Autistic Children - Suspecting a Problem, When There is Speech Delay Early On
As easy as it is for us to take speech for granted, we all in our hearts know that the faculty of speech is a wonder for the fact that it happens at all. Thats why parents usually start losing it when their child hasnt started speaking at the right age. Nothing about a speech delay is easy to understand. Parents bring in a little uncooperative baby at the doctor's, and it is all the pediatrician can do to keep the bedlam down. And the doctor needs to manage a way to find answers to a bunch of questions. How many words does the child normally use? Can anyone actually understand the child other than the parents? Does the child do more than use single words? Sometimes the parents can help with these answers, and sometimes the doctor has to make her own educated guesses. While this might have a ring of superfluity like, say going to a pet psychiatrist to figure out what Whiskers is thinking, these are very useful questions that the right doctor can put to excellent analytical use in diagnosing speech-delayed children; in a country where one out of every one hundred children is autistic, getting a leg up on diagnosing autistic children early on is an added bonus too.
Of course, all of this requires childcare specialists, doctors and nurses, who are completely familiar with the timeline that a childs development usually follows. Within the first year of birth, the child normally understands most of the language it hears. By its first birthday, a child is able to put together a vocabulary of single words, follow instructions, and be entertained by nursery rhymes and stories. By age 2, short sentences are quite common, while by the third birthday, there are complicated sentences and thoughts in evidence. These are really elementary speech abilities, and it is easy to take them for granted. We only get a glimpse behind the complexity at work from neurological areas to do with communication, right down to the thought process - behind the couple of simple words the child utters, only when something goes wrong. Is it just a problem to do with speech processing, or is there something slowing down the entire brain? Perhaps the child lacks social skillsdevelopment. Or is it something simpler, like a hearing disability? These days, with speech delay, there is always the possibility that one is dealing with autistic children.
Not every child with autism will demonstrate some kind of speech delay. The child will often have speech, but wont be to communicate with his mother. It will just be words memorized without emotion. The real experts who deal with autistic children who demonstrate speech delay, are the speech pathologists. The clue to the zeroing in on an autism-related speech delay is evidence of an unnatural use of language. A doting parent may not be able to put his finger on it, but there is always a feeling a doctor gets that there is some kind of disconnectedness going on. Actually, speech delay is a good way by which a parent can tell the difference between autistic children and children afflicted with the Asperger's disorder. Children with Asperger's do not show any kind of speech delay. But the good news is, in a normal child, speech delay doesn't really signify anything for how the child will get on, later in life.
10 years ago
