So you have worked really hard with your child and the talking is starting to happen for them. They are saying words and putting them into short sentences.
Your Speech Pathologist will most likely continue to work with you for some time to come. We know that children with dyspraxia are at high risk for poor listening and remembering, following instructions and, later, literacy difficulties. Children who are...
Older children who have had dyspraxia tend to find reading harder than most children. Research has found that children with CAS (or dyspraxia or apraxia) are more likely to have difficulty with reading, spelling and other academic areas when they go to school.
Certainly in the clinic we see lots of children who have had help with talking because of dyspraxia, who look for a Speech Pathologist when they...
There are some children that come into my office and drop things. If they are dealing out the cards, they will always get more on the floor and their piles will be untidy. They spill their drinks and get their reward chocolate frog all over their face. Everything they touch falls over and they knock things of the shelves!
They are not just careless children. They are clumsy. They are children who are...
We generally take it for granted that babies will do ‘baby talk’ or babble. It is actually an important part of language development.
Recent research has analysed baby’s babble and found that the quality of the babble is related to how easily a child learns to talk and the size of their vocabulary, as well as how clearly they can make sounds.
It doesn’t seem to matter what language...
Parents recieve different advice from different people about when children should be talking. Mothers and fathers often become concerned when they see that their children are not talking as well as children at playgroup or daycare.
Everyone knows that children develop skills at different rates, and this includes talking. However, as a general rule of thumb, Speech Pathologists suggest that children should be using...
This is a subject that is fraught with anxiety for many families!
When I see a family for the first time with a small child who is not talking well, parents are often surprised when I ask questions about feeding and eating. I ask about early feeding (Was the baby breastfed? Were their any difficulties latching on? How easy was it to transition to solids? What about eating lumps?)
Some children are fussy...
As a Speech Pathologist, I often see children who are not talking as well or as easily as they need to be for their age.
Quite often, when I listen to the way parents are talking to their child, they are trying really hard to give them lots of language. They use full, complex sentences, often at a fairly rapid pace, and ask lots of questions. And often these children have very good comprehension skills.
However,...
Yes, whether your child has dyspraxia or not, there are ways of talking to your child that will make the most of their potential to learn speech and language.
And, especially if your child has dyspraxia it is important to talk to him or her in a way that is going to make it as easy as possible to learn to talk and to understand and remember.
Talk to your child as often as possible, but keep your sentences short and...
Why isn’t my child talking?
This would have to be the most frequent question parents ask me, when they bring along a toddler for the first time. Parents have usually been worried for a while that their child doesn’t talk like other children the same age. Usually they will assume that a child will just be a ‘late talker’ and catch up, but often mothers will have a ‘gut feeling’...