Is my child too young for speech therapy?

“My child is too young to talk, they don’t need speech therapy”, I have heard this statement too many times to count!  I understand where parents who think this way are coming from. Why would you be worried about language development if your child is not expected to talk yet at their age?

Well, In actual fact it might be the best time for your child to receive speech therapy; research has shown that early identification and treatment results in better outcomes for children who go on to develop language and speech difficulties. Children who are ‘late talkers’ often present with difficulties at school that could be lessened and sometimes completely avoided just by early intervention.

So how as a parent are you supposed to know if your child needs therapy prior to language acquisition? Well you can take note of your child’s prelinguistic skills; these are the skills that are acquired prior to spoken language and can be a good indicator of possible future delays in language, cognition, and communication. There are several prelinguistic skills but I am going to discuss only a few of these skills very briefly:

1.       Turn-taking

This is your child’s ability to take turns when playing with you as well as share their toys; for examples: when you child builds a tower, do they allow you to take a turn or do they want to be the only one allowed to place the blocks on top of each other.  This skill should be almost fully developed at 12 months.

2.       Communicative intent

How does your child express their needs and wants to you?  Do they just ignore you and grab what they want or do they point or gesture or verbalize.  Between 10-12 months, children use gestures with verbalizations to request.

3.       Eye contact

Eye contact is one of the earliest forms of communication; children should be able to maintain eye contact around 4-6 months.

4.       Vocalizations

Vocalizations are the early sounds that children make before using real words.  Between 3-6 months, children start to coo, this is random vowel sounds; they also start to blow raspberries, these are quite fun to imitate the babies as they create motor humming sound.  Between 7 to 9 months, children start to babble by producing sounds like “papa’” and “baba”. Between 10-12 month children use many different strings of nonsenses syllables when babbling. Vocalizations are a very important part of language development.

If you feel your child is delayed in terms of prelinguistic skills, it is important to seek advice from a qualified speech- language therapist. Early intervention can make all the difference for your child’s development.