The Power of Early language

I grew up with a younger brother who had autism, and that turned out to be one of the most influential things in my life. So much so that a few years ago, I gave a talk that was titled “My Brother Is the Second Author on Everything I Write.” And that really was true. 

When we were growing up together, my brother was sick. A lot of the first couple of years of his life [he] had a lot of medical complications. And then he was diagnosed, not as having autism, but as having severe and profound disabilities when he was 4 years old.

But my experience of my brother, who basically had, probably by the time he was 4, maybe 10 words and he didn’t use them well, was that he was smart, and he was funny, and he was mischievous, and that he loved me. And I knew all of that without him ever saying any of those things. I knew that he loved trains. I knew that he loved to ride his bike all over town. I knew that he hated swimming.

I knew him and I didn’t really understand why language was such a big deal that he did not have it, and that other people didn’t understand who he was because he did not speak. 

But as we grew up together, that became clearer and clearer to me. In my family, my sister and I were both college debaters. So, here we are, these kinds of hyper-fluent people with all kinds of ways to use language. And here is our brother, who at the same age probably had maybe 25 words. So, my interest from the beginning was: How do kids learn language, and what can we do to help kids learn language? 

When I was a post-doc, I spent time on a project in a residential treatment center for kids with autism. And I had never thought about my brother as one of those kids because my brother was my brother. He was Jimmy, and in our family, he was just a kid. And we had lots of other family friends that had kids with disabilities, and it wasn’t that big of a deal. 

And here I saw these little boys, at 6 or 7, living in a residential treatment center where they didn’t talk and nobody talked to them. I was there on the day that Steve Anderson, who is my hero forever, came in and took the first little boy named John out to do a session on language. And I watched this little blonde kid who could type the script from The Mary Tyler Moore Show by memory on a typewriter, but did not say a word, go with this man who would change his life forever. 

And I thought I want to do that. I thought I was going to be a child linguist. I thought I was going to study normal development. But that day, I realized, first of all, that there were children who had not had the life my brother had, and that there were lots of kids that no one talked to. And I didn’t want to see one more of those kids ever. 

And I saw Steve Anderson take this little boy out in a way that changed his life. And that’s when I became an early interventionist. 

Years later, I saw Steve, who runs a school in New York, and he still knows that little boy who’s now a grown man, who left that treatment center, went to public school, and now has a job.

And if that doesn’t make what he did and what I did worthwhile, there’s no making it worthwhile. 

That’s how important early language intervention is for kids. And that’s how important it is in my life because of my brother, but also because of all those little kids that didn’t grow up with a sister who understood what they meant because they didn’t have language.