The No 1 Cause For Speech Delay and Autism Misdiagnosis

The number one cause of speech delay and autism misdiagnosis is actually preventable. And watch this video if you want to learn how to spot it, prevent it and intervene. My name is Ming from agentsofspeech.com we teach parents how to do speech therapy at home. Alright? So the number one cause I'm not going to beat around a bush is hearing loss. And it's not any type of hearing loss because there are a few. The one that we're going to talk about is middle ear infection, commonly known as glue ear. So glue ear creates a underwater kind of sensation for children and children who have an infection, have a fever or whatever, they may have a hearing loss. Now you might ask, why is it so prone that children have this middle ear infection? And it's because that we have tubes in our ears, right? This tube, it's flat and I'll show a picture of it right here. It's flat for children and as we age it gets slanted and slanted. If we have any fluids that are trapped inside of our ear, it's easier to dispel. If you have fluids trapped inside for children and like the tubes are flatter, it's going to accumulate, it's going to cause infection and therefore hearing loss. So when this happens, you have to get your child to a doctor and you have to check. So the best way to do this is to have regular checkups to see if there are any infections, especially after a really high fever. If your child was sick, you have to double check if they have any middle ear infections. Because what happens is that because a child is underwater, they hear things underwater, right? A lot of speech sounds are muffled out. What happens is that it obviously will affect their speech and language development. When someone cannot hear you properly, it's very hard to exactly learn the language. Therefore it creates a speech and language delay. And every time your child gets a middle ear infection, there's a stalling effect. It's, oh, now it's clear, now it's not clear. Now it's clear, now it's not clear. And for some children who are prone to having middle ear infection, it keeps on coming back. There might be some underlying medical issues that create this, but it could happen to any child. Because of what I told you before about the placement of the tubes inside of the ears, you have to do regular checkups to make sure that your child is not middle ear infected, right? Anytime. If there's a prolonged period that a child has a hearing loss now, it's not like they cannot hear at all. There's a degree of it, but any degree of hearing loss will impair the language development. And I don't need to explain more than that. If you can't hear it properly, then it's very hard for you to actually learn that thing. Right? So when we are going into a speech therapy, usually what we can check, and this is what you can do, is what we call Ling6 sound. So Ling6 sound is what we do with hearing impaired children before our session. And it was by a speech therapist from quite some time ago. His name is Dr. Daniel Ling. Nowadays a lot of therapists don't know him anymore. So I'm just gonna put this in this video so that our colleagues still remember this great figure of a person who has been helping hearing impaired children. So the ling6 is. So I'm gonna put the, the picture here, as you can see. And these sounds cover the spectrum of different speech sound frequencies that anyone would hear it. So if you go through these six sounds, you cover your mouth and you ask your child to imitate what they hear. If they cannot identify it, then you should see a speech therapist right away and obviously go ask an audiologist and see an ENT doctor just to check up and make sure that this is prevented. Okay. As I was saying, every time there's a prolonged period, it creates a delay, right? And a lot of times it also creates autistic like symptoms. Why do I say this is? Because if you can't hear someone, you're not going to pay attention, right? So a lot of the symptoms of autism is not responding to name, not looking at people, right? Being self absorbed and playing by yourself, right. All these things will happen to a child with a middle ear infection. Why? Because they can't hear you, right? Number one, Number two, they're in discomfort, there's an infection going on in the ear. And if you've had a flu before, if your nose and your ears were blocked, what happens? You have a headache, and then when someone talks to you, what do you do? You walk away. You cannot deal with loud sounds. When someone talks to you, it creates a headache. You don't want to talk, you move away. If someone talks to you and you can't hear, you won't respond to the name. When children are walking and running around you, you would much rather just sit alone and do your own thing. So all these create autistic like symptoms, right? So therefore at times, and I've seen it firsthand, there are misdiagnosis about this and I've had A few clients. Just the other day I was talking to a mom in Singapore. Her child actually had a hearing loss for a very long time. And she didn't know. And that's none of her fault. And I want to say to you right now, it's none of her fault if you didn't know. But now you know and you should double check. Right. And she was diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. But after some intervention from us and from the ABA centers, if it feels like she's very social, she's able to communicate with the stuff that she has. And I realized that this might be a misdiagnosis. Now, it's not confirmed yet. I don't want to say that. Oh yeah, it's because of that. But I'm just saying hearing loss will create autistic symptoms. How do you prevent it? So obviously I was talking about checkups and getting audiologists, speech therapists, doctors, pediatricians, ent doctors into the loop. Have these checkups every now and then. Make sure that you go through the Ling 6 sounds sometimes to check it out. And then also include more signing and when you talk, more gestures. So that even if your child cannot hear you and if you can see that they're using signs more than them talking or they're looking at your signs to understand you more, there is a chance that they're suffering from a middle ear infection or some sort of a hearing loss. Right. And then therapy do learn how to communicate with the child so that you, you give them a language rich environment. So language rich isn't always talking. Like just now when I was talking about signing and gesturing. That is also part of communicating and giving a message to your child. Right. So the last thing I want to talk about is, oh, Ming, you got to talk about like middle ear infection and how it makes it look like autism and create speech and language disorder and delays. But the thing, it comes with a lot of other disorders and conditions in children or adults for that matter. Right. So one of them is down syndrome. That their tubes, they never become as they grow older, the angle doesn't really increase that much for the ear tubes. So what happens if that's the case? They're more prone to having mil infections throughout their lives. So you got to check. Right. The second one is autism. Autism, there's a lot of sensory differences from neurotypical people. So you might have different types of hearing loss. And just to tell you there's a semi sick, that autistic individual will have other conditions. And that's not limited to hearing loss. All right. So just to tell you, you have to double check the hearing every now and then and make sure that your child is hearing properly so that they can develop speech and language properly and their social skills and their play skills and whatever comes along with it. Because if they're suffering and you don't know and it seems like they're not themselves for a very long time, it's time to check it out. Okay, so that's it for now. If your child is currently not speaking as much as he or she should, you should go to ww agents of speech.com course. We have free courses and a free community of 12,000 people inside of our community. And you can learn from how to teach a child from no words all the way to full sentences. So that's it for today. Thank you so much for checking us out. And I'll see you next week. Bye.