'Parents ARE to blame for many of the speech, language and communication delays' the headlines should have said!

Unfortunately, the press took the leading paragraph from the Hello press release literally (see our last blog post) and gave the parents the impression that it is OK to let your children watch TV for hours on end and that a lack of  interaction with your children has no bearing on their communication progress. Headlines such as 'TV not to blame', 'We cant blame parents' are both mis-leading and mis-guided. They actually had a negative effect rather than positive.


What the Hello campaign was alluding to, were the long term difficulties that around 7% of children will have. These are severe delays or disorders which happen through no fault of anyone, least of all the parents.


However, up to 50% of children in some areas do not have sufficient levels of spoken language to begin to learn written language as they start school. These difficulties can be transient so that they will improve with the right help. These families are definitely the cause of their delay. Children who are baby-sat by a screen, whether that be PC, computer or PS3. A lack of proper interaction with them means that children don't learn rules of conversation or social skills that go alongside. Studies have shown that babies do not become babbling by chance, if they are not communicated with, they wont try to practise using the sounds of language. Babies will even stop crying if no one responds when they do. A child won't learn vocabulary if they don't hear the words. The way we learn language is by being exposed to it repeatedly.


We are facing a crisis yet no-one seems to understand. I was hoping that the Hello campaign would hi-light the issues and promote good practise, yet January's theme was just that and I didn't see any headlines to that effect, did you? I can spend hours on this, my personal soap box topic, because it's something I believe is vitally important. What sort of society are we going to become if our communication skills are falling apart?

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Related articles

• Parents 'not guilty' over speech (bbc.co.uk)

Hello in February: Let's talk about long term speech & language difficulties

One in six parents in Britain believe that the most common cause of speech, language and communication
difficulties among children is the time they spend on computers and watching television, according to a new poll published today to mark the launch of the Hello campaign (www.hello.org.uk)– the national year of communication.


Over half of parents surveyed blamed speech, language and communication difficulties on parents not talking to their children enough. Nearly one in three parents said they were or had been concerned about their children’s communication skills. The OnePoll survey of 6,000 people, including 3,000 parents, was commissioned by the Hello campaign to explore perceptions about children’s speech and language development.  


The Hello campaign aims to make children and young people’s communication development a priority in homes, nurseries and schools across the country. It is run by The Communication Trust, a coalition of 40 organisations with expertise in speech, language and communication, in partnership with Communication Champion, Jean Gross. The campaign is backed by government and sponsored by BT and Pearson Assessment.


Speech, language and communication needs affect over 1 million children in the UK today: four out of five respondents underestimated the extent of these difficulties. Only one in five of the 6,000 people polled considered biological or genetic reasons to be a possible cause of speech, language and communication
needs. However, the Hello campaign says the exact cause of long term speech, language and communication needs is often unknown but can be attributed to biological as opposed to environmental factors.  


Jean Gross, England’s Communication Champion, said: “Public understanding of children’s communication difficulties remains worryingly low. The automatic response seems to be to blame parents or technology. This just isn’t right. We need to clear up the confusion and myths that exist around this subject. 10% of children – that’s two to three in every UK classroom – have some form of long term communication difficulty that can affect them early, severely and for life. Their brains don’t process language in quite the same way that other children’s brains do.  These results reinforce the need for the Hello campaign to radically improve understanding of speech, language and communication difficulties and the impact this has on children’s lives.”


The adults surveyed (48% of whom were parents of children under 5), exposed widespread lack of knowledge about children’s speech and language development. The poll found, for example, that parents and the general population know more about walking milestones than talking milestones.


8% of parents said they had been or were concerned that their children’s communication difficulties were significant, with a greater proportion of these in Northern Ireland (13%) and England (8.1%) than in Scotland (6.1%) and Wales (6%). One in seven of the general population say they wouldn’t have a clue when asked whether they would recognise a child with a speech, language and communication need. Most adults however could relate to the impact of communication difficulties. When asked how they themselves felt when they struggled to get a message across or got words muddled up, two thirds of adults felt frustrated or silly with only 9% saying it didn’t affect them.


