Question about speech therapy for 22 month old...

[mjkacmom]

For DS, he didn’t have many words until he was almost 3 & now he never shuts up! I would not have evaluated him that early b/c I knew it was mostly willfulness b/c he was (is) like that with most milestones (and most things ). He’s 4 now & wont pedal a bike or even try for more than a few seconds b/c he’d rather drag his feet. He tells me “I don’t want to do it that way”. But, at 2, although words were sparse, he definitely communicated using “jargon”.

But many times these delays are problems, and the earlier caught, the better. Balance bikes (or just removing training wheels) works great for bike riding, all my kids ditched them before kindergarten.

 

[LSUmiss]

But many times these delays are problems, and the earlier caught, the better. Balance bikes (or just removing training wheels) works great for bike riding, all my kids ditched them before kindergarten.

No I get that but it’s definitely not in DS’ case. But I am also a sped evaluator in a school system & an lcsw so I know what to look for vs others who might not have that training. I just wanted op to know that it can be willfulness like she asked.

 

[barkley]

I considered this, but to our knowledge he's never had an ear infection. That said, there is (ahem) an ear wax issue that runs in my wife's family, so I'm kind of wondering if that might be an issue. But his ears get checked every time he goes to the pediatrician and we've never had any comments.

getting your ears checked is different from a hearing test but it's very hard to do with a toddler. that said it could be that he's not clearly hearing what is being said to him so his 'alien language' is what he perceives as repeating words correctly. since he doesn't get his desired response he figures 'why talk at all'. a speech therapy evaluation will look to all the potential issues. appreciate that your doctor did the referral and you've gotten in quickly. best case scenario is it's due to the lack of socializing and will resolve with introducing more opportunities/worst case he needs some clinical help (but you're on the track to get it if needed/he's young and that's the best time to address these issues).

best wishes for everyone.

 

[QueenIsabella]

BTDT...

My older son didn't walk until 18 months, didn't talk until he was 2. He had other issues--don't get me started, but he was evaluated by the state, and put into speech and physical therapy. Various doctors told us that he was epileptic, autistic, developmentally delayed, and autistic. He is, actually, autistic, but wasn't diagnosed until age 19. We were told that, because he was so late walking and talking, he'd likely be a late reader. His dad was a very late reader, so I took this seriously, and read to him constantly.

First off, I can't say enough good things about his therapists. They would bring a bag of toys, and were fabulous at pulling out something new if he was losing interest.

On the physical therapy side, we think he just had his own system. He would do what we called a "Stumpy Pete"--pulling himself along on his butt. He could hold something, move fast, and didn't have to transition when he arrived at his destination. Why learn to walk?

The speech therapist "diagnosed" that he was a quiet kid with a chatty big sister (21 months older, very "helpful"). When we changed his therapy to while she was in preschool, he gained 6 months in 6 weeks.

He got kicked out of both therapies after a year. That's a good thing.

He also learned to read at 3--go figure. They tested him in kindergarten, and he got 95% at the sixth grade level. Take, that, Dr. Whoever told us he was developmentally delayed!

My point in all this is, parenting is a journey. It's not linear, and parts can be heartbreaking. Get your child evaluated--for speech and for hearing. Check your ego at the door (I struggled with this--I'd done everything RIGHT! I never so much as missed a prenatal vitamin! I didn't deserve a child who was DELAYED!!! But you know what--it happens. Nobody necessarily causes it or deserves it or whatever. You just do what you have to do to give your child the best possible outcome.)

Good luck. Long term, it's probably nothing. But, get him evaluated, listen to the experts, and most importantly--love the child you have. Every weird, annoying, crazy, wonderful bit of him!

 

[Southernmiss]

Our 3rd son was like yours. I was the only one who understood him at age 2. And when he got mad, he spoke in some language that sounded Asian, but only he knew what he was saying. He started speech therapy then 2 times a week in our local school district. It was free as an early intervention program.

Therapy continued until midway through elementary school. The therapists always made it fun for him.

He still has a bit of a lisp. I guess they couldn't work that out. He's successful and highly intelligent.

Though we could understand another son and daughter of ours, they started speech therapy in kindergarten as the kindergarten teacher recommended them for testing. They too thought it was fun. In fact, the speech therapist at the elementary school was one of my favorite people at the school. She was kind and caring and looked out for their overall well-being.

Get your son evaluated. The sooner the better for him and you.

