Review and monitoring

Some speech and language issues have. long natural history. Children who are hard to understand when they are small quite often go on to have problems learning to read and write, by what is known as a common co-morbidity.  And children who spend much of their early childhood unable to relate easily to other children of the same age may grow into adults who have difficulty with one or more aspects of everyday communication. So children may indeed seem to ‘grow out of’ early problems. But there can be consquences later on. So if there is a significant issue, it is as well to deal with it promptly.

But with the best will in the world, careful evaluation, and expert judgement, it is not easy to tell what counts as significant. Some children just follow the normal developmental pathway, only a bit more slowly than others. It may be that a child’s development needs to be watched over a period, seen for review at regular intervals.