You want the best possible life for your children. When they have to overcome a unique barrier, every fight can feel like you’re delaying a losing battle.
Hearing loss and speech impediments remain one of the more common issues faced by American children today. These can impact their studies. These can impact their ability to make friends or feel confident about themselves. Fortunately, therapy comes in many different shapes and sizes to help give your child their best chance at a high quality of life. Pediatric occupational therapists can provide you a solid perspective on your children’s struggles and defer you to treatments that work.
Should you look into e stim therapy or is a pediatric speech therapist a better option? Learn more about your options below so you and your child can start your journey together.
It’s not easy to summarize the range of physical and social issues facing children today. To start small, let’s focus on one of the most common conditions: hearing loss. Experienced by over 35 million Americans, hearing loss can be caused by a number of factors — these include genetic predispositions, exposure to extremely loud noises, gradual exposure to loud noises, ear infections, and a combination of the above. That’s as many as one out of five Americans having hearing loss in one or both ears. As a result, society is starting to shift and better recognize the needs of this growing population.
Struggling to hear can affect your child in many areas of life. They can fail to hear important words, affecting their speech and making them fall behind. Many parents worry their child could even be put in danger because of missing crucial sounds or words in their environment. Hearing loss is separated in to several categories — there is profound hearing loss, which denotes an inability to hear at all, and there is high frequency hearing loss. Determining the right one is best done with pediatric occupational therapists.
Speech impediments can be caused by hearing loss, though they are also in their own field of expertise. It’s estimated over 40 million Americans have both speech and communication disorders. To create a bigger picture, up to 5% of children entering first grade will have a noticeable speech disorder — this can range from a mild lisp to dyslexia. Child speech therapy is a reliable resource based in several decades’ worth of knowledge. It involves practice, medical diagnosis, and occasionally other resources like e stim therapy.
Your first step is to talk with an occupational therapist about the source of your child’s speech patterns. It could be a developmental disability making itself known. It also could be the onset of hearing loss making them fall behind. In the event of profound hearing loss it’s highly recommended you provide your child with access to sign language teachers and interpreters. Children who are not given accessibility early on in life will struggle with self-esteem, studies, and connecting with others.
For children with physical and mental disabilities, e stim therapy might prove more useful. This type of physical therapy is used to increase mobility by stimulating the muscles. This is then combined with speech therapy or any sort of rehabilitation program deemed best for your child. While this can sound like a lot of work, trust that your pediatric speech therapist is familiar with the process. Week after week you’ll notice subtle improvements in your child’s ability to express themselves.
Give your child the ability to truly spread their wings. Ask a pediatric occupational therapist for a diagnosis and discuss e stim therapy this week.