Ming, a speech therapist, explains that childhood apraxia of speech is often over-diagnosed and affects roughly 1 in 1,000 children. She recommends waiting until age 4 or 5 to diagnose, and emphasizes teaching alternative communication like writing or gestures while speech develops, rather than focusing on the label.
Questions this video answers
Ming @ Agents of Speech.
March 23, 2022.
About 1 out of 1,000 children (0.1%).
After age 3; she prefers around 4–5 years for more reliable assessment.
Chapters
Hey, this is Ming here, a speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com and today we want to talk about. Does your child have apraxia of speech? Okay. And let's get it out of the way. The awareness for apraxia has gone way out of the roof in recent years. And more and more mothers know about this term and they've been asking me. Okay. And I've been getting more and more of these inquiries. And I believe actually apraxia is quite difficult thing to diagnose, especially at a younger age. So when I hear, like, are my colleagues who are therapists or teachers suspecting apraxia to a child who was in kindergarten or even in preschool, I feel a little bit hesitant to. To indulge in that conversation because I really don't know. And to be honest, the prevalence rate of apraxia of speech is rather low. So it's at around 1 out of 1000 children actually will have it. And that's pretty low. That's 0.1% of all children. Right. So given that fact, I think that it's rather. I wouldn't say if your child has it. I don't know if it's lucky or unlucky. Right. I really think it's something that you have to bear in mind. It might be something else or it might be just that their language and speech hasn't developed fully yet. Okay. So the earliest you can get childhood apraxia of speech, I would like to call it more of apraxia of speech because CAs, as they call it, childhood apraxia of speech extends into adulthood most of the time anyways. The diagnosis criteria is that at least the child needs to be over 3. It might be different for different countries, different states. Within the United States, if you're there, or myself, there isn't really a guideline in this country that I'm staying here right now. And that's the problem is that like a practice of speech isn't widely understood directly or we don't know enough about it anyways. Right. So therefore it's better to get your child diagnosed after three. From my own experience around like four or five, that would be a better age to try because you need to go through a lot of repetition, go through all the sounds, gather a lot of data in order to conclude. Okay. And most of the time, a lot of speech therapists are not comfortable with doing such an assessment or giving such a diagnosis because it requires a lot of specialist knowledge about this. Okay. And for anyone, like, for anyone who is below the Age of three. In some places around the world, we will write, apraxia of speech cannot be ruled out. Okay. Or masked by whatever other diagnosis. Like, you don't know, Suspected. Yes. Or whatever. So these kind of. This kind of wordings will happen inside of assessment reports or something, like having problems with planning movements required for speech or like, disorder, motor planning disorder, suspected. These kind of wordings. You will find it. Okay? But the biggest thing for me, at the very least, is focusing on the importance of language over speech. That's number one. Okay? And that's something you have to think about as a parent, is not to go down a rabbit hole and think about whether, is this apraxia or not? Because whether it is or not, that doesn't change away what you're doing at therapy right now, especially if your child is under three. So what I mean by that is that I have had a few apraxic cases that are confirmed and confirmed by multiple therapists. And I can tell you by the time that they are like, I have one who's a teenager, one who's an adult who had apraxia since day one of their lives, which kind of sucks, but now they're getting progressively better every. Every day, every week, every month, like, getting better and better and better. Right. And I would tell you that if it wasn't for the mothers choosing to teach them some form of way of expressing themselves. For one was writing a lot, playing piano, using a lot more gestures. The other one is fluent in American Sign Language, and she could talk to me just using signs, you know, that's how fluent she is. And that has helped her immensely. All right? And there are days where, you know, speech performance goes up and down. It's not always like a straight line consistent because aos. One of the defining features of that is inconsistency. Okay? And there are times where it becomes really difficult to. The more they want to do it, the more they cannot. So. So I'm not diving into what apraxia of speech is, because that's exactly what I don't want to do. To do to you is to feed you information to make you think even more and think into a corner to yourself and say, oh, that's exactly my. Like, my kid. But at the same time, you won't know if you haven't had enough exposure to what apraxia really is. The most important thing is to focus on the language and teach them as much stuff as possible so that they can communicate without speech when it becomes hard. Okay? Make sure that they understand what you're saying to them, make sure that they know. They learn how to read, learn how to write these things as they age. It will help them a lot in school and so on. Okay? And the last thing I want to talk about is, is the differential diagnosis, okay? And speech disorders. We need to know the reason. Okay. I know that a lot of times that we do as a speech therapist is seeing the. Seeing the symptom and trying to treat the same symptom. Right. But at the same time, we need to know the reason why. So, for instance, if it's motor planning with apraxia of speech. I know this sounds like jargon, and you don't know what the heck that is. That's fine right now. Okay? Just listen up. The biggest confusion between apraxia and other speech disorders is apraxia and dysarthria. Dysarthria is the weakness in the oral muscles, the weakness in articulators in the mouth that lead to speech errors. Okay? So given that if you use a way of teaching apraxia for a dysarthria child, it won't be optimal. Okay. And vice versa. All right. Am I saying that it's. You're going to go the wrong path and teach bad things? No. In therapy, it's hardly ever the case. It's rather impossible that as you're teaching, the child will get worse. Okay. Unless you're doing something really bad. Okay. Which we might discuss in later videos. Okay. So that's all about apraxia of speech. If you have more questions, put it down in the comments comment section below. Ask me, and I will try my best to answer you, whether it's in comments or in a separate video. Okay? That's it. Thank you very much. And if you haven't, go to agentsofspeech. Com checklist, grab a free bunch of tools and toys, a list of what I recommend you to get when you start home therapy. Okay? Thank you so much. See ya.