Chris Pike, young person aged 17 with a communication difficulty, says; “The worst part of having a communication difficulty is being misunderstood; quite often the people around me don’t even realise I have these special needs. Parents and teachers clearly want to help me and others like me to develop and reach our full potential. However, the vast majority of people just don’t know the reality of struggling with a communication problem.


“It’s upsetting that many people might blame my problems on spending too much time in front of TV and computer screens. Communication difficulties come in a whole variety of different forms; sometimes they aren’t visible. I know the Hello campaign will change the way parents, teachers and young people view and understand communication problems. I really hope this will allow children and young people like myself to be recognised and understood, in the same way those with dyslexia and autism are.”


The Hello campaign will improve understanding and disseminate information on typical communication development, how to spot if children are struggling and where to go for help and support. 70% of survey respondents felt that more information on how children develop speech, language and communication
would be helpful, amongst parents this rose to 82%. Only 22% would ask parents, grandparents or friendsfor information on general communication development compared to 39% going to the internet.  The Hello campaign will also prompt tangible improvements for the 1.2 million children and young people in the UK, with some form of long‐term speech, language and communication needs. This means more support for parents and carers, earlier identification of difficulties and earlier, more appropriate, referral to specialist support such as speech & language therapy.

Related articles

• Parents 'not guilty' over speech (bbc.co.uk)
• Communication breakdown: Too much TV and not enough talk 'leads to speech problems in children' (dailymail.co.uk)

Speech & Language Therapists? What do they do again?

This article has been reprinted in many different places including Russia and India in the last 12 months. I thought I'd share it here:

In order for professionals from any field to work together well, it is vitally important that each one has at least a working knowledge of the other's role and ideally a little about their background. They need to understand what each can bring to the situation to help whatever task is on the table. There have been many studies and many projects on this topic. I wrote ‘Exactly what do they do’ for Special Children Magazine in 1994 which focussed on the results of a questionnaire. This really pointed to the fact that teachers didn’t really know what to expect from the Speech & Language Therapist. Having been out of the profession and working in industry for ten years, I assumed that the situation would have changed radically and improved beyond belief. However, in my day to day clinical work in schools and nurseries, I found the opposite to be true. The general opinion, I gathered, was that teachers do not realise what speech & language therapists do and how they can work together I decided, therefore, to look at the current situation in more depth.

The survey results revealed that we have been seen as very nice ladies who rush into nursery or school with folders, leave reams of paperwork and dash off, only to return weeks later to repeat the procedure. You can read the rest of the article at:

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/childhood-education-articles/speech-amp-language-therapists-exactly-what-do-they-do-1887035.html  I'd welcome your comments!

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January Podcast

We've had a fantastic start to the year, click 'play' to hear more......

 

Apologies for the variation in sound quality!

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Baby Talk.... let's celebrate it!

I had a lovely day yesterday, which included a mix of groups and individual clients. I enjoyed all of it but the hi-light of the day was a group of new mums and their babies. They were still at the stage where age is measured in weeks and the mums were still adapting to the enormous change to their lives while regularly swapping their various birthing stories.


The purpose of the session was to discuss 'Baby Talk' which is a series of sessions to go through important topics surrounding interaction and a baby's communication development. The first session looks at how old the baby should be before you start talking to him or her. All the mums there were adamant that it should be immediately. We discussed how new research has proved  what we suspected, that they must be able to hear before they are born. A new born can identify the voice of his mother, over others, immediately after birth according to new research from the US.


The reaction of these mothers was very refreshing! We don't run too many classes like this one unless they are commissioned by midwives or other health professionals as many feel that there's no point in talking to a baby 'as they wont talk for ages'. However, babies need to be talked to to trigger the area of the brain responsible for communication and also the centre for interaction, empathy and social skills. If they do not receive this in the first year then there are long term implications.


It is very worrying that many children today are not experiencing adequate interaction. I observed 6 young mothers last week with toddlers in pushchairs. I was waiting for a fiend who was running late so was parked at the side of a road in a housing estate.  I saw no interaction between mother and child whatsoever. 2 were texting, 1 was on the phone and the others had i-pod ear-pieces in! Where was the opportunity for communication there?