 

[MrsCobraBubbles]

Nothing may come from the eval, but if they decide your son needs speech therapy, my advice from years of working with autistic students and raising an autistic son is to put in the work. Do the speech therapy and learn about ABA so you can do it at home. Ever been to physical therapy after an injury? It's hard, right? And sometimes the therapist seems like a mean person? But it's worth it in the end. I'm not advocating being mean to your kid, but you're going to have to learn how to push them just the right amount. My oldest is autistic and he did not progress until I learned ABA. You can't just let the therapist do all the work a couple times a week, you are going to be your kid's live-in therapist. And if you choose to go the route of getting them a talker, make sure you are doing it because you have thought long and hard about what is the right tool for your kid, and you don't do it out of laziness. Please no one come at me for saying that but if you have worked with or had a kid of your own with speech delays then you know what I'm saying. Signing is hard and not every kid has the physical ability to do it; making kids use their words is hard and some kids just can't--those are the kids that benefit from using talkers. But I've seen families and school administrators choose to use them simply because none of the adults involved wanted to put forth any effort and that's just sad.

 

[Earstou]

We thought our son was just babbling all the time at age two. One day I realized he had just asked me a question by the way he looked at me and the inflection at the end of the sentence. We didn't even know he was putting two words together and here he was talking in complete sentences, but we could not understand him.
We started working harder to understand him, asking him if we had words correct, with lots of back and forth, usually working out the idea of what he was saying, just not all the words. His older sister would catch words we would miss. It was a family effort to understand the poor kid!
At the beginning, I worried because the first few sessions seemed pretty useless to me, my son is ADHD and most of the time was spent with him all over the room, crawling under tables and such. But he eventually got used to the teacher and learned what was expected of him and then we saw improvements. We also got tips for working with him at home.
He's an adult now and after years of speech therapy, has very clear speech. His first job was taking drive-up orders at McDonalds and he received frequent compliments on his voice, with one woman insisting he must be a voice actor!

 

[DodgerGirl]

When I was little I never really had speech problems but my teachers claim I couldn't pronounce my L's and my R's but now I can clearly say my L's and R's perfectly and when I was three I actually taught myself to read but I still have trouble pronouncing some words today. One problem that my mom had claimed I did do was mumbling and I don't really mumble words I just think about what I'm gonna say next. I said my first words at three and became a chatterbox at four. What I think you should do is see if your son's school has a speech therapy department and try to sign him up for speech therapy and see what progress your son can make and another thing you can do and this is something my mom used to do with me when I was little when I was doing speech therapy was take a voice recorder and have yourself say words then your son should try to repeat the same words and believe me it works and you can save the messages on the computer and put a copy of the recordings on a MP3 card and you can show your son's teacher what words he has mastered. Hope this advice helps you a whole lot Princesca
Dodger

 

[QueenIsabella]

Nothing may come from the eval, but if they decide your son needs speech therapy, my advice from years of working with autistic students and raising an autistic son is to put in the work. Do the speech therapy and learn about ABA so you can do it at home. Ever been to physical therapy after an injury? It's hard, right? And sometimes the therapist seems like a mean person? But it's worth it in the end. I'm not advocating being mean to your kid, but you're going to have to learn how to push them just the right amount. My oldest is autistic and he did not progress until I learned ABA. You can't just let the therapist do all the work a couple times a week, you are going to be your kid's live-in therapist. And if you choose to go the route of getting them a talker, make sure you are doing it because you have thought long and hard about what is the right tool for your kid, and you don't do it out of laziness. Please no one come at me for saying that but if you have worked with or had a kid of your own with speech delays then you know what I'm saying. Signing is hard and not every kid has the physical ability to do it; making kids use their words is hard and some kids just can't--those are the kids that benefit from using talkers. But I've seen families and school administrators choose to use them simply because none of the adults involved wanted to put forth any effort and that's just sad.

This is so true! I just wanted to add that, for kids, most of the "work" needed feels like "play", if you do it right! Both my son's speech and physical therapists said that, if they could only use one toy, it would be bubbles. Blowing them, chasing them, stomping on them, and so forth. Read books, sing songs, dance around the room, sound out signs at the grocery store. With my oldest, people probably thought I was nuts--I would be in the grocery store, picking out, say, apples, carrying on this whole conversation with her: "Do we want red ones, or green? How many--3, you think? Let's count, 1, 2, 3." She was 3 months old and I did this. She's now 27, and just got her master's in applied linguistics. She's a bilingual teacher of English language learners. (shameless brag, I'm so proud of her!).

 

[DisneyLover83]

My daughter was speech delayed due to hearing issues. She had back to back ear infections for almost a year before insurance covered tubes. You have nothing to lose going to the eval - and make sure a hearing check has been done or will be done with the eval.

 

[tazdev3225]

My one grandson did not have a vocabulary of more than 3 words at that age: Ma, Da and UNH which stood for everything else. I fought his pediatrician until he was almost 3 for an evaluation and we finally did it on our own. My daughter was overwhelmed with 2 kids only 18 months apart and work. She knew he had an issue but didn't know what to do and she has always relied on me for help. I watched them all week, so I was well aware of his issues. He qualified for services but was going to age out. Thankfully the Early Intervention program referred him forward and he went to preschool for free where they worked with him. He is 16 now and never stops talking.

