Supporting your Child with Selective Mutism: A Practical Guide for School, Home, and in the Community

This book provides strategies and ideas to support children with selective mutism in school, at home, and in the community. Packed with illustrations, this practical guide offers a roadmap to help children overcome selective mutism in various situations.

Based on Junhua Reitman’s vast experience of working with her own daughter Amelia – known in the book as Amy, and other children, this book furnishes parents and teachers with a toolkit to plan and implement intervention with individual children throughout their journey from the classic selective mutism ‘freeze’ response, to talking freely in various settings.

Techniques covered include:

• Graded questioning
• The buddy system
• The rainbow bridge
• Voice exposure

The reader is offered detailed examples of what worked for Amy in a variety of situations, including in school, at breaktimes, in extra-curricular activities, on playdates, and at birthday parties. These examples are followed up with suggestions and ideas of how these experiences could be applied to other children, making it ideal reading for anyone involved in the care of a child with selective mutism.

Junhua Reitman is a Parent Coach specialising in counselling parents and teachers of children with selective mutism (SM). She is the co-author of The Selective Mutism Workbook for Parents and Professionals and the lead English-to-Chinese translator of several selective mutism related books. She is the director of SunnyMindED Selective Mutism Center. Junhua is also a Montessori early childhood educator.

Amelia Reitman is a 16-year-old student in a Biomedical Sciences Academy. Having experienced and overcome selective mutism (SM) as a young child, Amy makes it her personal mission to help children with SM. She is an active volunteer at the Selective Mutism Association and helped with translating and editing books related to SM. Amy works with a group of volunteers to help children with SM make friends and have fun.

Nianhua Xu obtained her doctoral training in the field of biomedical sciences and is the co-founder of SunnyMindED. She is a Parent Coach and an active volunteer helping parents of children with selective mutism (SM) on their journey to overcome SM. Nianhua translated several SM-related books into Chinese.