It not just a specific class problem as the Daily Telegraph reported last week that children of middle class families are suffering too from lack of attention by parents who are working longer hours.


The 2011 Hello Campaign aims to share with the general public how amazing human communication is and bring attention to what we should be doing. This month' s theme is don't take communication for granted and next month it will be all about the fact that 'babbling babies don't turn into talkative toddlers by chance, it requires help and encouragement'.


The Baby Talk sessions will celebrate this and we will discuss other issues such as the use of dummies, forwards facing push-chairs, nursery rhymes and TV watching. As I've said 100 times before, human communication is fantastic, fascinating, fabulous.... there are insufficient superlatives to describe it and yet we do take it for granted!!!

Planned chaos with Teeny twos!

There are several reasons why a child of 2 might not be talking as expected including a general developmental delay, problems understanding, a family history of late talking, they might not see the need, they may be on the autistic continuum or belong to a family who don’t realise that they need to interact with their toddler in order for him or her to learn to talk. 

Whatever the reason, I created the Teeny Talker groups (part of the Smart Talkers Pre-School Groups range) to help.  The sessions are great fun and have specific aims involving songs, games, puppets and a snack-time. I have to say that sometimes these aims may not be clear to the observer as working with 2 year olds can be extremely unpredictable.... but never, never boring! They're not just for children with delayed language and are designed to encourage confidence and communication in all 2 year olds. I love running these groups and we get some fantastic results so I thought I'd share a couple of case studies with you. 

Case Study 1

J. B. was 2 yrs 5 months and had no spoken words. He got by with a combination of pointing and grunts. His mother, a single parent was concerned that this would affect his relationships with other children. His behaviour was deteriorating due to frustration at not being able to get his message across. His Health Visitor referred him to speech & language therapy but also advised his mother to take him to the Small talk group at Boney Hay. He is an only child.

J.B’s attention was fleeting and he preferred to run around for the first two sessions. He could not wait for his turn and had small temper tantrums as a result. No spoken language was observed at this time. However, six sessions on he could sit and attend to the group tasks, join in for his turn and more often than not volunteered to be the helper at snack time which meant he was last to be served! He could produce 25 or more single words and could even produce 2 words together e.g. more pop,  bubbles gone.

J.B. was already a confident little boy but he and his mother needed encouragement to communicate verbally and to observe how the Therapist’s techniques can be used at home in everyday situations. He received his NHS appointment but has been discharged because he is making such encouraging progress.

Case Study 2

N. J. was 2 yrs 6 months when she came to the group. Her parents were concerned because she did not speak at all, she was effectively mute. The Health Visitor had recommended they come along.

For the first 4 sessions she was very quiet but co-operated fully for the tasks. She appeared to enjoy the songs and her understanding was very good. Gradually, she began to join in with the songs and then she named items. Now 7 sessions on, she is talking when it is her turn and will spontaneously ask for drink or biscuit at the snack time. She can use 2-3 word sentences. Her confidence to communicate was the biggest stumbling block and the group acted as a forum in which to develop this. The signing and augmentative communication techniques just alleviated the pressure for her. She is using her new found skills in most situations now.

We've got Teeny Talkers at the Willows, Boney Hay, Featherstone, Springhill, Glenthorne and Landywood Children's Centres this term. If you would like us to come to your area or group, let us know!

For more information ring 0844 704 5888 or 07970 202561  www.smarttalkers.org.uk

Come and join Small Talk!

Small Talk are looking for qualified paediatric Speech & Language Therapists across the UK to join our dynamic, independent team.

If you are looking to work for yourself but not sure how to start, worry that you don’t have the business knowledge to be successful and need the support/mentoring of a team, this is ideal for you.

We offer a chosen distinct geographical area, within the hours that suit you. 

Work as little as a few hours to a full time week. Combine with NHS or other employed work.

The new posts will look to commence as soon as possible for each candidate.

For more about us www.private-speech-therapy.co.uk 0844 704 5888

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