Not everyone has the confidence to speak everywhere...

Selective Mutism is an anxiety disorder in which affected children speak fluently in some situations but remain silent in others. The condition is known to begin early in life and can be transitory, such as on starting school or being admitted to hospital, but in rare cases it can persist right through a child's school life.



These children usually do not talk to their teachers and may also be silent with their peers, although they do communicate non-verbally. Other combinations of non-speaking can also occur, affecting specific members of the childs family. Often the child has no other identifiable problems and converses freely at home or with close friends. He/she usually makes age-appropriate progressat school in areas where speaking is not required.



The essential feature of Selective Mutism is the persistant failure to speak in specific social situations (e.g. at school, with peers and/or the teacher), despite being able to speak in other, morefamiliar situations.





Thursday 19 January 2012

All About Us!

I think I'd better start by telling you a bit about us, just so you can understand our situation a bit better. There are four of us in our family...myself, my husband Allan, Kimi, my 6-(nearly 7)-year-old independant little supergirl (my daughter from a previous relationship) and Isla, our 4-year-old noisy but quiet (!) princess. There's also the dog, Keeta, and the hamster, Hammy, who the girls count in our family numbers.

I found out I was expecting Isla 3 days after we had had moved into our new house, only 10 months after Allan and I had got together. We knew it was going to be a struggle financially, but were thrilled at the thought of a new addition to the family. We had help from both our families and spent 8 months getting ready for the arrival, decorating the new house, buying baby paraphenalia and talking to Kimi about having a baby to help look after.

Isla arrived at 11:59pm on the 30th November 2007 (and Allan being a man had wanted me to stop pushing so that she would be a December baby like him. I mean...really!). We loved having this new little girl in our life, and certainly wouldn't change her for the world. Things got hard though. We started struggling with money, bills weren't getting paid, we missed mortgage payments and were living hand to mouth. We simply didn't have enough money.

After nearly 2 and a half years struggling, we ended up having our house repossessed. It was the worst time of my life, without a doubt. We were served with an eviction notice, and we didn't know where we were going to go. We applied to the council for  house and were told we would have to go into temporary accomodation. Speaking to my mum she said I couldn't do that to the children. The solution...we all moved in with her (and my dad, my sister and my nephew). So, on the 7th April 2010, we packed our bags and left the house we had lived in for 3 years, the only house Isla had known, and moved to a little village just outside York.

It was this day we moved I noticed the change in Isla. Little things to start with, but over the next 18 months things that became more obvious. She began to have the most horrendous temper tantrums. All I thought was 'It's the terrible two's. It'll settle down.' But it didn't. It was just the beginning of her going downhill.

Well, that's the start of the story. I'll carry on tomorrow so you don't get too bored reading about our dreary life! Bye for now x
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