What can you reasonably expect your child to achieve? Will she be able to live independently? To read and write? To hold a job? To get married? There is no way to predict how high your child’s learning curve will go. Her diagnostic group is not an indication, because even within a diagnosis children vary widely. Her test scores and assessments are misleading because they tell you only where she was—on the items the tests measured—when the tests were administered. Comparing her performance with that of her peers is not helpful because it tells you where she is now, but not where she is going. Any static measure—anything that measures a child’s performance at one moment in time—is unhelpful as an indicator of potential because it assumes that the child’s learning curve will remain the same for the rest of her life. And that assumption is unproved.

The best indicator of your child’s potential is the shape of his learning curve once he is in an optimal therapy program. If he is working rigorously with a team of therapists and is doing floortime with you, his learning curve will be indicative of his ability to progress. And as long as that curve is going up, your child will continue to grow. How long will learning continue? Where will your child end up? That cannot be predicted. But the steeper the curve, the faster the learning, the more optimistic a parent can be.

It makes most sense to look at the learning curve after your child has been in therapy for 12 to 24 months and true interactive learning has begun. As no child can learn in isolation, it is best to wait until he is engaging and interacting before making a judgment about his rate of progress. If it takes a while to pull your child into relationships and get him opening and closing circles (engaging in two-way communication with you with gestures, facial expressions or words), wait for that to happen, because while the first circles may take many months to close, subsequent circles will go faster. Your child’s learning curve will rise.

The time to be especially concerned about your child’s progress is when the learning curve levels off. Typically a child will move ahead, then plateau, and then pick up again. If the plateau lasts for two months we begin to worry, especially about the therapeutic program. When the child plateaus it is often because his needs have stopped being met in some important way.

What can go wrong? Any number of things can cause a slowdown—a regression—in learning.

• Tension in the family. If parents are not getting along, if another child is requiring all the parents’ attention, if the family has moved and is busy painting and unpacking—all these things can cause a reduction in the amount of floortime and nurturing attention the child receives. In addition, instead of picking up messages of patience and understanding and getting needed problem-solving practice, he’ll sense and react to the family’s stress. This combination of factors can take a toll on learning.
  Overload. Too much of anything can derail the learning curve. Too many people in the house, too much noise, too much excitement over a birthday or holiday—any of these things, even when positive, can upset your child’s balance and cause learning to falter.
  
• Changes in the social world. Perhaps your child’s best friend has moved away, her favorite teacher or therapist has left, or a bully at school is terrorizing her. These kinds of events are frightening to a child who is highly vulnerable to outside experience, and can easily disrupt learning.
  
• Changes in the physical world. Changes in diet can affect your child’s learning, as can environmental toxins such as pesticides, perfumes, pain fumes, or other chemicals to which he may be sensitive. Allergies and illness can also depress learning. Medications for physical illness may have side effects that can undermine learning. Sometimes, the ingredients with which a medicine is prepared are the culprit (for instance, a liquid antibiotic may be a syrupy, sugary liquid with dyes and food coloring). Special pharmacies can provide a pure form of these medicines.
  
• The therapy program. Perhaps your child has changed therapists. Or perhaps one therapist was good at helping her get to a certain point but has little experience with the next level. Talk to the therapists; see how they’re doing. Consider whether a change might boost your child’s learning.
  
• A developmental growth spurt. Sometimes a move up the developmental ladder triggers a temporary slowdown in learning. As your child opens up and becomes more aware of the world, his new perspective may be overwhelming. To protect himself he may withdraw. But with time and extra security and soothing interactions, he may incorporate the new information into his personality, and learning will resume.
  

As your child progresses in therapy you should anticipate slowdowns, and you should expect some temporary regression. Regression is very frightening when your child has special needs, in part because you fear the ground will never be regained, and in part because children with special needs have a broad regression range. Whereas a child without special needs may become moody or defiant under stress, a child with special needs may go from talking to tuning out or from cooperating to kicking, biting, and screaming. But just as your child can regress quickly, so can she return to her highest level of development. You need to provide the stability, the soothing, and the interactions that helped her attain that level in the first place.

If you examine your child’s world and can find nothing that needs improvement, continue working. It’s entirely possible that after a hiatus, his learning curve will pick up. If a flat curve continues for a considerable time, with an ongoing optimal therapy program, it is time for a comprehensive reevaluation.

