Hello again, everyone!
It’s Kasey back with part two of our blog series on typical speech sound development, and what we can do proactively to help set our kids on the right track. If you missed the first blog in this series, go back and learn about three key items that we need to know when talking about and thinking about how our kids are learning to talk. In this blog I want us to talk about appropriate positioning of our tongue, lips and jaw for early feeding, which then leads into speech sound production.
If you watch anyone around you talk, it’s unusual to see their tongue. You may notice a slight poke out of the tongue when the speaker says a TH sound, but for the most part the tongue is meant to stay hidden behind the teeth. This is also true for our kiddos. However, we often see kids protruding their tongue while talking and this is a pattern we like to resolve as early as possible. Here are some quick and easy ways that you can help your child to retract their tongue and keep it in their mouth.
Notice where their tongue is when they’re not using it. At rest we want kids to have their tongues resting lightly on the roof of their mouth with their lips closed and breathing through their nose. Watch your child as they sleep, play, or do a variety of other daily activities where they do not need to use their mouth to talk or eat. This will give you an idea as to where your child’s resting posture is and encouraging them to seal their lips and breathe through their nose is always a good idea.
Practice activities that pull their tongue back. We call this tongue retraction and is extremely important for a variety of different activities and skills. Some activities that you can do to help your child retract their tongue include blowing bubbles, drinking from a straw, or sounding a horn or a whistle. What we want to see in all of these activities that is that kids have their lips rounded, their jaw in a neutral position, and their tongue is pulled back. Practicing blowing horns and drinking out of straws may be a first step that is easier for your child compared to blowing bubbles or a pinwheel or even puffballs. This is because your child doesn’t have anything physical to wrap their mouths around in order to achieve the right placement for their articulators when they blow bubbles compared to a straw or a horn when they blow or drink from these.
**A word of caution**
We want to make sure that our children are not biting on the straw or curling their tongue up and around the straw like a hotdog. The goal of these tasks is to help our children pull their tongue back (or retract it) while rounding their lips and keeping their jaw in a neutral position.
Practice moving the tongue separately from the jaw. I typically like to encourage kids to look in the mirror for all of these activities since you can’t see your mouth like you can see your hand or your foot. By looking in a mirror, we help our kids to visualize what’s happening in a place in their body that they can’t typically see but often times just need to rely solely on the feeling. Looking in a mirror I often help kids to stabilize the jaw in order to figure out how to move their tongue separately, I do this by asking them to align their strong back teeth and to bite. Now, we don’t want our kids to be constantly clenching or talking while grinding their teeth, however, some stability of clothing our teeth helps our tongue to figure out how to move independently.
Check back in next week for some ideas on how to set your child up for success as you start to implement sounds that are emerging!
-Kasey