A Malaysian mother reflects on raising her eight-year-old non-verbal autistic daughter and discovering that love and communication can exist beyond spoken words.
MOST parents remember the first word their child spoke.
“Mama.”
“Papa.”
Sometimes something unexpected like “ball” or “milk”. It becomes one of those stories families repeat with laughter – the day their child finally found their voice.
My daughter is eight years old. And she has never said a word. She is what the world calls a non-verbal autistic child. But to us, she is simply our daughter – the quiet centre of our universe, the little person who has gently reshaped our understanding of love, patience and communication.
Like most mothers, I once imagined the day my child would call out to me: “Amma.” It is such a simple word, yet one that carries the entire weight of motherhood. I imagined hearing it from the back seat of the car, from the bedroom when she woke up or shouted across the living room in the middle of play. But in eight years, I have never heard my daughter say it.
For a long time, I waited. I waited for the silence to suddenly break – for a small miracle to arrive when we least expected it.
Over time, however, I realised something important; my daughter was already speaking to me – just not in the way the world expects. Her language lives in the small things – the way she takes my hand and gently pulls me towards something she wants to show me.
The sparkle in her eyes when she sees something she loves. The soft humming sounds she makes when she feels calm and safe. Sometimes, she leans against me quietly, resting her head on my shoulder for just a moment before moving away again. Those moments are her sentences and those gestures are her conversations.
Raising a non-verbal child teaches you to listen differently. You learn to notice what most people rush past – a glance, a small smile and the way a tiny hand reaches for yours. It slows you down in a world that is always in a hurry. And in Malaysia, there are more families like ours than many people realise.
According to government data, nearly 60,000 children in the country have been diagnosed with autism and registered with the Welfare Department, a number that has risen sharply over the past decade as awareness and screening improve. Behind each of those numbers is a child. And behind each child is a family learning a completely new way of understanding the world.
Yet, for many parents of neurodivergent children, the hardest part is not the diagnosis; it is the judgement – the stares in public places when a child becomes overwhelmed, the whispers that suggest poor parenting. The well-meaning but exhausting advice: “Maybe she just needs more discipline” or “Have you tried making her talk?”
People who do not walk this path often assume that every child develops the same way, on the same timeline. But children like my daughter live in a world that moves to a different rhythm.
Sometimes, they are simply trying to cope with a world that feels too loud, too bright or too overwhelming. What many people do not see is the extraordinary beauty that comes with raising a child like her. These children teach us to celebrate things others might overlook – a smile, a moment of calm or a small breakthrough that may seem ordinary to others but feels monumental to us. They teach us patience, empathy and to look beyond the noise of the world.
In our home, my daughter’s silence is not empty; it is filled with laughter, movement, warmth and a kind of love that does not need to be spoken aloud.
She may never call me “Amma”. That word – the one I once imagined hearing from her tiny voice – may never arrive the way I thought it would. But every time she reaches for my hand, every time she leans into me for comfort and every time her face lights up when she sees me walk into the room, I hear something far more powerful than a word.
In those quiet moments, I know exactly who I am to her. And perhaps, that is the real lesson my eight-year-old daughter has given me. The world may measure love in words but sometimes, the deepest love is found in the spaces between them. And in those silent spaces, my daughter tells me everything I need to know.
Hashini Kavishtri Kannan is the assistant news editor at theSun.
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The Sun Malaysia
