Hi everyone, it’s Kasey Wade coming to you with a question that I get asked all the time by my parents on the phone… Why does my middle school/high schooler still have challenges with their articulation skills?! To answer this question, we first need to look at a few foundational skills that may seem basic, but may actually be missing in kiddos who have residual articulation errors.
Many people are surprised to find out that speech pathologists also work with feeding therapy. Those of you who know me, know that I don’t love feeding therapy myself. I enjoy eating so much that practicing chewing or working on chewing with our lips closed takes some of the fun out of it for me. However, what I DO love is helping kids to work on speech sounds. A few years ago I started noticing a pattern with the way all of my kids who had speech sound errors looked, specifically the way that their faces/mouths were growing and how their tongue was moving. I found that I could easily predict what types of sounds kids were going to have challenges with before they even opened their mouth to speak, simply based on how they looked. I knew this couldn’t be a coincidence and so I dug in to find more answers.
What I found is that there are three different things that you do with your mouth that all work together and are intertwined. These three skills include breathing, swallowing, and speaking. In the next blog posts, we are going to take a look at each of these processes and learn in depth, why each of them impacts the other and how we are missing out on the bigger picture if we only focus on one of these three.
The short of it is, that if your child continues to demonstrate residual articulation errors, despite years of speech therapy, it’s time we took a look at some of the other processes that your child engages in on a daily basis (probably hundreds of times a day) and be able to address some of these foundational skills to make a bigger and lasting impact instead of continuing to practice thousands of speech words and never get any closer to graduation.
-Kasey