Is your child's delayed speech your fault?

It’s very rewarding for parents to witness their child’s vocabulary increase daily. It can therefore cause a great deal of stress and anxiety if a child suddenly develops speech difficulties. Conflicting advice from friends and relatives, well-meaning as it may be, doesn’t help either.

It’s not unusual for some young children to go through a non-fluent phase and most of them regain their speech later on. However, a few of them may develop a stammer. Early diagnosis is important in order to stop the problem from worsening.

 

 

When she is non-fluent

When a child is non-fluent, the rhythm and flow of speech is interfered with. A child with the disorder hesitates and stumbles over words and syllables. The hesitancy distracts the listener from the message the child is trying to deliver. Communication becomes jumbled and distressing.

A child’s speech and language are developing rapidly between the ages of three and six. It’s a time when she is learning new sounds and trying hard to express her own ideas. Navigating her tongue through tricky consonants becomes a problem when she is also learning to speak. Parents of a non-fluent child feel it is as if the child’s brain works too fast for her tongue.

It’s natural for parents to get concerned and if the non-fluency is persistent or erratic, parents become anxious, irritated and impatient. They feel the child might be seeking attention but is unlikely for the child to do so because they are generally far less manipulative than we think of them.

How to help

Parents often experience a lot of anxiety when their child is non-fluent. Often, therapists wonder who they are helping - the child or the parent. If the parent controlled the anxiety, there would probably be very little need for advice. The child might overcome the storm with ease quite unaware of any ‘problem.’

Once a child starts stammering the chances are that she will notice people reacting differently to her communication. That’s when real problems start. She quickly learns to associate a certain type of behaviour with an adult reaction and will pick up any waves of anxiety.

Some important guidelines:

? Don’t pass on your work worries to the child. Listen to her in a simple and natural way. Give her time to get her message out. Don’t hesitate to help her out with a word if she is really stuck, but do this in an unselfconscious and natural way. In case of several children in the family, give each child a ‘turn’ to speak and allow them to be listened to during their time without interruption. This gives the non-fluent child a turn.

? Speak to her in a simple and clear manner.

? Don’t correct her or ask her to repeat what she has just said. Repetition is a very different mechanism in the brain to the selection of phrases, and doing this can be frustrating both for the parent and the child.

? Sing and recite nursery rhymes together.

? Don’t ask her too many pointless questions as it puts undue strain on her. Let her talk when she wants to and not when she’s asked to.

Signs to look out for

 Has this difficulty been going on for several months?  Has your child been stammering since she started to talk?  Does she seem to ‘block’-get stuck-on specific letters or certain syllables? Does she twist her face or use some special body movement to help get the words out, such as clicking her fingers?  Does she seem to be aware that she ‘stammers’ and concerned about it?  Do you have a family history of stammering and are you worried that your child may have inherited this?

If you answer yes to any of these questions, it might be a good idea to talk to a speech therapist.