Speech Delay: What To Do And When To Worry

So when should you start be worried about your child? So a speech delay or a speech and language delay, that's the correct term, means that your child is slower than typical developing children for six months. So six months is actually where we start calling things a delay. And you cannot look at only one milestone. You need to look at the full scope of it. And obviously people have different diagnostic criteria. It really is different everywhere in the world, especially just in one city where I'm from in Hong Kong, some people would argue over diagnosis and I would believe that in bigger countries like the USA and United Kingdom and Australia, there's going to be even bigger discrepancies, especially that there's insurance involved. So when should you start worrying? The general rule of thumb is that your child needs to be above 2 years old. Right. Then half a year of a delay means that your child has no words or just start saying a single word. Right? So then that would be a delay. That's the easiest rule of thumb that I have for you, is that if Your child is 2 and he or she hasn't spoken a word yet, then, yeah, delay most probably at least for six months and you can go see a speech therapist to get an assessment. So the thing is, there, there are different points to it. So at one and a half, that's when the whole world agrees that one and a half years old is the latest, that a child should speak a single word. Right. And what, what actually a word means is that there's a sound that is distinguishable from other sounds, that there's a meaning. For instance, if they say baba for like water and sasa for something else is a bad example because children don't develop the S sound until much later on. So as long as there's a difference in the sound that links to a different meaning, then that's a word already. Okay? Okay. The correctness of the word, how it's pronounced and articulated isn't really a real issue just yet. At two years old, Right? One and a half, that's the latest. Two, they should be starting to mix up words and make phrases. It doesn't need to be grammatically correct, it's just that they're putting two concepts together and that two and a half, they should be forming some early sentences where it's more, a little bit more grammatically correct, but still two to three word phrases. At three, it'll be three word phrases, three word sentences, and then we skip to four immediately, which is they're able to answer some why questions. They're able to Say some simple sequences of events like first this, then this, last that they're able to describe how to make a cup of tea or whatever. At five they should be speaking in full sentences that can be made into a full story. So if you ask what happened at school and then they can say, oh, today I went to school, this happened, that happened, whatever, and last whatever. This is around what we would, I wouldn't go through the milestones after, because after five or six, because that's a little bit more complicated about the things that is more intertwined with academic stuff. So when should you start worrying? As I told you, at two, if they're not talking, go right at two and a half. If they're not making sentence like two word phrases, go at three. If they're not making full sentences, then go right at four. If they're not able to string sentences together to make a series of events, go see a therapist. Right? If they're five and then they're not able to tell you a story, go see a therapist. Right. And how about the speech part? So speech and language are different and I can only talk about speech and language because I'm a speech and language pathologist. Right. So the speech is about articulation, how well it's pronounced and stuff. So at two we usually do not really care about articulation, it's more about the language. Can they actually make sentences? Right. At three, then we'll start looking, right? If that's we, we, we have a term called speech intelligibility, meaning how much of a percentage does a stranger understand your child? Right. So if they're three and it's at like 70%, then you should see a speech therapist and that it's permissible in, in some countries. And I would say if you're in a high competitive environment in Asia, then if it's 70% at 3, then you should go check, check out, check it out and do an articulation test with a speech therapist to know which sounds are actually erroneous, as we call that. There's an error and it usually goes in a pattern or it doesn't. And a speech assessment or articulation assessment is very important because we need to know why that certain sound is missing, mispronounced, replaced, Whatever the error that is, right. If your child is older, 4, 5, and their intelligibility is still 70%, go see a speech therapist right away and just deal with it. Because down the line there are some other issues and I don't know, I cannot speak for your Country. There are some places where bullying is a pop, is a problem. Unable to speak as well as peers, and your child may or may not know, usually they are a little bit more. And what happens is that they would rather not speak. When they rather not speak, then the language will not be catching up as fast as, as the peers as well. So dealing with it, letting your child know that, oh, there are some sounds that you cannot say. Giving them the tools to learn how to do it will increase the confidence. Right? So there you are, there you go. Hopefully if you've missed anything, go back in the video and listen back again and you'll