So Your Child Doesn’t Speak
So your child hasn’t developed useful speech, and by this time it doesn’t look as if they’re going to.
Perhaps they never had any speech at all, from the beginning; perhaps they began to develop speech, until at the age of three or so their acquisition of words stalled, then regressed.
Perhaps your kid’s got a few isolated words, or a few phrases that come up at inappropriate times, or perhaps they’re utterly mute. Anyway, their communication isn’t sufficient for their needs.
Perhaps they have another diagnosis – Down syndrome or Rett syndrome, say – or perhaps nobody’s offered you an explanation or just used vague terms like developmental delay.
Whatever their diagnostic differences, though, just at the beginning we’ll look at what all children with little or no functional speech have in common.
For people with little or no functional speech, the goal is literacy.
Yes-no boards and picture boards and symbol boards have their uses – they can be quicker or easier or less reliant on electricity – but they can’t enable a user to say everything they need to say. They can’t handle school curricula. They can’t allow a person to be a full member of society.
When they’re choosing a communication method for a person teachers or therapists or carers often settle for less because they think the person can’t handle the whole thing. They make reductive diagnoses or condescending assumptions. They think that literacy is too difficult.
They’ve generally got their diagnosis wrong – most people without speech have perfectly adequate language skills – but they’ve also got the practical end of things the wrong way round.
Talking is more difficult than writing. There’s a lot more fine-motor skill involved in working a tiny little muscle like the larynx than a great big digit like a finger. And inside the brain, language is a thing that we were all born with. It’s not a thing you have more of or less of, like money; it’s a basic feature of the mind, like breathing is a feature of the body. People have language. All people without speech have to do is to get that understanding translated into spelling.
Not everybody can spell. You may be too young, or you may not have had any exposure, or you may have been taught a different language altogether. That’s why it’s always a good idea to give every child – especially those with communication difficulties – a rich exposure to writing. Read to them, spell out complex words, put them through kinder with their peers.
If someone has to be taught, teach them. They may have the usual problems of children with disabilities – they have to spend a lot more time on activities of daily living, they may have problems with sitting still, they may be more easily distracted – but these can generally be got around for enough of the time to get on with the necessary skills, especially if the kid is motivated (and if they’re really being held back by not being able to communicate freely, they can be very motivated indeed).
It's also true that if they can’t tell you what they know they may be some way along the road to literacy already. We live in a text-saturated society, and it’s quite hard not to know that COCA-COLA spells coca-cola. When you’re starting out, take them through the levels. Can they point to the letter C? Can they spell their own name? Can they spell their brother’s name? Is there anything they want to say? If they get one level right, always try for the next up.
If they can spell, give them something that will stretch them. Have them write a story, or a poem. Ideally, there’ll be schoolwork, and essays, and chats with friends… though that’s another difficulty level altogether.
Don’t short-change people without speech by giving them a restricted means of communication. We live in a print-saturated era; take advantage of it and give them a means to exploit it.
The first thing children with little or no functional speech have in common is that whatever their diagnosis, whatever their other issues, their biggest problem is that they can’t communicate.
Children with little or no functional speech are dangerously easy – to underestimate.
And they will probably be underestimated, by almost everybody you have to deal with. Nasty people may write them off and almost dismiss them from membership in the human race. Nice people are going to sympathise with their handicaps and avoid stressing them with demands. Very few people are going to treat them like ordinary children.
For far too many children with little or no functional speech, the problem resolves itself into a vicious circle. They can’t speak, and that’s taken as a sign of mental retardation, and that’s taken to mean that they couldn’t say anything meaningful even if they could speak, and that’s taken to mean that there’s no point in giving them any Alternative and Augmented Communication (AAC) training, and so they can’t communicate, and don’t, ever.
Until children with little or no functional speech have a way to communicate, you have no idea what their real language abilities are.
You don’t know, and you can’t know, and if you take the advice of the people who say you can tell then you’re relying on thousands of years of the acquired prejudices of people who couldn’t have known either. And it’s a serious mistake to make uninformed assumptions.
Children with little or no functional speech all need another way to communicate – non-speech communication.
If you can’t speak you need an alternative method of communication. If you can’t speak well, or speak enough, you need a way to augment your speech. That’s why the field that covers these communication methods is called Alternative and Augmentative Communication, which is a mouthful, and so generally shortened to AAC.
If you do give theses children the resources in time, and training, and equipment, and encouragement, that they need, then they probably will be able to communicate with you.
The Anne McDonald Centre worked for forty years with over three thousand people, and gave proper AAC support and therapy. The vast majority of clients could learn eventually to communicate effectively through spelling.
