Tricia shares story of hope

Tricia Henderson, supervisor for speech services, shared this story of inspiration from a recent speech evaluation:

"I met an extremely brave person while doing an evaluation a few weeks ago. A beautiful mother of two came in to have her youngest son evaluated for language delay. Her older son was already in our program, diagnosed with autism, and making good progress... saying words he never attempted prior to joining us. The sweet mother smiled as she told me she feared her second son was also autistic; she recently had seen the neurologist who hesitated to diagnose the second boy at 18 months since he had some very appropriate social skills.The mom wanted to get some idea about his language delay and to hear what a speech pathologist thought.

As we did the interview, I was encouraged to see that the baby had many good and promising social behaviors... he laughed, sought the source of voices, played speech-gesture games like "pat a cake", and sought interaction with his brother by crawling up to him to look at his toy. This young one was definitely delayed but did not seem autistic; he was interested in others and responded to language. Only time will tell.

Our plan is to place him in an appropriate language group just as soon as possible since early intervention is the KEY for both autism and for language delay. As the mother left she said, 'I'm pregnant and the neurologist said if it is a girl, the odds go down for autism. We're hoping for the best!' I could not help but offer a silent prayer for the baby to be born....knowing that no matter what, that baby would be loved and cared for by a very brave mother and father."