Reply to Anyone else think that speech therapy is a sham?

Forum Index » Kids With Special Needs and Disabilities

Reply to "Anyone else think that speech therapy is a sham?"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous]I think I am going to be the one person here to agree with OP--not that speech therapy is a "sham," because I don't think that's exactly what she was trying to say, but that in very very young children, it's often of limited use or no use at all.  My son started speech therapy at around 20 months and frankly, it felt largely like a waste of time until he was about 3.  At that point, we really saw a change in his ability to concentrate, to work on articulation (he initially had a significant delay in expressive speech, and later a delay in articulation), and to really benefit from the services provided.  DS is now 4 and still in speech therapy but doing great.  It's unquestionably helping him at this point.  I have real doubts about whether it helped at a younger age, and I don't think this was the fault of the therapists.

Now, I would be wary of making a blanket statement and saying that speech therapy is useless for every single 18-month-old who qualifies.  There could be different drivers of the speech delay, and for example, if a child has feeding issues that are a component I think SLPs can work on those at younger ages.  And as a pp said, speech delays can be an indicator of broader developmental issues, so there's a potential benefit to being on an SLP's radar who may be watching for those.  But a lot of the activities for expressive speech delays, such as blowing bubbles, encouraging different sounds, etc. are really things that parents can easily be trained to do in a session or two.

We have a younger child and have decided that if she seems delayed in speech we are not going to have her assessed as early as we did for DS.  [/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics