I’ll keep this as short and sweet as I can:My wife and I have two older children, one is typical and the other is developmentally behind due to medical issues so we’ve seen a lot of different development and have been intimately involved with child development. We both have college educations and my wife has a masters in behaviour and development.Her sister (my SIL) has one child who we love and care about.We provided temporary daycare to said child for 6 weeks and during this we discovered the child was about 10-12 months behind. She’s 22 months, and she appears to be around 10-12 months in development. Doesn’t talk, struggles to walk, can’t stack blocks, doesn’t understand simple words and a variety of other things that if it were me, would set off a variety of red flags. It’s both physical and developmental.We also have learned that the sister has lied twice to the doctor when she was asked about the child’s development.“Can your child do xxxx?”“Yes! All the time!”I understand kids develop at different speeds, I get that, but this is some fairly substantial stuff that we’re seeing.So, Just tell the parents our concerns out of love, right?Wrong.The sister has a history of becoming completely unhinged and losing her mind if she is challenged in any way.Want to change times of an event? Loses her mind.Don’t want to go to the restaurant she likes? Loses her mind.Didn’t invite her to something? Loses her mind.Respectfully, because it’s relevant to this, she and her husband are the type of people that could get lost in a round room with one door, too. Which doesn’t help.We do not want to hurt the family, and the sister has absolutely no friends but us. I feel like if we brought this up it’ll be end game for the relationship.Should we bring this up because we love our niece or just sit back and hope it works out?tl;dr my wife and I think our niece is substantially behind but don’t know if we should say something to her absolutely clueless parents via /r/Parenting http://bit.ly/2TspyXd
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