Does my child need speech therapy?

This is a question many parents dread asking themselves when they begin to realize something may not be right with their child's speech. It can be a tough question to answer, given that we are the ones who have spent the most time with our children and have worked out their nuanced ways of communicating. We essentially become deaf to our own child's issues. If you are here reading this, then something has made you question and search for answers. Perhaps someone mentioned speech therapy to you, or someone exposed the unintelligible speech of your child through an attempted conversation. Here, I will go through the top 5 questions you can ask yourself so you can work out whether your child needs to or would benefit from speech therapy.

Before I get into it, I must tell you I am not a speech therapist or a doctor. I am a mother who went through this realization and understanding that my child needed some form of speech therapy and that I had been deaf to his issue because I had learned his ways of communicating. It wasn't until my son turned six that his speech issues became undeniably prominent. I then began to spend a portion of the day teaching him techniques so that he could master the sounds he had spent so long mispronouncing. He has improved in leaps and bounds, and his speech is becoming clearer with every passing day. I made my own resources to better teach him and ensure he had visual stimuli he could connect with and understand (there's a link to the resource at the bottom of this article.) He's now 8 years old, almost 9, and his speech has significantly improved. There is still some room for improvement, just as there is for most people nowadays, but he is understandable now.

Let's discuss the top five questions you should ask yourself to determine whether speech therapy is needed. Note that these are the same questions I asked myself when I began questioning my son's speech.

This is a tricky question to answer when you have young children. We can justify our child's articulation issues by stating their age. This was an issue for me as my child is very tall for his age, so people expected him to speak beyond his years. The expectations were always short-lived after he opened his mouth and I explained his age and his inherited height. You can imagine how unhelpful this has been in identifying his speech issues, as I had always had a reason to justify it. Now, I have learned the truth of it: if your child is four and talking in sentences but isn't understandable by the age of five, you may be witnessing the early stages of the problem. This may be hard to hear – trust me, I know – because, as parents, we learn to understand our children no matter how they communicate, making it harder for us to know when to trust in the child's development and when to intervene.

So, how do you know when this is a real issue?

​If you find that others constantly ask your child to 'Say it again' or 'Speak louder', followed by 'I can't hear you' or 'I don't understand what you're saying,' this could be a sign that your child requires some special attention in their speech to help them clearly define tongue placement, lip posture, and other mechanics of speech.

At first, this indicator may sound cute, but if left unchecked, it soon becomes a habit—a habit that becomes a nightmare as time passes and your child is still using a /w/ for a /r/ at the age of six and getting /k/ and /t/ mixed up, too. We as parents can explain many of these issues away, but regardless of the reason, speech therapy can help to rectify this issue and possibly expose other issues you didn't realize were there.

Some children find the /l/ sound hard to master; this sound involves hitting the alveolar ridge at the top of the mouth behind the top teeth. No matter how often they see you do it, some children don't seem to get the sound right because they're missing the direction of putting their tongue on that ridge. Tongue control can also be an issue, not just for the /l/ sound but also for the /th/ and the /r/ sounds. These sounds require your child to have the ability to move their tongue into a specific position. If your child is having trouble with these sounds, it could be a sign that they need additional help and prompting.

I'm not talking about words like 'onomatopoeia.' I'm talking about words like 'favorite,' 'probably,' and 'actually.' This issue may be understandable for younger children, but at 5 years and up, your child should be able to say these words accurately. Therefore, if they cannot do so, it may be a sign to get some additional resources to teach your child how to execute these larger words with visuals that help direct their speech. This issue is often caused by a problem with the position of the tongue, teeth, or lip. These large words can be broken down into smaller fragments to make them easier to digest and repeat.

If this is the case, it could indicate your child struggles to voice themselves or lacks confidence in what or how they are saying something. Regardless of whether this is a lack of vocabulary, confidence, or articulation, speech therapy can build your child in all these areas, no matter what age your child is. Of course, it helps if your child is younger: they learn quicker and haven't formed long-lasting habits yet. But there is still hope for older children to learn and be able to speak perfectly, too – they just need more time.

Ultimately, it's easy to gain understanding through careful observation and listening to our children as they speak and communicate with us and others.

> Are they making the correct sounds?
> Would I have understood what my child just said if I were someone else?
> Is their tongue in the right place when they're making speech sounds?

These things help us identify issues and adopt new practices to rectify them. I have also found that helping my son has improved my own speech. I didn't realize how lax I had become in pronunciation. Children will inevitably copy you and your speech patterns, so the final and probably most important questions to ask are:

Are my other children having issues with their speech?
Am I pronunciation my words correctly and effectively?

It can be easy to fall into a self-deprecation spiral and feel like terrible parents, but there is much that can be done to help our children, and sitting idle is not one of them.

The Super Power of Speech Toolkit
Just &27 $17

You can do this! If you want a free option to teach your child, check out YouTube and other platforms to find resources and videos that teach the fundamentals of speech therapy and the techniques to help your child speak well.

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