A post about my son with a language delay (4m)

I love my son. So does my wife. He is four years old and has the most beautiful smile I've ever seen on a kid his age. He loves looking at books and he has a large number of things he's passionately interested in, ranging from Spiderman to Dinosaurs. He is incredibly sweet and compassionate and is pretty darn good at shooting baskets. And yet.. At the age of four he tested in the bottom first percentile for verbal language ability.We've known that he's been behind in language ability for some time, and we've tried everything we can think of. We bought hundreds of books, we read to him several times per day, we actively encourage him to speak, and shower him with praise when he uses a new word or sentence structure. We took him to daycare where he rarely spoke more than a few words, but he actively participated in class activities still was able to make friends while there. Since COVID-19 hit, we have been homeschooling him, which has been a mixed bag. He does speak in sentences with encouragement, but still prefers to answer questions with around one or two words and he struggles to recognize letters or objects that he has been taught by my wife. He also rarely asks "why" or "how" questions, instead asking "what" objects are, even objects that he has been taught about on multiple occasions.We have been taking him to see a speech therapist for over a month and we've been seeing some real progress, but he is so far behind I've become increasingly worried that even with a dramatic improvement, he'll still be far behind his peers when he ages into Kindergarden.I must admit that I blame myself to no small degree for my son's current situation. I'm a PhD student, so I balance my family life with the high demands of my program and the need to provide enough of an income to meet a basic standard of living for my wife and son. As a consequence, I don't spend as much time with my son as I'd like, though I try to at least read with him and roleplay with him in the evenings before bedtime. My wife speaks English as a second language and she does her best to home school him, but I can't help but think that maybe my son would be further along if I had just spent more time with him. Perhaps if we had just raised him with a single language from the beginning, he would be proficient in one of them instead of falling behind with both. Maybe I'd have the resources to get him more help if I had just taken an industry job instead of chasing my selfish career ambitions.I worry about him all the time. I just want him to live a happy normal life. What can I do for him that I'm not doing already? via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2VotoTV