I'm all for getting help when needed

 

[garada3]

So much great advice in these responses!

i would like to add that I feel the initial speech evaluation should be done by a therapist outside the public school system or state/county early intervention program. The results of the private assessment should then be provided to the school/early intervention program when starting those services.

in our case, the private evaluation was money well spent. Similar to the OP, one of our sons did not form intelligible words - he substituted letter sounds that he could make for sounds that he could not. We could tell that he was trying to communicate but, despite our best efforts, we had no idea what he was saying most of the time. This was very frustrating for him and resulted in some epic tantrums. Having a private evaluation smoothed the path with the public school system when our son needed more intensive speech therapy then what the school based early intervention program initially wanted to provide. Be polite but be your child’s advocate.

Please google ‘apraxia kids’. There are some great resources on the site. Not saying your child has apraxia but learning more about complex speech issues rather than just articulation errors might be useful. I had speech when I was young because I said an initial ‘r’ sound as a ‘w’. What our son was doing was more that just an articulation error.

As previously mentioned, ask for and do speech homework activities with your child. It will make a difference.

My brag: our kid, who was in speech therapy from ages 2 to 10, is now a rocket scientist and had a project launch last week.

 

[toodycat]

The evaluation is a good thing and having his hearing checked is also important. My son had a speech delay that the doctor said was because of chronic ear infections. He did have chronic ear infections, but he also had autism, so it’s best to check all possibilities. Your question about how they evaluate a child who doesn’t talk much is very important because many evaluators will still give a verbal IQ test which the child won’t score well on. Obviously, a verbal test is helpful in documenting a speech delay, but my son also had an entirely non-verbal IQ test which he scored exceptionally well on. This information helped determine what type of intervention and goals he needed. He qualified for speech therapy for the whole of his public education. Now, he is all grown-up and a college graduate. I have no doubt that getting services at an early age contributed to his success. Don’t be afraid of an evaluation. If there’s nothing wrong, there’s no issue, but if there is a delay or disability, the faster you treat it, the better the outcome.

 

[mom2rtk]

No harm at all in going. 2 of my 3 kids had speech therapy for a while through the school district, starting in preschool and extending into grade school. It was a fun experience for them and they have perfectly normal speech now as adults.

It just strikes me that fighting to get them to say words is the absolute wrong approach. I would keep trying to coax words out of them but not in any way make a battle out of it.

 

[SandyinMonterey]

Posting here because this is the 'general' board that seems to get the most traffic... mods, please feel free to move it to a better spot if it's not okay here.

Our son is two years old in October, and his pediatrician has referred him to speech therapy because he doesn't have many words. He talks constantly (just not in English) with tone, emotion, and inflection. He's obviously listening, because he can point to all manner of shapes, colors, objects, parts of the face (though always on others, not himself, save for 'hair' for some reason) and even some letters when we ask him to. He meets or exceeds all the other CDC milestones and has always been very advanced for his age with most motor skills. He's been running full on and walking backwards since about 16 months. We have a list of about 13 things we have heard him say (but many are only once or twice so hard to gauge if it was really a word or a coincidence). He frequently says 'whee' and 'yeah!' and 'mom', but mom is usually 'mom mom mom mom mom' babbling when he's overtired. He doesn't really wave hello or goodbye (he's done it once or twice) and doesn't say either word. He does copy other things we do - he knows to put hats on heads, comb hair, give hugs (sometimes), make faces. He also knows what to do with a fork/spoon but steadfastly refuses to use them. He plays peek a boo. Everyone I talk to says 'oh that's just boys for you' and/or 'the pandemic/quarantine has slowed down verbal development for a lot of kids.' Anecdotally, that seems to be true - we've met so many parents of boys (especially) who are saying their kids aren't really talking as expected. And I know the CDC recently relaxed their guidelines on words. Now that he is at least partially vaccinated, we've been more active in taking him out to playspaces. He also cannot at all be relied upon to stay near us and always makes a rapid beeline for the nearest exit or road. He has started to interact more with other kids, so that has been encouraging for us.

I will admit that we probably provide for/anticipate his needs too often without making him ask, but when we do, he instantly melts down and he is as willful as the day is long (comes by it honest, really) and flat refuses to say anything. I've even tried just getting him to say 'yeah!' which is a word he LOVES to say, when I ask 'would you like a snack' but he refuses to do even that. And obviously, never feeding him isn't an option. I've pushed past the tantrums and continued to press for him to request things, and he just won't.

