5 Signs That Your Child May Need Speech Therapy

1. Difficulty with social interaction: this starts from infancy (3 months) and includes poor eye contact, doesn’t smile, doesn’t engage with others.
2. Little or no babbling, no vocal play, your child only makes a few sounds, little use of gesture (from 7 months onwards): this indicates communicative intention and speech development may not be happening
3. People, other than you/direct family members, have difficulty understanding your child i.e. their speech and sentence structure is incomprehensible and doesn’t make sense, from 18 months upwards.
4. By 2 years old, your child has not started combined 2-words: these include simple combinations like ‘come mama’, ‘ta juice’ etc.
5. Speech sounds develop at each age-level, if your child is having difficulty producing certain sounds, difficulty imitating sounds and words or struggles to get a sound out, consult a speech therapist.

Starting intervention earlier significantly eliminates your child needing ongoing or later-in-life therapy. There has been around 50 years of research (both quantitative and qualitative findings) showing that early intervention increases the developmental and educational gains for the child, improves the functioning of a family unit, and reaps long-term benefits for society.