Selective Mutism

As told to Mindel Kassorla

People joke that once their kids started talking, they couldn’t get them to stop. We had the opposite problem.

Yaakov was a calm toddler with a long attention span. Give him a peg puzzle, and he was busy for an hour. It was easy to have him home, so I didn’t send him out right away. With his first exposure to a larger social setting, we realized something wasn’t right.

Yaakov’s morah told us he preferred to sit on her couch and observe the other kids, rather than play with them. He probably just needs time to get used to it all, I thought. And anyway, he was doing everything else — projects, lunch. He’d be fine.

Chanukah-time I checked in again. “Yaakov doesn’t talk to the other kids,” the morah said. “Or to me. If he wants a drink of water, he brings me his cup. He nods, but doesn’t say ‘yes.’ ”