1) We have our evaluation next week, and I'm just curious how they evaluate a child who doesn't really talk. We're not sure what to expect from the evaluation and would love to hear your experiences if you have them...
2) If any of this resonates with you and you have experiences to share (preferably hopeful ones!) that would be fantastic.
3) Is he possibly just rude? Are we raising a mini-caveman? We do our best to model our values at home - patience, compassion, mindfulness, humor, etc.
4) Suggestions for how to decrease willfulness in a toddler? (Hahahahaha.)

Thank you!

My daughter was born very premature (3 months early) and weighed 1.7 pounds. Most of her milestones were delayed, speech was one of them. She had an evaluation and hearing test. I remember going into a booth with her for the hearing test because she was young and having to listen for sounds, etc. with headphones. Honestly, I don't remember all of it. The evaluation revealed she ws way behind in speech. Speech therapy, for her, consisted of exercises, like blowing a cotton ball using a straw and games. Exercises that had to be done at home too. I looked into my school district, I don't remember if it's when she got a little older or what but she was still young. At the time, school districts were required to provide "help." We started going to a special class that speech therapy was incorporated into. I didn't find it very good. There were several teachers and very little "teaching" going on. The teachers would just say, "they learn thru play." Yes, but it's also supposed to be speech therapy. When she got older, she went to a "special" preschool thru the school system (again). It wasn't great either. Half the time the two teachers didn't show up and once there was a substitute teacher who didn't speak English. One thing to know about dealing with anything that a school may offer, is that a school doesn't have to offer the BEST program, just the most APPROPRIATE. And, from my experience, their bar is set low. The best thing I did was getting a private speech therapist on my own. It wasn't easy, or cheap, because my insurance wouldn't cover it. Insurance company said that prematurity wasn't a medical condition. I think one of the things that helped a lot was having her around other children that didn't have any speech issues. I understand that hasn't been easy because of Covid, but I feel it was just as important as her speech therapy was.

 

[QueenIsabella]

The amount/value of Early Intervention varies dramatically, state to state. I was fortunate in that I lived in NY when my son needed services--NY is VERY supportive. He started speech once a week, then they upped it to twice a week. They came to our home for the therapy. I know that others on this thread haven't always had the best experiences--I'm sorry to hear that. Mine were nothing but positive.

This would have been ~24 years ago, but at the time he was in speech, the Macaughey (sp?) septuplets were very young, and in the news a lot. Several of them needed special services, due to being cramped and preemies and all. The speech therapist for my son was so mad, because she said, so much more could have been done for those kids, starting right from birth--they would have known that, from the start, they would struggle. But, they lived in Iowa, and the most any kid was entitled to was 45 minutes, twice a month, or something pathetic like that. And the whole point of Early Intervention is, help them early on, so they can have better skills and quality of life down the line.

OP--It doesn't hurt to get evaluated. Here's hoping that one day, you'll have your own "...and it turned out to be no big deal!" story to tell.

 

[JediBonas]

When I was little I never really had speech problems but my teachers claim I couldn't pronounce my L's and my R's but now I can clearly say my L's and R's perfectly and when I was three I actually taught myself to read but I still have trouble pronouncing some words today. One problem that my mom had claimed I did do was mumbling and I don't really mumble words I just think about what I'm gonna say next. I said my first words at three and became a chatterbox at four. What I think you should do is see if your son's school has a speech therapy department and try to sign him up for speech therapy and see what progress your son can make and another thing you can do and this is something my mom used to do with me when I was little when I was doing speech therapy was take a voice recorder and have yourself say words then your son should try to repeat the same words and believe me it works and you can save the messages on the computer and put a copy of the recordings on a MP3 card and you can show your son's teacher what words he has mastered. Hope this advice helps you a whole lot Princesca
Dodger

1) The son is 18 months I believe, so not in school. Early intervention is the absolute BEST thing to do in this case.
2) That's not the way things work anymore. You can't just sign someone up for speech therapy at school, they need to be evaluated and have an IEP to receive services.

 

[toodycat]

The quality of services does vary by state. I also live in NY and therefore, my son got early intervention that was more than appropriate. It was excellent. If your child needs speech and your district’s Committee for Preschool Special Education doesn’t provide enough services, I would certainly recommend going through insurance as well. Do as much as you can as early as possible and there’s a good chance your child will need fewer or no services later on.

 

[disneydreamer1980]

My son loves his ST. He’ll be sad when it’s over. I have several family members (my dad, sister and her kids) who all had the same speech problems my son does when they were little and they all have totally normal speech now and they’re all smart and successful. There’s obviously some genetic component in my sons case. They did do autism and hearing screenings on him at the beginning of his ST which were both normal. He was also found to be tongue tied which was fixed when he was small, not sure if that contributed or not. For years I had to kind of translate for him (I always understood him but no one else could) and he would get very frustrated when people couldn’t understand him. Now everyone can and he’s a much more confident kid.