Every parent needs to know if their child has a speech delay. If not intervened immediately, the child’s speaking ability may be affected. Therefore, it is vital to know several ways to detect speech delay in children.
Not a few mothers are confused if their children still cannot speak. Children his age have started to mumble or even speak clearly. Maybe your child has a problem called speech delay. Then, how do detect the occurrence of speech delay in children?
How to Detect Speech Delay in Children
Indeed, each child’s ability can be different, so it is difficult to know if he has a speech delay or not. Initially, the child may babble incoherently. Over time it will be the first word. Usually, children start talking between the ages of 11 to 14 months but have begun to recognize language from the period of 3 months.
The term Speech Delay itself is a speech delay in a child’s growth caused by a lack of speech stimulation. Problems in this child may escape the attention of parents. Therefore, early detection is needed so that parents know whether their child has a speech delay or not.
Here are some ways to detect speech delay in children:
1. Comparison
The ability to speak from one child to another is indeed different. Therefore, comparing the power of a mother’s baby with other children can also be a simple clue. However, do not immediately conclude if the child’s speech ability lags behind children his age. It is because speech delay will usually only be seen when he enters 12 months.
The age of 12 months can limit whether the child is exposed to speech delay or not. At this age, experts believe that children have at least 1 to 20 vocabularies. By the time he is 18 months old, he will have 20 to 100 words.
2. Seeing Children’s Speech Development
If the child is exposed to speech delay without the parents realizing it, then don’t feel inferior. The reason is the signs of speech delay are very common, considering the development in children is different from one another. Therefore, so that parents know their child’s speech development, it is better to have a table of speech stages.
Reporting to Healthy Children, at the age of 1 to 6 months, children usually begin to respond to their parents’ words. Some signs include smiling, babbling, saying “baba,” and the like. If, at the age of 7 months, the child has not yet been able to do this, he may be affected by speech delay.
Not a few parents only realized that their child had speech delay when they were two years old. It is also known because it compares the speech ability of children with children their age. Immediately seek help from an expert if this happens.
3. Age-appropriate speech development
At the stage of normal speech development, children aged 10 to 11 months can already imitate. The child should be able to say “Papa” or “Mama” even though they do not know the true meaning. Meanwhile, when he was 12 months old, he could fluently call “Papa” or “Mama” and even say everyday words consisting of two or three syllables.
At the age of 24 months or two years, he also has more vocabulary, up to 50 words. At this age, children begin to understand other people’s terms. Meanwhile, when he is more than two years old, he will start to remember names, compose sentences, and remember more than 400 words.
Then, children who have passed the age of 2 years should also be able to say about 50 different words. Also, the child should be able to speak consisting of two words or even more. So if when he is 2.5 years old but does not yet have this ability, then the child is undoubtedly affected by speech delay.
