighbor named Ricky who doesn’t talk very well himself. She will talk freely in front of our other neighbors (maybe actually responded verbally to the lady once or twice). She yacks up a storm when we’re at Wal-Mart until she sees someone from school then she tries to hide from them.
At school, Camryn makes mostly A’s and an occasion B. Her favorite subject is math, but she’s also very good at writing and is a fantastic speller. She has many friends at school although most of them have never heard her voice. She has a friend at church that she will whisper to during Sunday School if no one’s looking.
Camryn was seeing a counselor during her first grade year and made a lot of progress, to the point where she was talking in school to her friends (but not to teachers too much). She even got conduct marks that year for “talking at inappropriate times.” Then she changed schools and didn’t talk the whole year (until the very last day of school when she let the girls in her class hear her voice momentarily). Then she changed schools again. Kind of a long, complicated story, but yes, this caused a huge set-back for her. She did see a counselor during her second grade year, but they never really bonded, and an $85 a week, we didn’t see the need to continue.
Camryn has the rest of her third grade year and her fourth grade year to be at the school she’s at now. Then she will go to the middle school for fifth and sixth. She’s used to having two teachers, but in middle school, she will have four. My fear is that if she doesn’t start talking before she leaves elementary school, she won’t talk at all. I read a quote from Dr. Elisa Shipon-Blum that if a child doesn’t talk by age 8 or 9, they probably won’t talk until high school.
So, at this point, I’m a little in panic mode. I recently had a two-hour meeting with her teachers, who are very loving and supportive of helping Camryn in any way. We came up with a few goals for her to accomplish at school: reading to her “whisper buddy,” running errands for the teacher by herself, ordering a snack from the snack bar, and using a response journal to communicate with her teachers and friends.
I am back in the market for a new therapist for her and have even been looking into seeing if she can qualify for speech therapy at school. I talked to the speech therapist yesterday who mentioned the dreaded words “educational need,” so I’m not feeling very confident about that. During second grade, I had tried to get Camryn 504’d but ran into the “educational need” roadblock there also. I have two names of therapists, but we live in a town of 14,000 people, so it’s not that easy to find someone who 1). works with children, and 2). knows anything at all about S.M. One therapist is a man, and Camryn is much less likely to open up to a man, but if his approach and demeanor and right, there may be a slight chance.
So, there’s our story up until now...
