Qualified Perceptions

Well, at 15 months, Denton was very short for his age, and had missed a language milestone; she was quite worried, and asked me to make all sorts of dietary changes.

By 20 months, the language milestone was still throughly missed, but he was a full 4" taller than before; she watched him to see that his motor skills were excellent, had us fill in the autism screening checklist, and then said "well, he's a doer not a talker, don't worry about it" to the language, without asking him to do things.

Now, 23 months, we've started the process of invoking Early Intervention for evaluation of the language (self-referred); our guess is that Denton is just someone who likes to really master skills before he uses them, but asking early intervention to evaluate him doesn't have much downside.

I don't think it was actually so much about teaching the test, as about giving a general impression of "normal".