The (stressed) mother of the little boy who wouldn’t speak

I am Téo’s mother, a little boy of 2 years old and 4 months (I am mentioning the months here for a better understanding of the situation). Well, this is me, the mother of the little boy who wouldn’t speak. He can say about 10 words, but that’s all. He understands everything we tell him, but he doesn’t seem to understand that he needs to respond back.

He either doesn’t feel the need of expressing himself or he doesn’t know how to. Only time will tell.

BEING STRESSED

We have begun the process with specialists to hopefully understand what is going on. At his age with the small amounts of words he can speak, he would have what they call a speech delay. Things may get better and hopefully, on his 4^thbirthday, we won’t remember he had a language delay. But no one can say just yet.

We went to see an ENT specialist and the doctor confirmed he can hear. Everything is as it should be. We took an appointment with a private speech-language pathologist, as to get an appointment with a public one takes over 1 year. We will see what the speech-language pathologist’s diagnosis is.

BEING SUPER EXTRA STRESSED

I am trying to be strong for him. It’s hard not to think about it every single day and it has become a very uncomfortable situation as we hear so many comments about our little Téo… So many unnecessary comments.

Our families are stressed… and it’s even more stressful for us. It just makes the situation worse than it actually is. We were even talking about that my partner and I, and if we were living on a tiny island by ourselves, we would never be worried about Téo’s speech delay. As he can hear everything perfectly, and his personal development is good. He socializes with people even though he can’t speak and even with strangers. It’s when we hang out with certain persons, that we get super worried about his situation. It’s how they look at him, what they tell us and there worried look that makes us even more worried.

THE STANDARDS

There is also the expectation of our society, the “standards” as they say.  Every kids’ personal development should be the “same” because the society said so. Just that could be the subject of a new post.

No! Téo isn’t like most of the kids. He is a little bit slower on developing his language, unlike all the other kids or unlike what all the books say.

I would really like to not be bothered by other people’s thoughts. I would really like if our families would accept that he is slower than most kids.

I would love if people would let him be a 2-year-old kid, without staring him down because he can’t speak.

Between you and me, there is no turn ON button on him (he isn’t a robot). The day he decides to speak, he will. Until then, we have no control over him other than letting him be who he is.

Did your kids have a speech delay? How did it go?