If you have been told that your child needs speech therapy, you may be confused or surprised that your child needs speech therapy. However, there is no reason to be concerned, as it is normal for many children to require speech therapy while in elementary school and even in higher grades. There are a variety of reasons why your child may not have learned correct pronunciation of sounds as quickly as other children, and none of them have to do with their developmental or intelligence abilities.
While your child may resent having to attend speech therapy classes since they will have to leave the classroom and go to speech therapy with a special education teacher, you should encourage and accept the need for your child to have aid. As a child, a lisp or a speech impediment may be endearing, but as they grow it will cause them to be ostracized or taken as less intelligent as an individual who probably has great intelligence. This is far from the truth and you do not want your child to have to live their life with this label.
Children who quickly start to believe the teasing and wrong perceptions of others will quickly lose their motivation to study and work hard because they will feel they are not capable of doing so. They also stand a larger chance of growing up unhappy and unaccepted by social circles. If they were teased as a child in middle or elementary school, they will choose to start playing alone, which may make them a loner for the rest of their school careers. Once a child learns to distance themselves from social activities, they will have a hard time as an adult dealing with social situations and will shy away from taking on any jobs that require they interact with others.
These are all horrible scenarios that could affect a child with a speech impediment, and they are worse case scenarios. However, the simple truth is, if you force your child to attend speech therapy classes they will largely disappear from your child’s life. It is important that your child learns the value of self-confidence while young, and removing a speech barrier from their life, removes one difficulty they will have to face in their future.
Speech therapy is simply a program where instructors help children learn how to place their tongues and move their lips so that they can create the correct sound more clearly. Heavy repetition is used so that they learn how to do this without having to consciously think about it. If you listen to your child practice at home, it may seem they are over learning their sounds, but they are actually training their muscles to make the correct sound instead of the previous wrong form.