Ming from Agents of Speech breaks down three warning signs of speech delay: your child isn't using two-word phrases by age 2, can't answer why questions by 4, or needs gestures to understand commands. Get a checklist at agentsofspeech.com.
Hey, this is Ming here, speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com in today's video, I want to talk about the three signs that your child might have. Speech and language delay. So take a look. If you're watching this video, then that means you're searching for if your child has a speech or a language delay or both. I just want to tell you that to stay calm and absorb as much information as you can, and at the same time, find a therapist, a professional that you can trust who has a good synergy with your child, someone who you are very comfortable with listening to and actually to seek advice from. Because the matter of fact is you're going to hear different advice, opinions, suggestions from different professionals. So choose one that you think you can stick with and you can actually listen to. Okay? So with that aside, let's go on to the three signs, speech and language delay. And particularly, I want to talk more about language delay, because a speech delay or a speech disorder or speech sound disorder, articulation disorder, these kind of words are all mixed up together in some places, okay? And what that means is it's just a problem with accurately saying speech sounds, meaning pronunciation, which might get frowned upon if I put it that way. But as long as you understand, okay, speech is the way that we make sounds from our mouth, okay? If there is disorder with it, that means some of the sounds coming out of mouth are erroneous, meaning there are errors. Okay? So three signs. Number one is that your child isn't speaking much. There's a limited use of vocabs. There's a limited use of words. There isn't enough for them to actually use in a daily life. So, for example, by 2 years old, your child should be speaking in two word sentences, meaning, even if it's grammatically incorrect, like mommy eats or daddy eats or eat banana or whatever, even if the grammatical markers aren't there, they should be able to actually use two words in one sentence at the very least. Okay? And you might ask, hey, when is the latest that is okay for my child to actually speak one word at a time? All right? And that usually is one and a half years old. That's the latest that a child should acquire a word. Anything after that is rather risky in terms of language delay. All right? Sign number two is that your child has problems with answering questions. So a lot of times parents ask me, hey, my child doesn't answer my questions. Some people are gonna disagree with me. And if you search online, there will be 1,000 different milestones that you can find over the Internet. Okay. And milestones are very tricky because sometimes you might see that, oh, your child is supposed to answer Y questions at like 2 years old or 3 or 4. But I'm saying that at the latest, if your child is at 4 and cannot answer Y questions, there's a high risk, high chance that he or she might be language delayed. All right, what do I mean by your child cannot answer questions? So anytime that your child actually ignores you, repeats your question, give you a puzzled look, give the wrong answer, or if you ask a why question, the typical response and interaction would be this, hey, why are you sad? And then your child says, because I'm sad. So there's not much of a reason behind it. They're just, they know that the form might be because, the word to use might be because, but they don't know the content isn't really there. So the last sign, the third sign number three, is unable to follow commands. So this is something you can try out by yourself. Alright? And a lot of parents report to me, especially the first visit when I ask, hey, can your child answer to you and understand your commands? Usually the parents will say, yeah, they'll understand when I tell them to throw it in the bin, when I tell them to switch off the light, when I tell them to go wash their face or their hands or brush their teeth, they totally understand. Well, the thing is, there are two things that language delayed children are very good at is to use their eyes to compensate for the lack of listening. So this is more like using the context to understand what's happening. So let me give you example. Let's say that I, right now I'm in Indonesia, I don't know the words here, so I go, drive along and then suddenly the guard stops me or the cop stops me and just says something. And I'm just going to guess what's going to happen next, right? With all the gestures and stuff and they're talking like, oh, you should park over there. Although I don't know the exact words, I'm going to do it because I have the knowledge that given that situation, I should do that. All right? Same as your child. So for instance, if you have a scrunched up piece of tissue paper and you say, hey, throw this in the bin, they're going to do it because there's a context of a piece of rubbish and they don't really need to understand or listen to what you say, all right? Or if you point at the light and you say, turn that off, you don't even need to talk, they can also understand what you're talking about. So try it out without any gestures, without any context. Say something. See if they can understand your instruction or command. Another way to know is to ask the teacher at school. See how they are doing at school. If your child is already in kindergarten, just ask the teacher, can they follow certain instructions? Can they follow other classmates to do certain tasks or anything? Okay, so with that said, I know right now at this time of recording, it's a very bad time to actually talk about this stuff because after I talk about this, you would want to have an assessment with a qualified speech therapist. And the thing is, right now, like, the therapy centers are opening slowly, but at the same time, if you don't feel good to go there, please don't. All right, and what I wanna do is to give you a checklist that of all the toys and the tools that I use in my own clinic and what I recommend to my. My clients who are staying at home. And everyone's just working from home from now on. So go ahead to agentsofspeech.com checklist to grab that PDF, all right? It's very short. It just tells you what I use and what I tell people to get. All right, so with that said, if you have any questions specifically with your child, you can also put them in the comment section or you could just find me over email when you get the PDF, because you'll be also subscribed to our awesome newsletter and you can just reply me there. All right, So I can't wait to talk to you and I'll see you in the next one real soon. Bye.
