If you thought the development of your child during pregnancy was impressive, they go full steam ahead the moment they enter the world. As they grow into little humans right before your eyes, you’re intent on ensuring their development is on track, including their ability to communicate.
If you suspect that your child may be struggling with a speech disorder or with communication, in general, they’re most certainly not alone. In the past year, nearly 1 in 12 kids between the ages of 3 and 17 in the United States had a disorder related to voice, speech, language, or swallowing. In all of these cases, early intervention in the form of speech therapy can be a very wise course of action.
At Celebrations Speech Group, our team of highly trained and compassionate speech therapists understands the importance of setting the foundation early on for clear communication. Through our speech therapy services, we’ve helped thousands of kids be heard, and we feel confident that we can do the same for your child.
Under normal circumstances, kids babble and coo for the first year, at which point they start learning some words. By age 2, they can put some words together and understand you more clearly. At around the age of 3, kids start to pull together sentences and they begin to understand more complex commands.
While this is a very basic description of a complex process (click here for a more detailed timeline), the idea is to progress your child’s ability to communicate forward. As we mentioned, there are often hiccups in this process and millions of kids face a few challenges in the form of speech disorders.
The most common speech disorders among infants include:
These speech disorders don’t include issues like autism spectrum disorder (ASD), which can very much challenge how kids can communicate.
We want to underscore the fact that early communication issues with kids are very common, and many kids outgrow them. For example, most kids who stutter during early speech grow out of the disfluency by age 5. That said, some do not and go on to struggle with stuttering as an adult, so it’s best to err on the side of caution when it comes to early speech issues — through speech therapy, we can set them on a better path and help them outgrow the speech impediment more quickly.
Early speech therapy is also critical for kids with ASD, studies show that early intervention in the form of speech therapy leads to major improvement in language and communication.
No matter what’s interfering with your child’s ability to be heard and understood, we’re there to help. We meet your child wherever they are with their communication and help them progress, laying a stronger communication foundation that will serve them extremely well down the road.
The best way to determine whether your child might benefit from speech therapy is to sit down with one of our specialists. To get started, we invite you to contact one of our offices in Brentwood, Stockton, or Elk Grove, California, to set up a consultation.
