What a Speech Therapist Can do For Your Child

As a parent, you know how important it is for your child to receive social skills development in their early years. It can be frustrating, painful, and confusing to watch your little loved one struggle with things like stuttering and expressive language disorders. Thankfully, speech therapy experts dedicate their lives to developing children through listening skill training. These professionals strive to help fine tune the speech skills of the children that have fallen behind in the auditory and oral development departments, through no fault of their own. It can be difficult to determine when your child needs the help of a speech pathologist. Here are some instances in which one of these therapists may help your child.

Stuttering is a common type of fluency disorder which may include word repetitions or difficulty and prolonging of certain sounds and syllables. This is most common fluency disorder, but another, deemed cluttering, is when a child collapses sentences by removing syllables in words and speaking them without the appropriate pauses. All fluency disorders can cripple your child’s confidence in speaking, their willingness to participate in school, and the tendency to avoid certain phrases or words altogether.

Other forms of disorders that may be cause to visit a speech therapist would be difficulties processing language or putting words together, difficulty with memory, perception, and attention, and struggles with the pitch, volume, and tone of voice during conversation. These problems are considered language disorders or speech disorders.

In listening skill training, a speech pathologist will work personally with your child to overcome the disorder and its difficulties. This will involve interacting with books, pictures, and objects to encourage language development. In articulation therapy, the child will be shown how to physically form the muscles of the face to articulate certain speech sounds.

There are many points in your child’s life that you may decide he or she needs help with listening skill training and speech development. Your child may need assistance if they have recently received implants, surgery, or aids to help with hearing impairments, as the child has lost valuable time listening to their parents and peers speak. A speech therapist can help autistic children, children with brain injuries, and children with cognitive development delays.

Most speech impediments are remedied or almost completely corrected before adulthood; that is why this is a prime time to take your child to a speech therapist today to get him or her the help they need while their brain is still growing.