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April 19 2011 5:31 PM


Parents of small children! Is your preschooler able to read and write already? If you just nodded "yes," with a little flicker of pride and satisfaction—well, Tina Brown's Newsweek has a revelation for you.

The April 18 issue presents an extract from a new memoir by Priscilla Gilman, The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy . In the essay, Gilman shares the harrowing story of her son Benjamin, who learned to read too soon .


It's not enough to worry about dyslexia. What if your child has gone too far the other way, and is too good at reading? In Benjamin's case, Newsweek explains, what seemed to be brilliance was actually a devastating disability, a symptom of autism. "He didn't have an interesting mind; he had faulty wiring," Gilman writes.


A lot of his phrases were very sophisticated—when he drank his juice, he’d often say something we’d taught him: "Cup of juice is not only tasty but also delicious!" and when we went outside at night, he’d sometimes say, "The moon is high in the sky and the stars shine bright," something Richard had once said to him. All of these phrases, I now learned, were "context-appropriate delayed echolalia."


as an adult—what the difference is between "context-appropriate delayed echolalia" and "language acquisition." Is your charming three-year-old really just





of Gilman's book, for instance, found room in its single long paragraph to mention Benjamin's "aversion to physical affection," while the four-page Newsweek account alternates between the clinical and the vague. (Benjamin had "sensory-integration dysfunction"; he "seemed to contradict romantic ideas of childhood and parenting.")



. Beyond being a symptom of (or trait associated with) serious cases of autism—where it goes along with the more familiar problems, as it did for Benjamin—"hyperlexia" can also be invoked when a child learns to read early, loves numbers, and is kind of standoffish and awkward and high-strung.

Early reading, that is, can also be a symptom that your child is part of the range of human variety that used to be known—back when it was stigmatized but not yet widely pathologized—as "nerdy." Or, in an older term, "bookish."



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