Jelena is 5 years old and is in the second year of kindergarten at a Dutch school. She does not speak in class. She seems to understand everything, but she does not want to talk. At home she talks incessantly, but in Russian, because that is the language spoken at home. Her highly educated parents can also speak Dutch, and her grandfather is Dutch. Previously, Jelena attended an English-Dutch toddler group. She is a very bright girl with a strong will of her own.
According to a speech-anxiety specialist, this is a case of ‘selective mutism’, a disorder in which a child ‘cannot’ speak in some situations, while being perfectly able to do so in others. This may seem like an obvious diagnosis, but we should nevertheless question it. After all, this is a child in a complex linguistic situation who has been exposed to three languages from a young age and is very bright and verbally gifted. The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) indeed excludes this diagnosis for multilingual children: fundamentally, they do not have a disorder.
These days, many children come into contact with multiple languages because they grow up in mixed marriages: for example, with a Spanish father and a Russian mother who speak English together. At daycare, Dutch is suddenly added to the mix. Being exposed to four languages when you are very young is no small matter! It turns out to be quite common for these children not to speak at daycare. The label ‘selective mutism’ is then quickly applied.
Recently, an article about selective mutism in Dutch-speaking children appeared in NRC. This ‘anxiety disorder’ is said to occur more often in intelligent and also stubborn children. This finding is consistent with my own, but otherwise I think that something different is going on with these children than with Jelena. In multilingual children, a period of silence is ‘more normal’, and it does not seem advisable to brand them with the diagnosis of ‘selective mutism’, along with its associated treatment plan. That is not to say that nothing is wrong! Children who remain silent can become very lonely. After all, they can make only very limited contact with their classmates or peers at daycare. What can we do?
First of all: understand. If you are an intelligent child and, given your age, can express yourself well in another language—for example, when you are at home—it is actually quite understandable that you do not want to risk failing by speaking poorly in the language of all the other children in the class. But the higher you set the bar for yourself as a child, the more difficult it becomes. And how can this be overcome? What can a teacher or childcare worker do? Labelling offers no solution, especially when the label does not fit.
I have not been able to find any research that provides a definitive answer. It seems important, at the very least, to look carefully at what the child is capable of and to ensure that the child does not become lonely. We do need to think about how to make things easier for these children at school or daycare. As a result of internationalisation, daycare centres and schools are receiving more and more young multilingual children.