While parenting your toddler, you may come across a phase when you think your kid isn’t
- learning to speak words,
- pronounce words correctly,
- make right sounds or sentences etc.
This can be a problem with speech or delay in learning speech. Whatever the underlying reason may be, sometimes things get resolved automatically with time, patience, and care.
However, sometimes simple parenting and counseling are also not enough. Sometimes you have to take your child to a therapist.
Therapists who help with learning and correction of speech are called speech pathologists.
Some clear indications help the parents check if their children need any such professional help.
When your child has a Speech Problem
Speech problems can be of varied patterns. This may be with their
- language,
- understanding it,
- using the sounds and voice correctly,
- pronouncing the words,
- hearing things right,
- perceiving it right, or
- writing it perfectly.
These problems hinder communication skills and delay a child’s normal communicative abilities. Finally, your child may suffer from the
- disability of language,
- speaking,
- pronunciation,
- grammar, and
- understanding.
Warning Signs a Child needs a Speech Pathologist
The following observations will help you realize if the child needs speech therapy:
- If you have a problem understanding your child’s language or other people are reporting the same about the child, then there might be a problem.
- Your child may give a wrong impression about his age before others, just because he has trouble communicating.
- Sometimes you may find your kid being bullied or teased for how they talk or try to communicate.
- The use of words and vocabulary development are prolonged compared to other kids of the same age.
- Stuttering.
- Interactions and playing with other kids may be abnormal, and your child may have inappropriate or odd ways of interacting.
- The child seems to be having difficulty in reading or writing, especially with grammar.
If the child is showing any or some of these symptoms, then as a parent, you must understand it needs special attention and care. You can contact a speech pathologist nearby and get things diagnosed with advanced testing methods.
How a Speech Pathologist can Help
These days, there are many advanced ways of detecting the issue. Problems in speech may be due to many reasons.
Congenital disabilities, anomalies, defects brought later due to diseases or injuries, trouble in proper brain functioning, nerve problems, chromosomal defects, confidence, mental issues, and many other problems can bother a child in different ways. This can be detected only when advanced tests are done with the child to detect the real underlying problem.
Based on the diagnosis, the speech pathologist then decides a course of treatment, training, or counseling sessions, as you would prefer to say.
For every problem, a different and dedicated training and counseling module was developed by the global standards. If you take the child to the speech pathologist, then remarkable differences in learning ability, speech development, and communication abilities will be apparent during training and completion of the course.
Every kid has a different rate of learning and development. Each child is also different.
Hence, it’s not always mandatory that a slow learner has speech and communication problems. It may just be a slow learning curve.
To detect whether there’s a problem, you can casually get the child checked up by a therapist too.
