It is worth going to a speech therapist when a 2-year-old baby does not speak at all or speaks only a few words. The situation is complicated if the same problems are observed in 4-5-year-old children.
Some parents do not consider it a reason to worry when their baby, by the age of five, is just beginning to pronounce its first words, and some are sounding the alarm and "dragging around" a one and a half year old baby if, in their opinion, he does not express his thoughts clearly enough. How can you not miss the moment and understand that it's time to go to a speech therapist?
Preconditions for possible speech problems
If at birth and in the first months of life a neurologist diagnoses the baby with MMD, PEP or hypoxic-ischemic CNS damage, delayed psychomotor development, then already at this stage we can safely say that the child will have problems with speech development. Therefore, parents can think about correctional classes already in the first months of a baby's life. Children with poor health, hearing, vision, thyroid and mental problems are also at risk. Parents should be wary if by the age of 1, 5 the child does not have phrasal speech, if he does not begin to pronounce the first syllables of words. By the age of three, a child should be able to construct a three-word phrase.
Sometimes the mental development of their baby is slowed down by the parents themselves, lisping and deliberately talking to him in babbling language. Such "shashi-masashi" lead to infantilism with all the ensuing consequences. But there is also a downside to the coin, when parents raise a child prodigy from the cradle and try to take him to all the circles that are near their home. Such a load can be detrimental to the child's psyche, and if he learns a foreign language from an early age, he will generally get confused in sound pronunciation.
When to go
You need to go to a speech therapist when a two-year-old child has no speech at all or his vocabulary is no more than 10 words. Here it is important to find a competent specialist who has experience not only in correcting sounds, but also in the formation of speech in non-speaking children. As a rule, it is very difficult to find such a speech therapist, most of them start working with 4-5-year-old children when the moment is already missed. Alternatively, you can try to send your baby to a speech therapy kindergarten, where classes with such children are held in groups, starting from 3 years old.
In general, a speech therapist begins to set and correct sounds in 4-year-olds. Particular attention is paid to children with stuttering, as well as 6-year-olds who are unable to memorize poems, retell the text and pronounce some words.