Concentrate on mastering the current milestone. If your child masters the current milestone, he’ll probably master the next. And if he masters that one, he’ll probably master the one after. Your efforts toward mastery today hold the key for tomorrow. Don’t compare your child with other children; compare him with himself, with where he was before. If earlier he was closing one circle and now he’s closing five, he’s made a 500 percent improvement. When you find yourself burning out or losing hope, look at where he is right now. Count the circles he is closing. Count the seconds he can sustain eye contact. Measure the time it takes for him to calm down after a tantrum. Use every small gain to motivate yourself to continue. Raising and helping a child with special needs is an endeavor of inches, not 50-yard touchdowns, but every inch of improvement lays a foundation for further growth.

Some people, clinicians as well as parents, are concerned about the age at which a child learns basic skills. Some believe that if, at age one and a half or two, the child functions at 50 percent of his age level, he will always function at that level. Others believe that when a child learns a skill four or five years behind schedule, he will be permanently delayed. This may be true for some children, but it is certainly not true for all. The track record of the children with whom we have worked suggests that when given an optimal therapy program, many children can make rapid progress. Far more important than when a child learns basic skills is the quality of that learning.

If you think of your child’s learning as the building of a skyscraper, you can picture the emotional milestones as the building’s foundation. They must support 80 stories—80 years of living in the world. They must be very strong, for if those basic skills are shaky, the entire building will be at risk. It is far better to have a solid foundation developed late, than a shaky foundation developed on schedule. Ideally, all children would function at age level in every area, and some children with special needs with whom we have worked have achieved this level of functioning. But quality of learning must never be sacrificed to the desire to move ahead. If building a solid foundation and strengthening the milestones means temporarily taking more time, we encourage that, because without that foundation your child will never be able competently to move on to more complex ideas.

Maintaining this philosophy is difficult in a world that places a premium on learning certain skills at certain times. Most children learn to read and write at age 6 or 7. They learn to write in script at age 8. They learn fractions at 9 or 10. Certainly these skills are important, but take a longer view for a moment. When a person is 35, what difference does it make if he learned to write at age 7 or at age 9? In either case, he can write letters to friends and take notes in school. What difference does it make if a person learned to answer a “why” question at 3 or at 4? If the quality of the answer is good at age 7—if the child can give three or four answers, all of them logical—the child has a solid foundation for abstract thinking for the rest of her life. There is still plenty of time to fine-tune that skill over the next 30 to 40 years. The emphasis on when a child learns skills is misplaced. Far more crucial is how well she learns them.

Unfortunately, our therapeutic and education systems don’t always embrace this way of thinking. Sometimes a child’s opportunities are limited at the elementary-school level because he had been grouped with other children who also have difficulty learning. Most often, when a child becomes a teenager and is several years behind his peers, we stop offering interactive therapies (which might build the basic skills) and instead emphasize practical splinter and community-based skills, such as making things and handling money. As a result, the child’s cognitive education is halted and he never advances to more abstract levels of thinking and behaving. But why assume that because a child has not learned to think abstractly by age 15 he never will? Our brains continue to develop until our mid-50s. Why not assume that if we continue to work with children in optimal programs, they can move up the ladder of milestones and become—at 20, 30, or even 40—flexible, logical, abstract thinkers.

If we start working with a 12-year-old boy who behaves like a 4-year-old and keep going for as long as his learning curve is going up, by the time he is 16 he may function like a 6-year-old. He’ll have made significant progress! If by the time he’s 22 he behaves like a 10-year-old, he’ll be able to live semi-independently rather than in an institution. If by the time he’s 30 he can function like a 15-year-old, he’ll be able to go to a two-year college, have a girlfriend, get a job, live a good life. Is this possible? We don’t know. The experiment is yet to be done. But we do know that the brain and the nervous system are much more elastic than formerly thought, and we are now seeing large numbers of children who develop skills at later ages than once thought possible. So in fairness to these children, why not continue to offer them the opportunity to learn as long as their learning curves are rising? If we do otherwise, we risk creating a self-fulfilling prophecy; we risk unconsciously limiting a child’s potential by limiting the experience we provide.

Some clinicians argue that to maintain hope for a child’s potential when the potential is unknown is to encourage parents falsely. “Parents must be realistic,” the argument goes. “They must prepare for the child’s future based on what he is likely to achieve.”

We don’t yet have enough experience with optimal intervention to say what a child is likely to achieve. Moreover, each child is unique. Therefore the only way we can predict a child’s future achievement is by watching her learning curve. As long as the curve is rising, the child will continue to grow. To make predictions any other way is to run a risk far greater than false encouragement. It is to provide false discouragement and thereby limit a child’s ability to grow as fully as possible. The child’s biology, environment (including family, therapists, and educators), and interactive experiences are all a part of her developmental journey. Only the journey itself, however, can determine the destination.