If you suspect your child has a speech delay problem, you may be worried about what you should do. We have experienced this same anxiety and we were not sure how best to handle it. The following steps are the route that helped us get to a point of what was right in our own path to helping our child’s speech delay.

Make an appointment with your pediatrician to discuss your concerns about your child’s possible speech delay. The pediatrician will talk to you about your concerns and recommend a speech therapist if a problem is suspected. Sometimes your health insurance will require a referral from your pediatrician. The main thing is to get your child properly evaluated.

Make sure you find a speech therapist that works well with your child. It will be unproductive if your child does not work well with the speech therapist. It is important that you sit in with your child during the initial speech evaluation. You can see the evaluation process and determine for yourself if it is an accurate evaluation of your child. Remember that you know your child better than anybody. Sometimes these evaluations are not accurate due to a variety of reasons. For example you child might not have had a nap and may not be interested in the speech evaluation process. So it is a good idea to make an appointment time that works well for your child. Smaller children might have a more productive speech session in the morning. Read the rest of this entry »

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If you suspect that your child is showing signs of a speech delay it is worth further investigation so that appropriate intervention can be sought as early as possible. Almost one in twenty adults suffers from some sort of speech or language disorder. If diagnosed and corrected before the child reaches school age, it will have less impact on their overall intellectual development.

Normal speech development begins with the newborn as they discover that they can use their mouths to produce an array of soft sounds. This later develops into babble and by the age of 12 months most babies will be able to say ‘ma’ and ‘da’ or even the occasional word. Each baby has their own unique developmental timeline and an individual’s schedule could be brought forward or delayed by weeks or even months for no apparent reason. As a parent you should always trust your instincts. If something with your baby’s development doesn’t seem quite right you should always seek medical advice.

Brain damage can be attributed as the main interfering condition associated with speech delay and it is usually associated with an intellectual disability or cerebral palsy. Hearing problems or cleft palate are physical disabilities that may hinder the ability to articulate. Speech delay is also an indication of undiagnosed autism spectrum disorder. Read the rest of this entry »

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