Is it a speech delay? Don't WAIT & see with Angie Hronek, MS CCC-SLP
Today I’d like to introduce you to Angela Hronek. She is a speech-language pathologist. She owns her own business, SPEECH WORKS and in this business, she does Pediatric Speech Therapy.
I work out of my home office, which I love. It's a natural environment kids just feel like they're coming for a playdate not feeling like they're going to the doctor's office. Right? So it's a really, really natural way of doing therapy and it really resonates with kids and shows a lot of progress when we do it that way. I also offer in-home services and tele-therapy.
So as some of you already know, I have a child who has a speech delay.
She two, and I realized at about twenty-months that she only had seven words. I was concerned mostly because the seven words that she had were the same seven words that she had the month before and the month before. I've had a lot of parents asking me like how did you know she was speech delayed?
How do you know if a child has a speech delay?
The way you can tell is knowing the norms. So you've got to understand what normal development looks like and that can be a little confusing. So we go by averages for kids.
Expressive skills what they can say. Count the words they say. Receptive words are what they understand from you. So with like a one-year-old we're looking at an average between 1 to 5 words (expressive). By the time that child is 18-months the average is 50 words.
Something that's often confusing is pediatricians at your two-year well-visit — will ask if your child has 50 words, but technically 50 words for a two-year-old is delayed. Average for a two-year-old is actually between a 100 to 200 words.
Those are some general milestones that you want to be looking for with your younger kids as young toddlers once you if you can look at your child and say, you know, they're not really doing those things, that's when you want to investigate further.
You can always look at a website called the American Speech Hearing and Language Association. So asha.org and they'll have all different milestones for speech and language and social interaction there and they'll be able to you know for all different ages.
The one place where you should definitely not look is Facebook Mom groups.
There's so much misinformation spread there.
Why would you suggest to parents to not do the wait-and-see method?
A lot of times, between fifteen months and two-years-old, is where the concern starts to come in for speech delays. So if you take an eighteen-month-old that only has like five words, (six-month delay in language). Let's say you wait and see till they are three-years-old. You've taken a six-month delay and increased it to a two-year delay.
So your kid has to like hyper-develop to catch up. Instead of closing a SMALL gap, you've got to close an even bigger gap and there are more holes. It's a larger impact when you wait and see.
For a lot of kids who are late talkers or have a language delay, there is hope. Between sixty and seventy percent of kids catch up on their own, no intervention needed. With that other 30-40%, they have a lifelong impact from that language delay.
Early intervention is the most effective and the best bang for your buck. You're going to get the most progress by intervening earlier and you can close the gap of where your child needs to be and where they are much quicker and easier than if you wait so long
I think there's no harm in doing things that promote speech and language it only benefits your child. There's no harm done. Even if your child catches up on their own knowing what to do and giving him a little bit of help just promotes that language skill and closes that gap and puts them in a better place. So to me, there's NO risk in waiting.
Because you might have a child who doesn't grow out of their language to it, but there is no risk in getting early intervention and getting help right away because it will only help it will not hurt.
If I waited to get my daughter speech support, it would have a domino effect on her. So she's not able to communicate what she needs and so then she's having more tantrums, more challenging behavior and other problems.
Does speech delay have an impact on academics and on behavior?
Yes, yes, it does. And this is one of my favorite topics to talk about because all of these things influence each other just like you said it's a domino effect. So I am a child who struggles to talk as you've experienced has more frustration because they can't get their message across. So you start to see Behavior challenges with those kids, but as they grow up even when they get to school age and going through academics speech and language impact reading and reading comprehension skills. So you see kids a lot of times if they have a language delay that's persisting into like kindergarten first grade up to sixth grade. You see them struggle with reading and writing you see them struggle with retelling narratives (being able to tell a story that's cohesive and make sense). Kids with language delays will continue to struggle with that learning new vocabulary is really difficult birth.
I just see this impact grow bigger and bigger as they get older and older. Another thing that happens is that kids with poor language skills often have poor social skills, and they're the ones that get bullied in school and research shows that to be true. And so that's always like a heartbreaking thing with parents and for teachers and for speech therapists at a school district because you see this kid struggling they don't understand humor because of their language delay, they don't understand how to interact how to make friends because of the language delay. They don't have the words. They need to be on par with their peers and so they get picked on and you know it just I just if I can prevent that from happening I want to do that. And so that's a reason why I'm just so passionate about early intervention and getting to it before it has this domino effect.
We stop that chain of events and put it on a different trajectory because every kid deserves an equal chance to be successful and to be the best that they can be and to have their abilities match. You know, what they're capable of I I see here parents all the time be like, they're so smart, but they're just not talking. I hear it all the time and it's so true. You've got these kids who have so much inside of them that they can't express or they have trouble understanding, but if they could understand what you're saying if they understand the words you're using they could have so much back-and-forth interaction and be on the same level and have a great relationship with their peers. So that's always like deep down in my heart. That's what I'm trying to picture. Where is this kids going to be in sixth grade? Where is this little guy going to be when he's five years old old.
And I want that to be a really good place.
I've seen something that you've talked about on your page and it was really helpful to me. My child was having hard behaviors. She's screaming at me all day. And being obsessive over certain toys. I'm like “does she have autism, does she have this?”
I am all about early intervention. So the sooner I can figure out what is going on, the sooner I can help it. Angie shared a video with me that says how speech delays sometimes look similar to autism and it can look very similar but also looks different.
Can you talk more about how speech delays sometimes it might show up looking like it might it could possibly be another diagnosis and how that gets confusing?
Yes. That is such a good question. It's a common question and I think it's something that if more parents understood there would be fewer sleepless nights and better and better intervention.
So when kids are between like a year to two to three years old, that's generally when they start looking into autism, right and the tricky part is that the red flags of autism are very, very similar or the exact same as a child who only has a speech delay.
So there's a lot of overlap there which creates confusion and fear in parents, you know, and that anxiety and the unknown of okay is this just an impact from not being able to express themselves or not understanding language or is this the real deal autism? And so some of those overlaps our first of all language delay.
So if you have a language delay, you can't talk generally kids with autism have a language delay and struggle to speak or express things and understand language. Echolalia, which is repeating something after that they've heard, is something that kids with a speech delay do and kids with autism do.
Those are some basic features of both. It's an important topic and one that I love to share about because it brings peace whether you realize your child is probably more likely on this autism side so you can prepare yourself for that or, your child is probably more on this speech side.
Whether my children's autism or odd or whatever, I'm going to help her through that. It is a lot more stressful to add multiple diagnoses.
Somebody reached out to me that after I shared and said, I wish I had this for my son when he was male age because he's now six or seven. Now he's being tested for autism and had they known at that early age that the speech delay wasn't actually just a speech delay, they could have gotten early intervention. So I really really appreciate you talking about this topic.
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