Why is Your Child Non Verbal?

Hey, this is Ming from agentsofspeech.com today we'll talk about why your child is non verbal. So there are a few reasons. Usually the first one is that it's a language delay. If your child is one and a half years or older, then yeah, they should be using single words by now. And we can see language delay going up to two years or two and a half to three. That can still be a non verbal child. So it might be just a severe language delay. And that there's a subgroup of children who we call late talkers. It's not much of a, of a real term, like a very official term. We use it for children who are not on the spectrum, don't have anything else going on and they're just late. They're just basically late talkers. There's a few books on this. There's one called the Einstein Syndrome. Like late talkers, late speakers, whatever it was. And it's just basically talking about children who have normal intelligence, who have no other mobility problems, like no other type of diseases going on and they're just delayed. Okay. And we see these children starting to pick up the pace at like 4 and most of the time I think maybe in my experience, I'm not talking about real statistics here, I'm Talking about like 50% of the cases that come through our door are like that. And this kind of delay cases are easy to treat. And, and I would not venture into saying that, oh, it might not be easy for everyone. I was just saying that it's relatively easier to manage, first of all. And the second thing is that these language delay cases, they are usually quite stubborn, they're smart and so they get their own way. Okay, that's for a different video. But I'm saying all the, all the reasons for your child being non verbal, they're going to have very similar things. All right, so in the comments, probably, and I'll probably get some emails saying, oh, is my child like this or that or whatever. I hope it's language delay only. I hope so too. But we'll never know until we do more, we test more, we do more stuff. And what's important is that you don't get stuck in the phase of hoping and praying at something or not something. In terms of diagnosis, the most important thing is that you jump into action to start teaching your child because the moment that you do, you put it as a priority, you will see results quicker. Okay. Anyways, the second thing is autism is getting more and more prevalent. Now. I don't Know the reason for that. If I did, even if I did right, what can I do? What can you do right? There isn't really. It's very unclear right now. Hopefully we'll get to the bottom of why it's increasing. Some people will say that, oh, it's because we have a better way of defining it and better way to identify it and stuff. I think so as well. But at the same time, autism shouldn't be something that you're thinking too much about. If a child is around a year and a half old to two, I think that it's easier to identify and think about it by the time like between two and a half to three. And to be very honest with you, the therapy and the treatment or intervention, however you like to call it, doesn't differ from a person or a child who is just purely language related. When we do this, we do very similar things. Our goals do tweak a little bit, but a lot of techniques and the philosophies behind the actions are pretty similar. And you can watch a lot of videos or you can just go to agentsofspeech.com course to see the courses that we give parents for free. Those will go. Will teach you to go from like zero to words pretty quickly. Anyways, the third reason is speech disorders. So there will be a bunch of us. There's a bunch of disorders that render a child or a person unable to speak. So one of the hit words nowadays is that apraxia of speech. But the prevalent percentage, the percentage of people who have it, very low. So even if your child is non verbal, please don't jump into the conclusion that oh, maybe it's apraxia speech because it probably isn't. It's so low of a chance. And you would say, oh, it was a small chance, but it might be your brain shouldn't go there because you can only really check for a child if he or she has apraxia is around like four. The reason why I'm chuckling is because even if you did know, the stuff that we would do in the beginning are pretty much similar to. We will also need to establish a means for them to communicate with you, which always comes in the form of gestures. And we will also need to establish verbal imitation in order to know what sounds they have or have not in order to know if it's apraxia of other types of speech disorders. All right, there are other types of speech disorders like dysarthria, which is a weakness in the oral muscles, which is actually more prevalent than apraxia of speech. And there's a problem with differential diagnosis right now with a lot of therapists out there. I think there needs to be a more public education about this. And, and this is also why a lot of therapists are not comfortable with giving a diagnosis of speech disorders. They would just call it articulation or just phonological or most cases they just call articulation. Don't drill in it into it too much, especially if the professionals aren't ready to make a diagnosis because they're not a specialist, of which I'm not. And a lot of times what I see is like parents will share in the community is, oh, my child is suspected apraxis of speech. If there were so many suspected apraxis of speech, I think we would be very busy. So I don't really think that's the case. A lot of times we take it with a huge grain of salt. And the last reason for being non verbal is, is that it's a genetic disorder or a rare disease. All right? And these things come in very different forms. And we never know, we'll never know when a child with these will actually taught. I had a child, I had a student who had a genetic disorder. I forgot which one it was because it was so rare. He was stuck at action imitation for half a year. And then we were trying to get him to use sounds for a whole year