A little background information here: I have four kids. My 3-year old (second to youngest) is still not talking. He get speech therapy twice a week, and my husband and I work with him as well. His verbal abilities were recently pegged as those of a 15-month old. He doesn’t seem to have any other issues. He can point to things in books, follow complex instructions, and basically does everything you’d expect a 3-year old to do, except talk.
But it’s still so surprisingly scary to deal with every day–I’d say that his speech delay is the thing I worry about the most in the world. I wonder if he’ll ever catch up. I feel crushing guilt, that maybe something I did, or didn’t do, has caused this problem or made it worse. (I know that’s not rational, but I still think the thoughts.)
Can any of my fellow Dopers help? I’d really like to hear something reassuring. I’d like to hear from any of you guys who had kids with speech delays that had good outcomes, or really, anyone who has any ideas on how I can cope. I’d be grateful.
My daughter had a speech delay. She was evaluated at age 2 1/2 and found to be on the level of a typical 15- to 18-month-old for speaking and I believe she was 6 months behind on comprehension too. And it was about that time that she was just starting to catch up, so a few months earlier it would have been more extreme.
She never did have therapy, and one year later, at age 3 1/2, her preschool teacher (who didn’t know about her past delay) commented to me that her speech was advanced. She had told the teacher that she was “impressed” that the teacher had gone on stage during an assembly. She also scored in the high 90s percentile on the preschool standardized testing (yes…standardized testing in preschool…).
My daughter is in 6th grade now and has been a very good with language ever since. It is definitely possible to catch up!
I’m currently studying to become a speech therapist and I thought I’d add in my two cents even though I don’t have any children, if you don’t mind.
Children tend to be a very heterogenous group when it comes to speech development, until the age of 7-10ish, about. This is one reason why most therapists won’t come out and say “Oh, your child is still one/two/x standard deviations below the norm,” as the number of words for each standard deviation could be just a small handful and, compounded with heterogenous ability as mentioned above, tends to make labeling extremely difficult.
It is possible to say “Oh, the child has the expressive vocabulary of an x year/y month old and receptive vocabulary of an x year/y month old” with some basic guidelines and milestones. But pinpointing exactly why a child is behind can be challenging at such a young age.
I would take confidence in the fact that your child can follow complex commands; this shows a good receptive vocabulary. It could be nothing more than a speech delay. A delay itself is nothing to be worried about as it just means that for a period of time the child will be behind the average peer but will have a spurt to catch up with peers and then show no sign/detrimental affects of the delay in their future speech.
As you already know, it’s not your fault, so get those thoughts out of your head! As long as you’re treating him like a normal child (not locking him up in a dog crate or underneath the bathroom sink his entire life :)) and giving him good exposure to social situations and whatnot, you’re doing just fine. I would continue doing what your speech therapist advises, and maybe getting the therapist’s advice of implementing milieu teaching or other activities that are used to generate/elicits verbal responses or requests from children.
Don’t feel any stress about it. Don’t make any stress about it. The stress will be much more of a problem for the kid than the not-being-able to speak thing itself.
I know it’s a natural reaction of humans to ask themselves “Why does this happen to me/ my family/ kid? Did I do something wrong? What if I had done X different?” The important thing to remember is: Shit happens. Things happens. Life is. A lot of things happen without any reason, or any discernible reason for a normal human being. We’re simply used to stories where everything has a reason that we fall into this trap.
If the kid has a strong need to communicate, he will find a way, since he is normal intelligent (you didn’t say otherwise). If it takes him half a year longer, that doesn’t make him dumb if everything else is okay. All children develop different skills at different speeds. This doesn’t mean he can’t go to Yale when he’s 20. It only means that he’s slower at speaking now. Nothing else.
To take the worst case, if there were a physological problem preventing speech (which you obviously did check for and it’s not), he could learn Sign language. If there were a psychological problem (which you presumably also checked, and is not the case), you would back off, and get him therapy, and things would improve over time.
Relax, have faith and trust in your kid. Look at what else he is learning, which is probably why he doesn’t have much time and interest for learning to speak. This will give you a better perspective.
Several famous people (whose names I can’t remember right now) started talking late. They were still smart and sucessful.
