Dear all,

i would appreciate some advice. My son is 3yr 9 months. He has limited speech although has really improved over the last year. He now can name single objects and has a number of phrases - whats that? where are we going? where's...? i don't like it etc. He seems intelligent - knows numbers to 20 and alphabet. His real problem is expressing what he wants to say all the time. Sometimes he says very long sentences but its all made up speech or he says lots of nouns together - quite commonly he misses out the "is" "and" and is only just starting with verbs.

My older son, aged 6 is the opposite - a very confident speaker and i'm stressed silly about Adam. I've even thought about private speech therapy - has anyone tried it. He does see an NHS therapist every 6 weeks but I've not been happy with her approach - as with other people she labelled him with severe speech problems, wanted paeds involved and also labelled for the early years support - which i turned down as i hope he'll improve.

My questions are:
is private speech therapy worth it? any recommendations
does he need a brain scan as the problem with speech expression is very localised

any similar situations????

from a very stressed out mum!

Hi there Humma
I came on this forum to vent my anger at my 6 year old DS's teacher however found your post first and felt compelled to send you a reply! My son Lewis is 6 years and 9 months and has an expressive language disorder. I will try to put in a nut shell what has happened in the last 6 years but bear with me! Lewis was my second child so I knew by the age of 14 months that he was having some problems with his speech. Before he was two I asked for an assessment to be done so we could put in place some kind of speech therapy for him. This was a laborious task - the assessment came quickly but the therapy was infrequent, of short duration and I felt of very little benefit - just as we were getting some where the sessions (which were 40 minute sessions for 6-7 weeks at a time) would come to an end and we would be waiting 6 months at least for another block of sessions. It wasn't until the summer before he went to school that we decided that he should really have some private therapy. Allelujah!!! Someone finally was able to give us some idea of what was going on with Lewis - although it has still never been written in stone - we finally realised that Lewis was not just delayed but disordered with his language showing significant problems with his expressive language. It is very difficult for me to look back and say what Lewis could and couldn't do at different ages but all I can do is say that now, at 6 and a half he still has extensive problems with complex sentence structure and word retrieval. This has equally had a huge impact on his school work as language plays a part in SO many aspects of school life. To this end I would suggest that private therapy is definitely worth it if (and it seems that you do) live in the UK. The UK just does not have the resources to give children everything they need. Added to this when children reach school age it is then up to the school to take over (in Kent - may be different for you). I can't say that Lewis' school is terrible as he does get additional help but it could definitely be much better. I am also really disappointed with his teacher this last year - I know it must be very difficult for teachers to take on children with additional needs especially when they are complex and unusual difficulties like Lewis' are. However, I don't feel she made any real effort to find out anything about Lewis' disorder which in turn has impacted on his learning in this past year.

All this said, it sounds like your son is still quite young and the fact that he seems intelligent in other ways is promising but I'm not a professional and my advice would be to never turn down any early years support. I lived in hope that Lewis would just be delayed and would catch up with his peers, however the gap is definitely widening and this has been with me pushing for as much help as possible. If you want some ideas for private therapists, I was given a really good website link from this very forum which I can dig out for you if you want to .

Good luck Humma
Maz

Hi Humma

Sorry it has taken me so long to reply, have been pretty busy this last few weeks. Anyway, here is the website for the speech therapists - http://www.helpwithtalking.com/about

Hope it is of some help.

Keep us posted and good luck!
Maz xx

Central Auditory Processing Dysfunction - the inability to understand spoken language in a meaningful way in the absence of what is commonly considered a hearing loss.

Central Processing of Sound occurs mainly in the brainstem. In order to process auditory inputs, this component must be functioning properly. Included in this system is the afferent auditory pathway, which tells the brain what a sound is and where it came from. Since the ears are several inches away from each other, location can be determined by distinguishing which ear heard the sound first and louder. A sound coming from the left would thus reach the left ear first and be louder in the left ear than in the right. What seems so simple here can be very complicated in the brain if it is not functioning properly. The brain stem still has several other functions. It must integrate sound with the rest of the body, so that an individual can respond to sound physically. If you hear a car horn while riding your bike, you might turn to be further off the road while also looking to see what the car is honking at. The brainstem also integrates visual processing to sound, as well as body mapping, auditory spatial mapping, and visual spatial mapping. Two other features of the brainstem are the ablility to enhance important sounds while dampening background noise, and tone discrimination.

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