Are you worried about seeing a speech therapist for your 2-year-old?

This is a phrase that constantly echoes in my ears, after a phone call with a former client...

A client convinced of the benefits of early stimulation. Convinced, because we greatly helped her son, who was two years old at the beginning of the follow-up and had a severe language delay. She regularly gives me updates on him. He is now 3 and a half years old and speaks completely normally. She shared this reflection with me because she sometimes encourages a parent she knows to seek speech therapy quickly, but that parent then shares their fears, or their hopes...

Fear... It's true that this emotion often paralyzes us.

As parents, we hear all sorts of scary information related to language: fear that our child will not develop "normally," fear that they will be dysphasic or autistic, fear that they will never learn to speak like others...

And in these cases, often, to reassure ourselves or to protect ourselves, we hope... We hope that our child's developmental differences will resolve themselves... That language will "blossom" or "take the right turn," without having to consult... We hope that our child will be like one of our old uncles who didn't speak until he was 3 and who speaks like everyone else today... A perfectly normal, and even necessary, hope before taking action.

Faced with these two major emotions, I understand and feel a great need to reassure these parents. To reassure them that it's not only dysphasia or autism (or ASD) that explains language delays. These two disorders are extreme examples, though very real, of language difficulties experienced by some children. But they are not the only ones. They represent only 2 to 9% of the Canadian child population.(1)

This means that for other children, we find (very briefly, and unfortunately, without being able to provide respective percentages as they are not available in research):

• simple delays (said to be mild) that will resolve on their own,

• other more significant (moderate) delays that will require help to progress, improve, and return to normal,

• other particular problems (severe delays or disorders) that require longer-term treatments, and often, specialized rehabilitation services.

Should I consult a speech therapist?

So, when a child has a language delay, the probability that the problem is severe is still quite low. And above all, remember that when parents act quickly, they can even change the course of things: this is exactly what happened with the client I was telling you about at the beginning of this article!

So, a little advice: don't stay paralyzed! Act as soon as possible: you won't regret it!

(1) sources: prevalence of autism spectrum disorders (C.N.R.I.S. journal website) and prevalence of dysphasia (Dysphasia Quebec Association website).