Parents can rest easy. If your child is a late-talker, it is because your kid is a late-talker, not because you didn't show them enough baby Einstein videos:
New research findings from the world's largest study predicting children's late language emergence has revealed that parents are not to blame for late talking toddlers.
The LOOKING at Language project has analysed the speech development of 1766 children in Western Australia from infancy to seven years of age, with particular focus on environmental, neuro-developmental and genetic risk factors. It is the first study to look at predictors of late language.LOOKING at Language Chief Investigator Professor Mabel Rice said the research found that 13 per cent of children at two years of age were late talkers.
Boys were three times more likely to have delayed speech development, while a child with siblings was at double the risk, as were children with a family history of late talkers.
The study found that a mother's education, income, parenting style or mental health had no impact on a child's likelihood of being a late talker.
Study Coordinator Associate Professor Kate Taylor said the findings debunked common myths about why children are late talkers.
"Some people have wrongly believed that delayed language development could be due to a child not being spoken to enough or because of some other inadequacy in the family environment," Associate Professor Taylor said.
The study goes on to mention that late-talkers generally catch up with their peers later in childhood.
It is important for parents not to freak out about small variations in their child's development, lest their solution be worse than problem itself. It is true that kids sometimes have learning disabilities, and we should try and recognize them. But I think for a lot of parents it becomes almost a competition to see whose kid can talk and read the earliest.
Funny story: My Mom was telling me the other day that when I went to first grade the teachers took her aside one day. They said that they couldn't understand why I couldn't read -- I couldn't at the time -- because I would use words like "loquacious" in a sentence. They were worried that I was having vision problems or something.
Turns out that I was fine by the end of the year, but I just was maturing at a different rate from other kids. Now I can even spell...
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Good call on not worrying about "small" variations.
Another important quote from that article: "However, she said that it is important that children who are delayed in their language development by 2 years of age are professionally evaluated by a speech pathologist and have their hearing checked.
"By 24 months, children will usually have a vocabulary of around 50 words and have begun combining those words in two or three word sentences."
Remember that.
My oldest had NO vocabulary at age 2, and at age three only had about a dozen monosyllabic approximations. Since he had had a history neo-natal seizures (plus another nasty one during an illness when he was a year old), he was referred to a speech therapy clinic at the age of two (diagnosis was oral motor dyspraxia with some functional dysarthria and some dysphasia). He was in speech therapy for about 10 years... he still has some serious expressive language issues (which is why he is still gettin special ed. services as he enters his senior year in high school).
Even with as severe of problems he had, including only being able to communicate as a toddler with sign language... Oh, so friendly folks kept telling us to "not worry, he'll learn to talk sometime...My second cousin's niece's kid did not talk until they were 3, 4, 5, 15 years old and is fine now!". Of course, when I ask for more specific details on this miracle child the response was a blank stare.
Second child did have a language delay (speech and language are two different things, his older brother had a SPEECH disorder). This was noticed by his brother's speech therapist. Little brother got some language therapy from the age of 3 to 5. He entered kindergarten scoring "low average" in the language test. As it turns out he finished his freshman year of high school as an Honor student. He is the type of child the article is aimed at. If he had been the first child, there would have been no push for early intervention... but we did not want to take any chances.
Longitudinal prospective studies by Rhea Paul show that about 50% of late talkers catch up and about 50% of kids don't. This is consistent with epidemiological data from Tomblin et al that show that language impairment affects approximately 7% of the population. This 7% (about 1/2 of 13% who are late talkers at 2) goes on to show long term academic deficits and likely have poorer social outcomes. We believe that early intervention can prevent some of these problems. So while it's nice to be in a position to blow off delay for half of the late talkers, it's a significant concern for the other half. And at this point in time we don't have a reliable way to determine who falls into each group.
While Early Intervention can be great for many young children with mild to severe delays it cannot be considered a blanket solution for all children. My son is a late-talker, actually he talks a lot but is almost entirely incomprehensible even to me most days. We are working with him and he has made great strides. We did Early Intervention through our state program for awhile, where a therapist would come to our house for a 1-hour visit and essentially "play" with my son, but all the while encouraging him to practice his speech correctly.
When he turned 3 he, unfortunatley, graduated from this program and started speech services at the local school where the speech therapist was far more concerned with him doing the activities she wanted him to do (which consisted mainly of coloring with crayons) and when he wouldn't she suggested to me that he probably had "sensory issues". In a meeting that followed she and the school OT kept touting to me the importance of early intervention as being almost more important than actually determining with accuracy whether or not he indeed had "sensory issues", which he does not. The speech therapists negative attitude and flippant, cavalier approach made me pull my son out of therapy and he continues to progress just from the work my husband and I do with him at home.
Yes, early intervention can be great, but we should be careful not to become to overzealous in our anxiety to keep our children from "falling behind". Treating a child for a condition he/she does not have, or taking too strict/rigid of an approach to address a potential delay CAN indeed cause more harm then good! If I were to enroll my son in the school's local developmentally delayed preschool class (which I was told I should do, lest we miss the window of opportunity to "fix" my son, thereby leading to a life of failure and loserdom) I can guarantee his self-esteem would be shattered within a month! It is an incredibly rigid and oppressive format for a preschool curriculum with HEAVY emphasis being placed on the child's learning to sit quietly. For a child who has difficulty sitting quietly at such a young age, the clashes which are bound to occur can leave the child rocked, harboring an intensely negative attitude towards school, authority, and any institutionalized setting in general.
All that being said, we all do the best we can as parents. Listen to your gut, it generally will lead you where you need to go.