You Juin was born prematurely at 34 weeks. During his first 18 months of periodic review with his paediatrician, it was observed that his development was slower than other babies at each milestone such as walking, drinking from a cup etc. He was also very scared of loud noises and would squint to look at things in a line such as toy cars. The most worrying issue for us was that he wasn’t meeting his speech milestones at the same rate as his peers.

We brought him for an early childhood assessment at a government hospital around 3 years old and the initial assessment was that developmentally, he was “delayed” and he needed to start on an early intervention programme. During that time, there weren’t many private centres that provided such programmes. We got connected with a Special Needs pre-school near our place where You Juin spent some hours in the centre on weekday afternoons. As I was aiming for You Juin to later receive his education in the mainstream school, I enrolled him in a normal childcare centre on weekdays morning with an established syllabus (Montessori). The small student-to-teacher ratio was a plus point for me. We also looked extensively for a speech therapist and finally found Prudence at a private therapy centre.

Prudence diagnosed him with severe speech and language delay and put him on a program that worked on correcting his articulation errors. It was a struggle as You Juin was often not very cooperative and protested to avoid the activities. His motor skills were also observed to be lacking and we had to separately put him on an Occupation Therapy program. In the initial years, a lot of work was required to get You Juin’s basics right. He had low confidence in himself, making him shy away from others due to his speech deficiency in communicating. Thus, he hardly had any friends back then in his preschool days.

You Juin slowly gained confidence as he reached his primary school years. I remember that we had to go through an assessment at the government hospital to determine if he was suitable for mainstream education. We were overjoyed when he was assessed to be eligible for primary one. Throughout his primary school years, You Juin continued to struggle academically with both languages. We were comforted, however, that he was able to cope well with his Math and Science, as we had understood that most language-impaired students usually struggle with all academic subjects. We attribute it to the therapies and the extra lessons we were providing for You Juin.

Being in a Singapore school would mean many decisions along the way – such as, whether he should be giving up the Chinese language when it comes to the crunch of national exams. We made the difficult decision of dropping Chinese as a second language. We were heartened that he achieved a very decent score at PSLE that allowed him to enter into the Express stream.

In secondary school, we got over the initial frustration of having tutors quit on us. We found suitable tutors after this initial hurdle. You Juin was also lucky to have very supportive teachers who were ready to render the help that he needed at school. From 14 years of age, he showed independence in planning his homework and revision schedule. He was also able to excel in his math and science subjects with A grades. At the upper secondary level, his school teachers closely monitored his progress and put him in additional classes to coach him on his weak subjects as he reaches the ‘O’ level. At this point, You Juin mainly relied on home tuition for English. Besides his academics, he also joined Scouts where he was appointed as an Assistant Petrol leader when he was a senior student. He was showing independence, went to camps on his own, and was able to mingle well with his peers.​