Is your son vocal? Our son talked but nobody could understand him. On evaluation it turned out he was mixing up his vowels. (I always blank out here and can’t remember the name for it.) Anyway, if he was trying to say boot, it came out boat. Ham for home, etc. Maybe nikonikosuru can tell us what it’s called.
He took speech therapy for around three years I think. He loved the therapist and I commend nikonikosuru for taking up this profession.
He “caught up” and eventually did fine and has no lingering problems.
Please don’t worry about it too much. I have yet to know anybody (child or adult) who is perfect. Seems we’re all held up to the standard of what’s average, but being individuals we’re all over the place.
My son (now three years and seven months) hardly talked untill he was three, and he was diagnesed as a year behind by the pre school doc. But in the last three months he has improved by leaps and bounds.
Was it only vowels? Vowel errors tend to be a hallmark of childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), but kids tend to make consonant errors as well. Put simply, it’s an issue with motor planning and sequencing to get the sounds out correctly.
My nephew is three and, having been born with tetralogy of fallot with pulmonary atresia, has been through quite a ringer health-wise. Not much of a talker, but he’s getting it down, and is so fucking cute it doesn’t matter. I find it lots of fun to interact with him verbally and see how he’s learning various verbal cues.
No doubt it’s challenging for my sister and her husband, but his work with a speech pathologist and “graduating” into preschool have given them the confidence to admit that he’s actually pretty smart – just maybe not so much with the words right now.
This is something that has helped in one case I know. Take some photos of the child (or use ones you already have), put them into a little photo album (you can get them cheap at Wal-Mart or Target) and caption them “Child’s Name” is walking, “Child’s name” is eating, “Child’s name” is playing, etc. Children are often fascinated by seeing pictures of themselves. The child I’m speaking of began using some of the verbs in the album. His speech therapist loved it.
Depending on the ages of the older children, maybe they could read it to him.
I have 3 boys. The oldest (now 9) didn’t start talking until he was a bit older than 3. We did not have him in therapy (didn’t know any better.) He started on his own shortly thereafter (and has NOT STOPPED TALKING SINCE.) My middle one (5 1/2 now) was even slower to start. His daycare teacher suggested speech therapy and he went for almost 2 years. It helped tremendously. He’s still a little hard to understand (he speaks VERY fast, and when we remind him to slow down he’s much easier to understand.) The youngest is almost 3 and has been talking up a storm since he was a little over 2.
When my little girl was three she really didn’t talk, only counted to ten. She was tested at below one year language level. With therapy for speech, OT for some sensory issues (she has mild autism) at (just turned)seven she tests at four years, five months as of last week. But that’s testing under guidelines. She can carry on a conversation with me and her friends now and only gets a little tripped up with who, what, why questions. She’s aced “where” this year! Little things like when someone asks, “How old are you?” she’ll reply 'I am fine." Her speech is a little slower and unsure sometimes but she’s really shown improvement.
She has speech at Le Bonheur twice a week plus one group and one 1-1 hour during school every week. Her regular ed. first grade teacher doesn’t make special allowances for her language delay. She’s expected to learn at the same pace because I think she can handle the challenge. She scores well above average in Math and just about average in everything else.
So I’d say she’s doing really well!
My plan was to work with her every single day on my own along with her therapies. Just throwing in whatever I could without too much pressure. Always asking her questions and getting her to show and tell me how to do things. We got her the Vital Sounds listening therapy set and I think that helped. Some people think it’s a crock but the program impressed me. Not just language but sensory issues eased up almost immediately. Also I have always tried to focus on her strengths and motivate with tangible rewards. She loves math and she’s very good at it, so I get her math games and we play Yahtzee. Or rather she BEATS me at Yahtzee.
Being around her now some people don’t even see a speech delay unless they ask one of those who/what/why questions. I’m betting by the time she’s twelve she will be at her grade level or near it.
I understand what you mean by feeling guilty. I was a painter when I got pregnant so I wondered about the fumes and environments I worked in. Before I knew I was pregnant I smoked 1.5 packs a day and drank sometimes. I worried she was having problems because I had some PPD so I felt like maybe I wasn’t affectionate or attentive enough (knowing deep down I was plenty affectionate and attentive). I think what you’re feeling is normal but don’t let it get you down. Focus on the future and you won’t need to worry about the past.
Thanks! I’m enjoying everything I’m learning so far and I’m excited at the possibility of getting a job where I help people. We’ll see how I do during clinicals and my internship next year.
