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| Name: Jo | Date: Nov 12th, 2007 12:08 PM |
| Hi Maria, Hope your appointment with the specialists went well :) We are also a bilingual family living in Italy, and went through a similar situation with our daughter who is now 7. We speak English at home, but the extended family here use Italian with our daughters, and obviously school, tv etc is in Italian. In addition to this, I'm originally from Finland and even though most of my side of the family speak English, they try to use Finnish as much as possible with the girls. We used to live in the UK but regularly traveled down to Italy for periods of 1-3 months once or twice per year until moving here permanently two years ago. My daughter did not use ANY words until she was 3,5 years old, and I am very familiar with the Italian drs comments (don't worry, she will speak when she's ready :))... whereas in UK, they were in my opinion over eager to diagnose her. First, they started telling us she was autistic (effectively she was not as social as your daughter sounds like). This diagnosis was discarded due to her play skills (very imaginative even without language) and the fact that she was, and still is, very affectionate, and also she has never had any problems with changes in her routine (might have something to do with our slighly hectic lifestyle :)). At 3,5 she started acquiring new words (in English) and continued to improve fast. She also learned to read by herself shortly after her 4th birthday; at first I thought she just had an extremely good memory since she could tell stories almost word to word from her books, but during our next trip to Italy soon realised that she was in fact able to read (she read story books that I hadn't read to her since she was a baby). We held her back for an extra year at preschool in UK, as we were always planning to move to Italy and wanted her to start school here. When she was 5, we moved to Italy and she started school immediately, exclusively due to the fact that she was already reading and wanted to learn more, otherwise we would have happily held her back for another year. At this point she was not speaking any Italian (when she was born her dad started to talk to her in Italian but at around 2 years old when it became obvious that her speach was delayed, we decided to use English only), but before Christmas holidays she was fluent in both languages. She is now on 3rd grade, way above her age in most academic skills, and no sign of any problem at all... when we tell people drs thought she was autistic we get weird looks :). Now she also speaks some Finnish and next summer she will be visiting her grandparents and uncles (youngest is 6 months younger than her!!) in Finland and I expect her to come back with fluent Finnish too :). I have now developed my own theory about the differences between drs in these two countries... In UK, where children are expected to start school at latest at 5 years old, they don't give children time to be children... they are pushed to reach milestones in order to get them away from home and therefore letting their parents work as soon as possible even though this has little benefit to the child (according to UN research the best school system in the world is the Finnish one where children start school at 7 years old and the academic program is initially less demanding and more based on play). Obviously the opposite approach of the Italian drs is not very helpful either, but generally I don't think there is no need to over diagnose a very young child. Something I have thought after reading your post, you say only you can understand most of your daughter's words, now the drs may be thinking that this is only due to the bilingual issue, but to me it sounds like she may be having some problems hearing? Not sure if she has had a hearing test done but if not I would certainly push to get it done (my second daughter, 4, has a slight hearing loss and her speech is somewhat unclear and I usually have to "translate" for her :)). Apart from this, all I can tell you is hang in there :) and good luck with the drs. If you want to ask me anything else or just chat about things since we seem to have a lot in common, feel free to contact me, my email is [email protected] Ciao, Jo ↑ |
