hardofhearingchildren.com by PAM Candlish MLS
"What did you say?" "Eh?" "WHAT did you say?" "MM?" "WHAT DID YOU SAY?" oh "PARDON ME!"

Speech Pathology with my granddaughters in Guelph Ontario.

My granddaughters' speech is a little slow. I was delighted to observe one of their sessions with a speech pathologist. They are 3 years old, and the apples of everyone's eyes because they look like angels. They scream a lot, and don't go to bed. They flirt with the right people, and exude love for their Nanna and Popa. They are swimming with floaties having been in a warm pool weekly since they were born. So wonderful to see Erica decide she wants to be on the other side of the pool so she swims over there. Roberta will do better with a snorkel and mask

Their Mom at the Same Age

At the same age their mother was speaking with cadence and rhythm but substituting HH for all the consonants in all the placements. She was capable of following instructions and receiving complicated messages but her speech did not develop and flow out of her soul and mouth. It was frustrating. The GP got  a daily phone call from me until the referral was made to a wonderful Speech pathologist who stopped in the middle of the initial assessment and said." This child has serious speech problems and will need so much work on her speech. You are obviously educated and intelligent. What has prevented the child from getting here?" I said. "The GP saw excellent speech in the first child and thought I was comparing excellent speech with normal speech. I saw nothing normal in a child who was so frustrated that she screamed and screamed."

My daughter's speech remediation went on until school intake. She was a December baby so could have gone to school at age 4. Instead I put her in a co-op nursery school which I also did my share at, and she was 5 going on 6 for kindergarten. As long as she was not tired her speech was fine, but as she got tired the HHHs came back.

My daughter had a tough time in school. Her speech pathologist said she was so sorry that her profession assumed early remediation would eliminate school problems. Barb's path through school presented difficulties which should have had continuing speech pathology. She was simply lumped with the other difficult kids, the obdurate stubborn non learners. She had verbal apraxia.

Day Care -Home Care

I certainly agree with the realization of the importance of early childhood in the development of a human, but I also think that if one parent is committed to the cause, home parenting is better than school because the energy flow of the child's life is determined by the child, not the other children and the artificial schedule related to the parent's work or the school system. Part time day care,part time home care works well for everyone as long as everyone manages to have fun together as a family..

At the Speech Pathologist's Office

The atmosphere is more child friendly these days. Both girls had their appointments together which imitates the life of twins. The SP began with a book which was familiar of dogs and snow. The SP and the kids sat a tiny chairs at a tiny table. The children lasted 9 minutes, then exploded in energy running around the room. I wondered if the kids were allowed to stop before the end of the book. They were allowed to run around, but still had to finish the book. They had other activities all planned to generate speech. One  reward was parts of a person to put on a family portrait . The kids seemed to know what was coming next.  My favorite toy was plastic fruit which can be cut in half with a plastic knife and has the seeds inside.  What a difference from the black and white simple word pictures which we used for Barbara.

Have Fun Pay Attention

The children's attention is kept focused by not having many thing visible which not in the lesson plan. The girls greatly enjoyed cooking the fruit in pots in the oven. The Fisher Price kitchen play stove now has a cell phone and a microwave. The concept being emphasized is "in" so there was lots of putting pots  "in" the oven, a little "on" the stove, and "in" the microwave.

Me Want

The SP is working on I WANT as opposed to me want. My daughter hates to hear "I want," and I mentioned that to the SP.

Dr. Ling and I used to talk about this all the time, simple speech makes simple speech.  As an auditory verbal parent I understand that the tense Would like is the future conditional, Want is the present and simpler when you are working on I instead of Me. And the time spent at the SP is very limited compared to the hours and hours at home, when you can model please with every request. If you say it enough around the kids, sooner or later they will also say Please may I have? or I would like, please.

 more kids with speech problems in Calgary

In Feb 2007, CBC had an interesting article about more kids with speech problems in Calgary .

http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2007/02/13/speech-therapy.html

When Barb was a kid, only the city kids had any speech therapy. In the country waiting lists took care of the pre-school need for speech therapy. One mom that I talked with on the phone often was also fighting with the provincial government to get a local speech pathologist. We both contacted our MPP, the honourable Jack Johnson, and his office gave us each other as a resource. In the end the other mom quit fighting and went back to work to pay for private speech pathology for her child. All the other children on the waiting list had no speech pathology, but that does not mean they did not have problems. If anything, only the kids with severe and profound problems were diagnosed.

With much earlier understanding of the right path to good speech with a pre-schooler, and a much more educated set of parents, we are probably finally approaching identifying the correct amount of children with speech problems across the diagnostic spectrum from mild, to moderate to severe to profound and thus training the professionals and providing appropriate speech therapy when needed.

Find a Speech Path

This is the home page of ASHA where you can find a speech pathologist in the US. ASHA is an excellent on line resource for speech and hearing problems in adults and children.

http://www.asha.org/default.htm

Caroline Bowen lives in Australia , and has been on the net providing vast information about speech pathology possibilities .

http://speech-language-therapy.com/whatshere.htm

Interesting sidebar. I had pneumonia for Feb and most of March. This prevented me from researching and assimilating the knowledge to write my web. The words were just not in my head, and pulling concepts together was too difficult. How often are we expecting kids to keep on when they are really too sick to learn.

Happy Spring to those of you in the northern hemi-sphere.

PAM Candlish

1 April 2007