I had a speech impediment as a child and a few years of speech therapy mostly cured it.
My problem is apparently my brain runs at 100/m an hour and my mouth can barely hit 60m/h, so a lot of my therapy was just learning to slow down a bit so my tongue wouldn’t trip over itself.
I did speech therapy too! Now no one notices (other than the fact sometimes I structure my thoughts and words oddly). At least what I am saying is clearer than what I mean.
My brain is often so far ahead of my mouth that I forget how the next thought began before my mouth can finish the current scentence and start the next. I have to pause to go back and try to piece together how it started. If the pause takes too long, the social anxiety comes in and freezes my brain entirely, extending the pause, which can worsen the freeze, further extending the pause, worsening the freeze, ect. It's awful. Sometimes, it goes on long enough that the other person picks up the conversation. There's no one to save me during public speaking.
Same here... Had a "stutter" that wasn't really a stutter, it was just me not being able to get my thoughts out at the speed my mind wanted to get them out.
Spent a good 2-3 years in speech therapy from grades 4-6.
As someone with ASD I get that, I was just stating how development affects us all in different ways. I'd also hazard a guess at saying those who were nonverbal until they were a few years old weren't "just shy", there's a lot more going on than that, hence, development affects us all in different ways
I don’t know how true that actually is cause I seem to hear all of the time about kids who had delayed speech until 4/5 and turned out fine, myself included.
I have a niece who didn’t speak until she was 4, she is now at uni. And a friends little boy was non verbal until he was 3 but is fine now and has just started school.
In all honesty all of them didn’t but that’s because their parents were either neglectful or didn’t have the resources, and my parents were just assholes lmao I got absolutely nothing.
I was non verbal until 5. My sister said everything for me. Spent 10 years in speech therapy and I still don't properly say my last name if I'm not focused on pronunciation.
Finished my masters with a 4.0. Still can't even say my name properly without people mistaking the L for a W sound.
I’d highly recommend an AAC device. Ablenet can provide a free assessment and device.
And I will dispel the myth right now. It will not reduce or replace your child’s verbal speech.
It will give him access to language and communication. If he doesn’t have access to a robust aac system it is a deprivation of the ability to communicate.
My brother was youngest of 4 kids. Didn't speak until age 4. Parents renamed him Henry.
He has had the most fantastic social skills his whole life (50+ years), srsly.
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u/TributeBands_areSHIT 16d ago
Those are exceptions. Unfortunately most children who are non verbal by 4 require extensive services to catch up.
Rarely are these children just “really shy but fully capable of speech”. It takes WORK to get them to communicate 99% of the time.