Late-Talking Children, by Thomas Sowell

This particular book is a deeply interesting one when it comes to the issue of learning disabilities, as Sowell talks about his own son and other people (mostly boys) that he had known, as well as a variety of families in a support-group and those who answered the author’s surveys and thus provide some statistical insights as to the issue of late-talking children.  Rarely does one see the effort on the part of parents to desperately avoid having their children labeled as having Persistent Developmental Disabilities or autism as clearly as one does here, as the author notes the way that at least some of those with delayed verbal communication have enough other mental abilities that it should be clear that there are wide differences between those who are often categorized as late-talking children, although he does comment that not all late-talking children have the high mental abilities in other areas that make a diagnosis of a learning disability unwise and improper.  The author also also comments at least somewhat on the way that diagnoses of learning disabilities tend to leave children behind and make it even harder to catch up than would be the case if children are allowed to develop their vocalization at their own pace.

This particular book is short, at less than 200 pages, and begins with acknowledgements to those that helped the writer.  After that the author spends the first twenty pages of the book discussing his own personal experience in how he and his ex-wife dealt with the late-talking of their son and the course it involved over several years.  After that the author talked about the children that were in a group that was designed to provide support and encouragement to late-talking kids.  The author spends some talking talking about patterns, careful to avoid the fallacy that correlation is causation, but still interested in the suite of qualities that were combined in the children that were a part of the group.  The author then looked at the patterns that could be found outside of the group from those that the author met in the course of conducting research into the phenomenon of late-talking children.  The last chapter gives some facts, thoughts, and questions and encourages others to add more research.  After this there are notes, a lengthy appendix that includes the surveys that the author used to research late-talking children, and an index.

Quite to my surprise, I found this book had a lot to say about my own childhood.  Like the children discussed here, I shared a wide variety of the same phenomena and was thankfully able to avoid being diagnosed as having a learning disability.  I was a rather quiet child until after three years of age, had delayed toilet training (although in my case there were other factors influencing that as well), and had the standard qualities of late-talking children:  a good memory, high musical ability, and aptitude in mathematics, along with being left-handed, myopic, and having allergies, as well as having a bit of a struggle with social cues and occasional tendencies to be a space cadet despite being generally empathetic and affectionate, all of which are associated with this same suite of issues.  It was quite alarming to see all of these things connected together, although it is unclear what sort of causes are behind this suite of shared qualities that are correlated together.  It is worthwhile that the author used his own experience of having a late-talking child in order to bolster the scientific understanding of it and to encourage other parents struggling with the same situation and seeking not to have their children labeled and stigmatized as disabled thereby.