Are you trying desperately to understand your child’s speech?
I’ve been there. It’s SOOOOO frustrating for you, and your child. I’ll share what I learned in all our years of speech therapy.
For a long while, I couldn’t understand most of what my son said. He started all his developmental milestones on time. Sometimes even early, but it was like he couldn’t finish the development. Speech was one of these. He would say words but it wasn’t long before we couldn’t understand what he was trying to say.
At the age of three I took him to be evaluated by a speech therapist. The therapist said he was fine. I pushed.
I’m his mother and I could understand less than 50% of his speech.
Everyone else could understand maybe 25% of what he was saying. I insisted we start speech therapy despite the therapist telling me it wasn’t necessary “yet.”
Despite strongly disagreeing with the therapist and him later being proved wrong as my son needed years of speech therapy, he also gave me some of the best advice I heard in all our years of therapy.
At this stage, my son was very frustrated because he couldn’t be understood which caused a lot of meltdowns. I honestly had no clue half the time what he was trying to tell me. The therapist said to always repeat back to my son what I thought I had heard.
“Oh, you want your blanket?”
This gives your child a chance to give you feedback. It wasn’t the blanket he wanted so he tries again.
“You want your basket?”
Yes, sometimes I still couldn’t tell what he was saying but this back and forth of me asking if I was understand him correctly, helped him to understand that I was listening and trying to understand. Getting him to repeat it gave both of us practice. He would still get impatient and frustrated but this method lowered both of our frustration levels.
Whenever I write about speech delays I always have parents ask if they should be concerned about their child especially when they don’t feel that their child’s doctors are listening to them.
Here are some basic guidelines.
Age 2: doesn’t use at least 25 words
Age 2 1/2: doesn’t use unique two-word phrases or noun-verb combinations
Age 3: doesn’t use at least 200 words, doesn’t ask for things by name, hard to understand even if you live with them
Any age: unable to say previously learned words
Healthline
As you can see, your child isn’t developmentally behind on some sounds until they are much older. It depends on the sound and your child.
Another thing to check is your child’s hearing.
Part of my son’s problem? He would never tell us his ears hurt when he was little. The only way we ever knew he had an ear infection is if we happened to be at the doctor for something else. The doctors later decided that he had many ear infections over the years.
When he was 5- (yes it took us a while to figure this out), he went to the audiologist for the first time. What we found was that he could barely hear anything. He was always replying to any questions with the reply of “Yah.” We had P.E. Tubes put in and when the ENT doctor came out after the surgery he said his ears were so full of fluid there was no way he could hear much and that it was so thick it was never going to go anywhere. After the surgery? He was suddenly answering questions with something other than “Yah.”
There are many things that can affect a child’s speech ability. If you are concerned, address it with your child’s pediatrician and they will be able to refer you to a speech therapist who can evaluate your child.
And as always, I’m happy to answer any questions you may have about our journey through speech issues or to hear ideas of things that worked for you.
Thanks for stopping by and spending time with me.