basically know when to see a speech therapist. And the last thing I want to talk about is behavior, right? Because one of my friends from high school, he has a son and he was saying how the teacher nowadays, like they love complaining. I don't know why, they're like, oh, your son is like hyperactive, he's going jumping around, he can't even sit down. And I guess that's not very acceptable in Asia. But if your child is like two to two and a half, you would have to understand their natural attention span is within minutes. Right? So if your child cannot sit down, I think it's permissible to wait until he's three to three and a half to see if there are any improvements. Right? And a lot of times you just single out that milestone and say that, oh, because they can't sit down and have joint attention or whatever. And then they would say, oh, it's a risk of adhd. Basically. That's what my friend told me. And I'm like, dude, you cannot make an assumption about ADHD or make a diagnosis about ADHD until 5 or 6. Other than that, before that, we can only think about how to make it better. So I really don't like it when, when teachers point out a problem and not try to solve it, that's not the best idea and maybe they don't have the tools to fix it, right. So then they would push the child to do some sort of assessment which is in this not existing for a two year old, right? So behaviors, these things, like if they are like self stimulation, whatever, at two, do their own thing, they're in their own world, they're making sounds and whatnot, they're doing echolalia still, you can get autism screen or whatever and teachers will try their best to talk you into doing some sort of assessment because that's their job, to screen out anything so that you don't. We don't Miss anyone and that's the job. They would rather have false positives rather than missing out. Right. So that's a good logic. I can live by that. But. Right. Especially in Asia, I would push you to do autism assessment after two and a half, at the very least a three is a little better. Right. And is there going to be a diagnosis how it work? I cannot tell you all the details here. And whether there is a diagnosis or not, it doesn't really matter. Like just from me working in the industry for 10 years now, there's actually no benefit to it other than you can get more resources. And the last thing is if you're scared right now, if you're fearful right now, that's very normal. I just want to share a story before we go. I had a parent from China contact me and she was telling me about how her son, who's three and a half, who hasn't spoken a word yet, she was just thinking, oh, maybe, you know, the sun's just a little late. Finally they got the son checked up back in China and it was a diagnosis for autism. Right. And I'm not going to talk about whether, how accurate those diagnosis Cs are in China. I have no idea whatsoever. So I'm not going to try and dismiss whether it is or not. But what it did to that mother was that she knows that she has a spring into action, number one. And number two, that you know, she couldn't believe. And although the signs were all there and that her child was not speaking a non verbal, it's easiest, easy for us to say, dude, of course there's going to be a possibility being a mother, especially a parent, especially being a mother, I would say is really difficult to accept a diagnosis that, you know, and I've seen it many times over, that fathers, men like myself, have an easier time to think, okay, what should I do next? Right. Because men are more like problem solvers, right? We see a nail and we want to hammer it in. Whereas mothers, they tend to think a lot more. And because the child came from their body, it's really difficult for them to, for you maybe to accept that. And I understand that. I will never relate. I cannot tell you because I will never be a mother. I can only be a father. And it took me an hour talking to that parent through a consultation to, to tell her, look, there's no fast ways, there's only slow ways, right? Anyone who tells you that, oh, your child's gonna speak in two weeks, probably lying, I don't know whether your child's gonna be verbal or not. The only way that we will know is that we try. And the process of trying is gonna be horrendously difficult. You're gonna lose sleep, right? So you're losing sleep right now. Why not just try and it's easy for me to say, but she finally understood the logic behind it. Because I've been having this same type of conversation with parents all over the world for the past, I don't know, four or five years. You can check my YouTube channel. I've been making content for four years now, right? So if you want some help like that, just go to our free community with over 13,000 parents inside. It's in www.agentsofspeech.com course. So why is it slash courses? Because we also have free courses there. It's over 800 USD worth of courses that we used to sell for money. Now it's all free because we just don't want to answer the same questions. We want parents to be well educated before we intervene. And we also want to get rid of the problem of not everyone has a credit card. And some people think that, oh, it's a scam or whatever, it's all for you for free. And hopefully you will go through those courses and help your child before and prove those people wrong who gave your child a wrong diagnosis and that they said it was a severe case and actually was a mild case or actually they even caught up after a year. So that's all for me this week. I'll see you in the next video soon. Bye.