Lorelei Charles wasn?t overly concerned about the ?slushy? sound her four-year-old son, Connor, made when he said his Ss. He drooled a lot as a toddler, so it was easy to assume the endearing way he said ?shorts? and ?shoes? was a result of excess saliva, and something he?d outgrow. But when he started Montessori school in Dundas, Ont., his teacher suggested it might be more than just a cute quirk, because while chatty at home, he was quiet and withdrawn in the classroom. Thinking his speech might be a factor, his teacher recommended speech therapy. ?I thought, Are we jumping the gun here" He?s only four,? says Charles.
Whether your kid has a lisp, a stutter, mispronounces words or uses baby talk (think ?Mommy, up!? versus ?Mommy, pick me up!?), it can be tough to figure out when to seek help. That?s because the range of what is considered normal in speech and language development is so wide. Some preschoolers might develop a stutter that can last anywhere from two weeks to six months, and that?s considered normal, notes Stacie Donison, a speech-language pathologist in Regina. (It?s often a temporary side effect of a rapidly growing vocabulary.) Others might use the wrong consonant sound for certain words, such as ?baf? instead of ?bath,? and that can be normal, too. It?s easy to brush these issues off, but as speech-language pathologist Lynn Carson says, there?s a risk in leaving things too long. ?It?s like building a house,? she says. ?Language skills build o...