before he started talking. And once he started imitating, boom, he started talking right away and his language was actually a lot better. And we realized that the genetic disorder actually caused a speech disorder. The dysarthria that I was talking about, there was weak oral muscles. He had hypersensitivity in the mouth. And so we had to help him with those and also build up the coordination of his mouth muscles. Would you call that apraxia? I don't know. Probably not. I didn't. And it doesn't help anyways. So there are marked differences. But we're not going to go into this right now. There are also loads of rare diseases that happen and also trigger some speech disorders too. All right? And by the way, even autism is correlated with speech disorders. Okay. And usually what I see is that these genetic disorders either create some sort of motoric difficulty in the child. So if you see a child unable to like, do gross motor things that are like, easy for other children, then you think about a speech which just in the mouth, there's like hundreds of small muscles coordinating to create the speech sounds. So if they have coordination range, mobility, strength issues with the gross motor stuff. Just think about how easy it would become an issue when they start talking. All right, so these genetic and rare diseases will create problems motorically and then they will also create problems with the cognitive side and how cognition and language is interrelated as we grow older. That when we talk ourselves into things, we use language to think, but also we require a certain amount of cognition to understand language. So I'm not saying that a child who has a rare disease or a genetic disorder, they will have accompanying like cognitive disorder, meaning that their, the intellectual ability might be lower. We don't know because it's always masked by like their language, the hearing, their motor skills. We don't know. Sometimes we just don't know. What I'm getting at is that if their cognitive ability is lower, then it will also delay the language acquisition. And these two things, the motoric and the cognitive, will actually in turn constrain how fast a child can develop in terms of speech, of language. Okay, so enough of me talking about these really long words, right? So knowing about whether how your child is speech, speech delayed and non verbal, will it help you with the treatment or not? Most like 80% of the time it's not going to, especially if a child is below three. If your child is like above four, then yeah, it's going to change a lot. We're going to use a lot more AAC, like using an iPad for communication devices. We use PACs. Right. We use different ways of doing the oral motor stuff, making sure to have like good play skills and whatnot. But below the age of three, we're always going to try and push speech imitation so that we know where we stand at number one. Number two is we're going to push for play skills to see how well their cognitive developed, to see if they can learn a certain play sequence if they like it or not. And number three is that we're going to push for a way for them to communicate with us functionally, be it using gestures or if they are up to it, we can use pecs. Okay, so knowing why doesn't really help that much, especially in the young ages. And it's absolutely a time waster for you, especially even for professionals like myself. And I'm not specialist by any means, but I'm telling you, even specialists out there, they will reassess the whole situation later on. Meaning that we'll start intervention first and then we'll do a rolling dynamic assessment about the general motoric speech, whatever the whole assessment, we just keep on dynamically assessing it. Okay. Because what we want to do is we want to provide treatment, not to provide a label. Okay? So forget about the label first. The label is going to be helpful later on for when your therapist goes on a holiday or like, they have to do something else in life and they have to pass on this client to other people and that they have to communicate their case to an IEP or whatever. And they say, oh, this child is like apraxia speech or like dysarthria. They have articulation disorder. They have a phonological, you know, they have phonemic. All these words don't mean anything to a parent like yourself, but to another professional, it's like, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I see now, oh, it's apraxia. Their breakdown level is here. They can say these consonants. They cannot do these. The number of syllables is like that. They have a syllabic. They have a syllabic separation. Whenever there's like up to four syllables, they just break down. These are the patterns in their speech, so on and so forth. So it only makes sense to professionals, the labels, when you have to pass it on and have a. Have a clean record of the case history so that you can work with someone else to. To do things right. But it doesn't matter to you, especially if your child is below three, because what are you to do? There's so much for you to work on. I mean, I've talked to parents who have read through all the textbooks and stuff and learned a bunch, and at the end of the day they're like, oh, the stuff that you tell me, I do it, it's working. Why did I go through all that? And the answer is, because probably after you read the whole textbook, you have to put face to a name. You need to know, oh, this is like, this child is like this. But you only have one client, which is your child. You don't need to learn so much stuff and you won't see all the variations. So leave it to the professionals and do the work. Okay? If you want to learn about the work, you can go to www.agentsofspeech.com course we have a bunch of courses there that are free of charge for you to watch, which will teach your child to go from zero and all the way to full sentences and above. Okay? And of course, you don't need to learn from us. I'm just saying that if you want to, please go there. And if not, I'll see you in the next video soon. Bye. Bye.