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The Basic Requirements of Speech Therapy for Children

By: AndrewM Tang


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Children who are still experiencing stuttering should be monitored by their parents for assessment purposes. If those kids who are stuttering are already older than five years old, what the parents need to do is to provide speech therapy for children.

Speech therapy may not be considered one of the hard-core medicine practices but it is one of the most useful disciplines especially when it comes to improving the children?s speech patterns.

The aim of speech therapy is to treat and cure a stutter. The discipline falls under the broad umbrella of speech pathology. However, speech therapy is not merely aimed at teaching a child to speak properly, but to set right a number of speech defects and correct a child's pattern of speech. Prior to therapy, a therapist first must identify if a child's speech defect is due to external causes such as accidents, or whether it is a natural defect.

Whatever the cause, a speech and language therapist must first and foremost determine the defect's severity. Practically speaking, the severity of the defect directly affects the gravity of treatment rendered, i.e. there is a direct correlation. Treatment is usually moderate for something relatively simple like a stutter, and is more intensive for more severe speech problems.

The speech and language pathologists or the speech therapists are not the only ones who can provide speech therapy. However, normal individuals can also provide therapy as long as they are guided by an SLP (speech and language pathologist). This can work very smoothly when the SLP drafts the lessons and the exercises that needed to be drafted for a more effective therapy.

Parents are also in the position to give speech therapy for children, but must also be closely monitored by an SLP. So, for parents to be able to carry out this task without facing any problem, parents of such children must be made to undergo some training that will enable them to know the common defects that should be identified.

Defects on children can be divided into three types of disorders. First is the articulation defect that is characterized by defects in secondary physical features involved in speech such as tongue, teeth, jaw, cheeks and lips. The second type of defects is also classified into voice/resonance disorders that affect the primary physical features that create voice and speech such as the vocal cords and the like. The last type of defect is called fluency disorders. Fluency disorders are not caused by any physical defect on the primary or secondary features involved in speech. Such fluency disorders are sometimes referred to as stuttering and the like.

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There are more resources for speech therapy for children included on this website: How to Stop Stuttering, visit now!

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