Most important investment of all… kids

[Errold]

@Sweet  I wish!  Sadly I am a long term Nintendo bagholder ever since they announced the change to become a platform and expand into movies/amusement parks/etc..  

[Sweet]

On 6/27/2026 at 1:05 AM, Saluki said:

I had a lawschool classmate who was top of the class and he told me that he didn't talk until he was 4 also. He said he understood everything, even when his parents were discussing why he wasn't talking. He just wasn't talking.

 

I have ADHD and wasn't diagnosed until my 40s, and if I'm honest, I might have some of the 'tism though I've never been tested. You're on here so your obviously smart and it runs in smart families. Ferraris have powerful but finicky engines. On my mother's side I have two family members who were supreme court justices in Latin American countries. I also have a cousin who doesn't make eye contact, doesn't talk much, but has published more scientific papers than I have read. I'd rather be in a family that has that trait (good and bad) than one with people who go to watch UFC fights on the White House lawn and can't figure out 20% tip on a restaurant bill without a calculator. 

 

Four is very young. Too early to tell. I just had a baby, and I know that being older (55) increases the odds of stuff like that. I do worry about it. But it's not something that I will be able to know, and I don't want it to interfere with the process of raising him. 

 

The fact that you're worrying about it shows your a present and concerned parent. So I think he'll be okay either way. 

 

On 6/27/2026 at 3:34 AM, Marco Van Basten said:

When I was at Yale doing my undergraduate degree, I met a guy from Ethiopia who was a fellow student.  He was a year older than he was supposed to be based on his class, and the reason was that he was left to repeat a class in Ethiopia when he was in kindergarten.  Teachers in kindergarten had thought that he was retarded.  The guy was an engineering major.   Just because people think you are a retard at age 4 does not mean that you are, you may turn out to be smarter than everyone else, just wired differently.

thanks both for these stories.  My son is most definitely wired differently, he thinks of thinks in ways that nobody in my family does… he’ll have a unique intelligence if he can just get the words out, I’m feel confident.

 

Saluki, lots of factors matter. Prematurity is one of them.  Take your kid everywhere you go, they’ll probably be just fine.

[ICUMD]

Consider Kumon - reading and math.

 

I put my daughter in at age 2 in the reading program.  Now at age 4 she can read at a grade 1 level.  Will be starting math next month. 

 

They are short exercise booklets,  designed for repetition and developing focus.   Students progress at their own rate.  Fosters a great parent bond with the child, but requires patience to get through the daily homework.  

 

Would not underestimate what a child can learn. The brain is mysterious.

[jfan]

37 minutes ago, ICUMD said:

Consider Kumon - reading and math.

 

I put my daughter in at age 2 in the reading program.  Now at age 4 she can read at a grade 1 level.  Will be starting math next month. 

 

They are short exercise booklets,  designed for repetition and developing focus.   Students progress at their own rate.  Fosters a great parent bond with the child, but requires patience to get through the daily homework.  

 

Would not underestimate what a child can learn. The brain is mysterious.

Check out spirit of math too. My three kids are still in it, oldest at the grade 11 level. Less rote than Kumon, more problem solving focus. Highly recommend it

[thowed]

@Sweet I'd ignored this thread - thought it was going to be different.  I'm so sorry to hear this - I know how incredibly frustrating and upsetting stuff like this (well Parenting is Highs and Lows generally!).  Hard to know what to say, but sounds like you've had lots of good advice.  I know very intelligent people who started talking quite late, they were just thinking and learning in the interim.  I think any reading on either side is a wonderful thing.  My best wishes to you and your partner with it.

[thowed]

Thinking more about this - I remember someone wise once said to me that 4 is a big turning point, which I found very true.  When your youngest hits 4, it's pretty glorious as you are out of a certain pit i.e. no nappies, no buggies etc. so moving around is so much easier for starters.  It's one of the big shifts (followed by the teenage years, which are something else altogether....)  So I'm sorry, because you are really in one of those super tough times with 3 under 4.  The only other thing I can think - an obvious one - is I hope you and your partner are kind to yourselves and each other - it's easy for parents to beat themselves up about stuff, and worry you haven't done the right thing.  It's the wild west out there - we all try our best (when we're not too tired!).  Good luck!

[nsx5200]

IMHO, people are a lot more varied and complex than they can come up with labels for.  People like to easily 'bin' people into 'normal' and 'abnormal' to make their lives easier.  Most people think black and white, whereas some of us think in probabilities, with Gaussian curve dominating this space.  If it's not covered by the 80% Gauss, they think that's 'abnormal', and would like to come up with a label for it, whether it's introversion, ADHD, autism, or whatever new fangled 'new' term they think they have 'recently discovered'.

 

There's an incentive for the academics to try to come up with 'new' stuff, whether in nutrition, psychology, and sometime even in medicine in order to justify their own existence.  Keep Gauss and the perverse of occasional academic incentive in mind, and it's much easier to differentiate true abnormality from just 'outside the norm'.  Digesting other people's experiences(ex. Reddit, forums) also helps a lot.  Again, just MHO.

[Sweet]

6 hours ago, nsx5200 said:

IMHO, people are a lot more varied and complex than they can come up with labels for.  People like to easily 'bin' people into 'normal' and 'abnormal' to make their lives easier.  Most people think black and white, whereas some of us think in probabilities, with Gaussian curve dominating this space.  If it's not covered by the 80% Gauss, they think that's 'abnormal', and would like to come up with a label for it, whether it's introversion, ADHD, autism, or whatever new fangled 'new' term they think they have 'recently discovered'.

 

There's an incentive for the academics to try to come up with 'new' stuff, whether in nutrition, psychology, and sometime even in medicine in order to justify their own existence.  Keep Gauss and the perverse of occasional academic incentive in mind, and it's much easier to differentiate true abnormality from just 'outside the norm'.  Digesting other people's experiences(ex. Reddit, forums) also helps a lot.  Again, just MHO.

I’m of the same opinion.  
 

Anxiety has become a big thing, there are huge numbers of people in the U.K. claiming they are incapable of working and getting a government cheque to sit at home because they got a medical note saying their anxiety was so crippling it prevents them from working.    Think the number is well north of half a million.  When I was entering the workforce this was unheard of but it’s directly downstream of broadening out categories of ill health and disability.

 

On my son.  We got some suggestions from the state speech therapist.  It’s flash cards on a page and basically he’s to come and point at what he wants.  I get this is supposed to help communication but part of me wonders if it takes away the need to talk too.  I mean the little fella is lazy, he would happily sit there and let me spoon fed him his food so he could continue playing with his toys - I refuse to do it anymore.  So part of the help also feels like enabling.