When Will Your Child Speak?

Alright, so today we're gonna talk about whether your child will speak or not. This is a question that I always get first day when I meet a parent and they will say, oh, Ming, is my child ever gonna talk? Is he gonna be alright in the future? So on, so forth, right? And a lot of the parents who have been working with me for a very long time who start to show their faces on social media, sharing their stories and stuff, other parents will reach out to them and say, hey, how do I get your child to be like your child? What did you do in particular that is different from what I'm doing right now? Or do I have to worry? Right, so these are all questions that are very valid and let's talk about it today. All right, so let's talk about some quick language milestones. By now, if you're watching this video, it means that you're probably thinking that your child is delayed, right? So we typically say that speech delay is when a child doesn't talk their first single words by one and a half years old, okay? And these need to be meaningful words. A lot of parents go dig deep into asking, oh, what does a word mean? Like, can I take for instance, the word dada or whatever and count it as a word? Or if they use dada and it refers to two things, does it mean it's two words? Well, you don't have to go into that rabbit hole, okay? Leave these linguistic things to your speech and language pathologist. Someone like myself doesn't mean to be me. Go find someone who you can talk to and have a good conversation about this, okay? And by 2 years old, your child should be, at that time be speaking in two word combinations, which is usually using things such as mommy eats, right? Or they're using drink milk. And they're able to flexibly interchange between these two word combinations. Right? And then when they are around three, two and a half to three, they're starting to use three word combinations and they're able to answer some easy questions such as who and where. All right? And after that, at 4, they're able to speak in full sentences, probably. And they would be able to answer some why questions. So for instance, why is the table wet? It's because mommy spilled the water. And by five, they're nearly adult. Like, okay, so we have, if you're new here for agents of speech, then go to our channel and take a look at all the videos about speech therapy for two, speech therapy for three, four, five, so on and so forth, right? So these are the quick Milestones. So obviously if you want your child to talk, it means that maybe your child is already non verbal. But you see, it depends on what your expectations are, right? So let's talk about expectations. For you, it means that you want your child to be speaking, if not at the level of their age or above, right? So what we call a speech delay, or speech and language delay to be exact, is that anything that if a child is performing around six months behind, we will classify as a delay, Right? So what expectations should you have? So to be quite frank and honest with you, from working in this field and seeing a lot of children and parents like yourself, that children who have a language delay typically require a longer period of time to catch up. And why is that? And because if a child is delayed, they're not talking by two, that means they need, they're missing out on all the language learning, right? From like two to three, properly, like everyone needs, requires a lot of practice in order to get to a certain level of competency, right? So therefore if your child is just starting to talk, they have a backlog of practice they have to catch up with and that takes a lot of time, right? Your expectations should be managed by someone like myself, okay? And it sucks every time I have to tell parents that, yes, it's going to take some time longer, right? Sometimes this delay will go into primary school and sometimes you will also see it happen in secondary school. So this is something you have to bear in mind first of all. And other than that, how about non verbal children, someone who hasn't been talking and maybe they're five, six, they're still not talking, right? What expectations should you have? So I've seen a lot of cases and I cannot share much detail here, right? I can tell you one or two cases from my experience that if they do start using single words by around five or six, depending on what type of diagnosis. Now, if you've been watching our videos, I always say that diagnosis is not that important, right? And this is where it is important in a way that it's about how the professional handles your child's case, right? So if it's a speech problem, meaning they have problems with talking, creating speech sounds, being because of unable to create speech sounds, then it might be the problem of the treatment. And the treatment should be focused on helping the child able to create the sounds that are missing, okay? And a lot of parents will go into this rabbit hole and say, oh, my child is apraxic, or he's got dysarthria, or there's A lot of things going on, but usually speaking this, you really have to rely on your speech and language pathologist or speech therapist perspective per se. So there's nothing you can do in that department. You need to trust your therapist and let them do the judgment. Right? So I've seen many children who are around like five or six, they start talking, they catch up. They do catch up, but it wouldn't be as, you know, like, there's always gonna be a gap. There's always gonna be a gap. As time goes on, the gap does shrink. And we're talking about, you know, this gap. It's. It depends. And it's just like, if you ask me, how long is a piece of string, it really depends, right? So it really depends on the profile of your child, what diagnosis your child is, how long have they been delayed for? What kind of environment do you guys have at home? Right? Is it that you are already trying a lot of techniques that you've learned before? All these things play a crucial role to whether, like, how long, how long this gap will be maintained and how big the gap would be. And this is what we call prognosis, right? This is a word you can ask your speech and language pathologist, right? So at the end of the day, speech, like being able to talk requires language skills, okay? You cannot run away from that. All right? So you and I, we have language skills already. So when you're. We're learning as a second language, we already have a basis of language skills and we already have a basis of some social skills, right? So in order for a child to talk, for someone to talk, they must understand the basic human interactions. And for newcomers who are watching this channel or parents who are having like two year old or three year old children, most of the time what you have to do is actually to teach the communication first, which there are loads of videos inside of AsianOfSpeech.com or on this YouTube channel. I really sincerely hope that you go through all of them because a lot of times when I look into the comments below, you would have asked something that I have addressed before, and that's because I've been doing this for quite some time now on the Internet. So don't worry about that. Okay? So the last thing is that I really hope that you can go check out www.agentsofspeech.com checklist for a list of tools and toys that I recommend you when you're starting your home therapy. All right? And I know that during this pandemic, I was just talking to another parent is that there's a three year that's gone. That's three years from the pandemic. That's gone. Right. And there's a backlog of these speech therapy, assessments, therapy. And you're seeing that children are actually getting diagnosed at 5 because of the pandemic. And this three years is gone. Right. Maybe the world will stop having babies. Right. But these three years is very hard to catch up to. Okay. The amount of. In the whole worldwide therapy is already not that accessible. Even if it is, then it would be maybe too expensive for certain families and so on. So I really hope that these videos will really help you in starting home therapy. Okay, so that's it for today. I'll see you next week. Bye. Bye.