Are you worried about the speech or language of a child who can’t be understood or has difficulty reading or writing? Does your child not seem to be talking like other children of the same age? I once had exactly this worry about a child of my own.
If you just want to get things done, contact me now for a free, half hour, face-to-face consultation, as soon as we can arrange this. It is helpful if you can answer all the questions on the contact form. To save time at our first meeting, please complete the check list here, and send it to me in advance.
I try to maximise FUN and the experience of success, minimise the sense of failure, and build CONFIDENCE. I define my therapy goals on what a child can say, not on what he or she can't say.
I have been trained as a speech nd language therapist and as a linguist.
My experience is in speech and language therapy for a wide variety of conditions in children and in adults.
I now specialise in the area where I have special training, experience and expertise – problems with the formation of sounds, words and sentences, where there is either no speech or language, or where the speech is limited or hard or impossible to understand. Linguistically motivated treatment gets the fastest results.
I use, as I am required to by the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists, treatments which are evidence-based.
I treat what are often or sometimes known as
Articulation delays, Articulation disorders, Phonological disorders, Verbal Dyspraxia, Childhood Apraxia of Speech, CAS, Language delays, Language disorders, Specific Language Impairment, SLI, Lisps, No speech or language, Profound unintelligibility, Dysfluency, Stammering, Disorders of writing and / or reading, Dyslexia.
I follow a tradition going back to the 1660s. This is now arguably the dominant approach to the study of speech and language. I am also active in research.
You want your child to do well, to be safe, happy, enjoying life, fitting in and making friends. But if a child is not learning to talk this can limit the making of friendships. And this can have long term effects.
You may be worried about your child not seeming to follow the ‘normal’ schedule. But children are individuals. There are many reasons for them making up schedules of their own.
You don’t want your child to suffer because of a communication problem.
Are you worried about any of these things? Before I went to university, I was very worried about my three year old who had only one word at the time. I know what what the worries feel like.
If you’re worried and you want some information, this website is for you. There are things you can usefully do. You can take time for your child. You can make sure there is always a space for him or her in your life. You can keep a diary as an invaluable resource, helping to make it exactly clear how a child is progressing, and how the therapy is going, if the child is having therapy. There are various angles on what is at stake here.
There are common issues, and there are urgent issues.
And there are four simple questions:
Does the child seem to be missing milestones?
Are you worried about your child’s future?
Does your child seem to struggle with his or her disorder?
Does your child avoid conversation?
If the answer to any of these questions is: Yes, some investigation may be useful. You can contact me.
Is the child lazy? Has anyone done something wrong? These are common questions. My answer to both is: Almost never. But there are more productive ways of thinking about the issues here. Speech and language are are complex. It is not surprising many children have problems learning to talk.
Some of the commonest issues like problems with S and Z and saying K and S rather than T involve the fine details of speech, known as ‘features’.
Problems often go together. When problems go together they are known as co-morbidities. Many children who have problems learning to talk later have problems learning to read and write. This is often diagnosed as dyslexia.
Being confident about talking is halfway to being able to read and write, although confidence is not the only factor.
These problems often run in families.
Speech and language are both in the mind and on the lips. We can rehearse a speech in the mind without saying a word. The mental and physical aspects have to be balanced against one another. I don’t generally prod children’s tongues or try to spread their lips. My therapy has its basis in current linguistic theory and modeling. There is a learnability space that needs to be integrated into Speech and Language Therapy.