Ch Ch Changes

This feels like a really important blog to write because as a parent who has searched the internet for 3 years in search of the terms “late talker outcome” or “speech delay prognosis,” I can tell you that there are not enough follow up posts once the kids start talking and it makes those years seem very lonely and very, very long. If you click the tags “speech” or “apraxia” you can see some posts I’ve made about Elias and his language delay. I have some blog entries from Livejournal that I’d really like to get put up here as well, but I’m still trying to figure out how to organize them.

In a nutshell, Elias didn’t say a single word until he was 3 years old. Here is a video of how we communicated when he was 2.8 years old:

Somewhere soon after that he did start learning phonics, but he practiced those sounds in isolation for about 6 months before using single words, which he started using while sounding out written words. This is a video from when he was 3.4, about 4 months after he started talking:

He developed a serious interest in phonics because he then figured out blending and he was using real language. You could see how excited and proud he was of himself, and we were so pleased when he attempted new words that it wasn’t scary at all, more like a fun game. However, he still couldn’t answer even a simple question like “Did you got to the park?” Until he was 3 and a half! We think this is a receptive language delay called MERLD. He doesn’t process language easily, which might be the reason he couldn’t use language either. The processing part is still an issue for him but it’s less and less by each week now. Here is a video from last week:

He talks non-stop from morning ’til night, rarely pausing for thought. He’s still got a little something going on, he doesn’t have the detailed conversations that his peers are capable of, but it will come. Just today he said to us “We had a good day at Target” (we went for the nurse-in but no one was there except us!) totally out of the blue, which is a new step. He’s normally less conversational and more of a narrator.

So, for all those people who find this post by searching “Outcomes for a late talker” or “long term prognosis speech delays,” I share this, something I found myself googling this evening before bedtime:

Advertisement