As for your son’s mixing-up of the vowels, it depends on the type of patterns. There are articulation disorders and phonological disorders. Children with articulation disorders tend to have the same repeating sound mistakes (“boat” for “boot”, “cope” for “coop” and so on) whereas in a phonological disorder the child can form the sounds but does not understand the rules of the language. This means that, for example, the child knows that a plural for an unvoiced ending such as the word cat is cats, with the unvoiced s. However, the child may try to overextend that to a voiced ending and say dogs, instead of it being properly pronounced with a voiced ending (sounding like /dogz/) or saying foxs instead of the correct sound of “fox-es.” A child with a phonological disorder may also use one sound and substitute it for multiple sounds.
Or even as mentioned above, it could be CAS. I haven’t learned much about apraxia beyond the neurological anatomy yet.
I wish I could explain better and it’s a shame as I just finished this class, but I don’t want to branch off into information that I’m not familiar with. Unfortunately, the teacher was a real nut* and didn’t teach the class that well. With stuff like this, there is only so much you can teach yourself with confidence! Not to mention that there are still some debates as to whether phonological disorders should differ from articulation disorders as this is a relatively new seperation, but I believe that the distinction can make for a better target of treatment.
Anywhooo, it’s a little hard to tell without going back into the past and assessing your child. But now they have these really cool assessment tests that are quick, entertaining for kids and also easy to score to tell parents right away what the likely diagnosis is.
*Nut as in scrapped 1/3 of her classes by cancelling, scrapped our second big project, and scrapped the final. Tenure does some crazy things to people.
My youngest son has a speech delay, and I started freaking out when he wasn’t talking/verbalizing at all before he was 2, so I got him into speech therapy right away. I freaked out so much because my oldest son has autism and apraxia and other developmental delays, so I was certainly worried.
Now youngest is 5, in kindergarten, and he will not shut up. He’s a little hard to understand at times, because he talks really really really fast, and he still gets a little speech therapy at school (mostly to help him learn to slow down and enunciate). He’s a little annoyed that we kept pestering him to talk for the past four years, and now he gets in trouble for talking in class.
I’m assuming you have had extensive tests as well for trying to identify the cause (for example ruling out autism).
I have not much to add except we had a therapist convinced Serena had apraxia. Turns out the therapist diagnosed 99% of the kids with apraxia. Also turns out that Serena is on the autism spectrum.
Serena spoke about 20 words at age 5 1/2 when we moved back to the US. 18 months later she now speaks hundreds, unprompted sentences, working on her “w” questions, and some really basic conversations.
So, my experience is that this can take a looong time. Think ultramarathon rather than a sprint. Just keep after it. Best of luck.
Yeah, it was vowels. But before, during and after our period of not being able to understand him he would sometimes act out words…the thing that sticks out in my mind was one time he was thirsty and, straining in my arms, he pointed at the sink faucet, turned his fist and said, “shhhhh.” The sound of water gushing out.
He was so frustrated. Threw tot tantrums and was sometimes close to tears. Working with the speech therapist unlocked the door for him.
My third kid didn’t say even “mom” till he was almost three. We were raising him bilingual and some speech delay was expected but it became clear that he wasn’t going anywhere after 2 and a half years.
After deafness and autism were discarded he went into therapy. One year in a mostly behaviourist therapy made him start using word but it wasn’t until he went into a more total-physical-response therapy with lots of singning and repeating “we’re wasing your hads, see, we’re washing your hand. The soap and water wash your hands…”
Three times a week for two years made him start speaking although by the time he was five he was just using sentences. His therapist has helped kids with autism, down syndorme and even cerebral palsy to speak.
He’s now almost 9 and almost has caught up.
Always talk to your kid. Say every action as if you’re doing a radio show and give him reasons to speak, almost like bribing. For my kid it was food or candy. Don’t accept simple pointing.
One last piece pf advice:Never let a diagnosis put a limit to your expectations. My kid was diagnosed with dysphasia (the most severe level of speech impediment short of not speaking at all) and his second therapist told us that if we let the original diagnosis guide us we would accpet little as enough.
I didn’t talk until I was three, when I got my first hearing aids. The last time I took a verbal IQ test, I got a word that NOBODY else had ever gotten. My verbal IQ is SKY HIGH!
