I’m going to preface this by saying, no mom is perfect. Especially new moms like me. We have no clue what we are doing. I didn’t. With that being said, I think my biggest parenting failure to date was not recognizing that we weren’t ‘properly’ – for lack of a better word – playing with our son to encourage speech development. We were spewing off sentences left and right without realizing how we should be speaking to your son so that he would start to understand what the heck we were saying. It didn’t help that my husband and I are fast talkers either. We weren’t encouraging his speech development in the way that we were playing and speaking to him. We weren’t pointing and naming things like, ‘ball,’ ‘milk,’, etc. And I think that truly hindered his speech development and was a cause of his speech delay.
Children with speech delays might use words and phrases to express ideas but be difficult to understand. In our case, our son wasn’t using any coherent words at 2 years old. So, that’s when we started taking him to a speech-language pathologist. We found out that there are multiple reasons why our son wasn’t talking yet. Some of those reasons are:
Oral motor issues
These happen when there's a problem in the areas of the brain responsible for speech, making it hard to coordinate the lips, tongue, and jaw to produce speech sounds. These kids also might have other oral-motor problems, such as feeding difficulties.
Genetics
Apparently, multiple men in my family had speech delays when they were children. They didn’t start talking until they were somewhere between 3 and 4 years old.
Feeding Difficulties
This goes hand-in-hand with oral motor issues. Our son also has feeding difficulties. He won’t eat meat because his jaw muscles are not strong enough to chew through it. So, getting him to eat certain things can be very difficult or he just refuses once he sees what it is.
I say this is my biggest parenting failure because for the longest time I just listened to what others were telling me rather than follow my mom-instinct. People continuously said that our son will talk when he’s ready and not to worry. I wasn’t necessarily worried, but as the months went on my mom-instinct told me that we needed to see someone regarding his speech delay. Then COVID-19 hit and everything went to shit. About 5 months after the virus came to town, we were finally able to see a therapist and get our son assessed.
Another reason I consider it to be my biggest failure because I didn’t recognize how I should’ve been playing with him early on. It also didn’t help that I was a work-from-home mom trying to run her own business, and we didn’t have family nearby to help out. So, speech development was never at the forefront of my mind until later on. We didn’t change how we spoke to him until we went to see a speech therapist. Now, we speak a lot slower, name everything he sees and comes in contact with, sing to him, and make sounds he can imitate.
The good news was that since we were seeing a therapist for both speech and feeding, we now know what we needed to do at home to encourage him to start speaking and eating nutritional foods. We now spend a ton of time communicating with him. We talk, sing, and encourage imitation of sounds and gestures. We read to him all the time and now he can memorize stories and characters. The most important thing we are doing now is what we should have been doing when he was a baby. We are now using everyday situations to reinforce his speech development. For example, we name foods at the store or explain what we are doing when he helps cook pancakes and name objects around the house. We are keeping things simple but avoiding “baby talk.”
After 7 months of speech therapy, we are seeing so much growth with our son. He is saying many words now and he’s starting to imitate what we say. Now we are working on trying to put two words together. The first therapy session after Christmas, his therapist was so impressed at how much he is imitating after not seeing her for two weeks.
Yes, it was my biggest parenting failure and regret so far (and I’ll have many more), but I do not regret sending him to speech therapy. Yes, he could’ve started speaking at 3 or 4 like other men in my family. But I didn’t want to chance that. Plus, I get to see his face shine brightly when he says “car,” “wheels,” and “Cheeto.” And I wouldn’t change that for the world!
