And I would also like to point out that experts are not God.
I have an anecdote, but I don’t want you to interpret it the wrong way.
The grandson of the people next door is the same age as my son. So they’re both 20 now. They played together occasionally as little boys but never really hit it off as “friends” as such.
This kid had a speech impediment from Day One. He had a mush-mouth. It could be fairly difficult to understand him.
When he was in about the first or second grade, his folks took him to the school’s speech therapist, who pronounced, “He’s fine. He’ll grow out of it. Don’t worry about it.” And they basically shrugged and said, “Okay. Whatever.” Because they are simple folks, and they believed that the school’s speech therapist was an Expert, and so must be automatically right.
He’s 20, and he still hasn’t grown out of it. He’s still hard to understand, only now he’s self-conscious about it, so he mumbles, which makes it even worse.
What’s more, he’s grown up into a 20-year-old who, although he did earn a high school diploma, still lives with his grandparents (his mom having died unexpectedly last year), who works in a school cafeteria, and who basically has No Life. He doesn’t game, he doesn’t have friends, he comes home from work and watches TV.
So…maybe if his folks had been more proactive, and had ignored the expert’s advice, and had gotten him into the speech therapy fast-track, maybe he wouldn’t have grown up as a social outcast with a speech impediment, and maybe he wouldn’t be living at home with his grandparents, doing nothing.
So now you’re thinking, “OMG, I’d better get the kidlet some serious speech therapy!” but that’s not the lesson I want you to take away here. The lesson here is that the expert was wrong–the kid wasn’t going to grow out of it, and what’s more, he should have been reevaluated yearly, not simply evaluated at age 6 or 7 and then pigeon-holed as “Problem Solved–He’ll Grow Out Of It”. And he should have been tracked by the school district’s expert for annual reevaluation–because it was a really horrendously noticeable speech impediment–not leaving it up to the parents to request it.
My son went to the magnet school here, and when he was in first grade, we were told that their school speech therapist said he had trouble with the letter “S”. So he had a number of weeks of therapy, and he was tracked by the speech therapist the rest of the school year, to make sure it “took”. My neighbor’s grandson, OTOH, went to one of the ordinary District #61 schools. What a difference a magnet school, and a different expert, makes.
The lesson here is “Experts Can Be Wrong”. So your experts can be wrong when they say that your daughter’s slow-to-talk issue is even an issue at all. It’s only their opinion that it’s something that needs to be addressed proactively–it’s the opinion of a ton of other intelligent, articulate people in this thread that she’ll be fine, all by herself.
Hope this helps.