Saturday, September 30, 2000Education
Language skills lag too often
At nine months, Griffin uttered his first word — “Dada” — and the world stood still. When he turned a year, he added “joose,” and there was great joy in Griffinland.
But at 18 months, Griffin still had only a handful of words — five to be exact — and soon began to lose those. The cup could be held just out of his reach, and still there was no “joose.”
His pediatrician arranged hearing screening and then a speech and language evaluation. Griffin's obvious difficulty — delayed speech — revealed itself as a troubling pattern. He choked often, drooled heavily, had little realization of the functions of his tongue, lips and mouth. He had stopped trying to form, not just words, but sounds.
At 20 months, Griffin started speech therapy twice a week. Ten months later, he completed it, able to interact with the world in a wholly different way. He choked less frequently. His behavior improved. He had the sounds required for becoming a reader, and the words for becoming a friend.
At 3, he is perfectly able to sit down at the dinner table and say, “This food is horrible,” and I, his cook and mother, am perfectly glad.
Griffin's struggle typifies how vital speech and language skills are to the development of a child. The day I received his speech evaluation I happened to be interviewing the late Jeanne Chall, a Harvard professor and one of the country's top reading researchers. “A child with speech difficulties almost invariably has reading difficulties,” she told me. “To learn to read, you must be able to make the sounds.”
Left untreated, communication problems lead to other complications. Socially, children who cannot communicate with peers and teachers tend to isolate themselves. Some engage in disruptive behavior. Academically, many children underestimate their own intelligence and, likewise, are often underestimated by their teachers. As Dr. Chall indicated, as many as half of all poor readers have a history of spoken language disorders. Physically and emotionally, children with speech and hearing problems are at a significantly higher risk of being abused.
Speech and language problems are hardly rare. Left untreated, most do not go away. A Baldwin-Wallace College study showed that 35 percent of kindergartners enter school without the speech, language and cognitive skills to succeed there. Nearly 60 percent of the juveniles in Ohio's correctional facilities fail basic speech-language screening tests.
The good news for children is that speech, language and hearing help is available and effective. The bad news is that many families don't have access to it. A recent study by the Ohio Speech Language Hearing Association (OSLHA) found that 30 percent of families needing treatment do not have the insurance coverage to provide it. An increasing number of plans restrict coverage to “acquired disorders,” which means the patient must have had the ability to speak, for example, then lost it. Typically they do not cover children with problems from birth.
OSLHA recommends that parents find out what speech and hearing services their health coverage provides, and lobby their employers for adequate coverage. Often, insurance riders can provide good coverage at reasonable costs.
Speech and language care are not “options” for a society dedicated to the well-being of its children. To be ready to learn, a child must enter school ready to communicate. Ultimately, the world is only open to children who can.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at the Enquirer, 312 Elm St. Cincinnati 45202, or krista_ramsey@hotmail.com