10-18 years with Communication Difficulties

Empowering Their voice

You want your pre-teen or teenager to be successful in all aspects of life, including communication. If they are struggling with speech, language, or communication difficulties, our online speech therapy can help them.

Our experienced therapists are here to support anyone between the ages of 10 and 18 with a range of communication difficulties, including autism spectrum disorder (ASD), stuttering, stammering, articulation, speech sound disorder, and developmental language disorder.

If, after reading this, you suspect your child has a speech sound disorder, complete our checklist and contact us for a consultation as soon as possible.

Research backs up the fact early recognition and diagnosis of speech sound disorders can help children overcome speech problems.

Don’t delay and hope they will ‘grow out of it’ – get an expert SLT/SLP’s opinion in the first instance.

There is no known cause for stuttering, and there is no one thing a parent can do that would cause their child to stutter.

Children learn language at a very fast pace. In just a few short years, they go from crying to have their needs met, to speaking in complete sentences! With this, parents may hear their child start to stutter or stammer, which is a repetition or prolongation of a sound, word or phrase.

Many children go through a typical, developmentally appropriate stage of stuttering (stammering) between the ages of 2-5 years. This often coincides with a burst of language development, especially when children are learning to put words into sentences.

Stuttering is hard. Others don’t often understand how hard it can be for are a person who stutters. It can impact on every part of your daily life. You may feel a loss of control, of being stuck, of not being able to say and do what you want.

Speech and language therapy has changed over the years. Twenty years ago, it was all about learning fluency tools, to make speech as fluent as possible. There has been a huge change in the stuttering world since, and speech and language therapists have learned from people who stutter, to help improve how they can help those who stutter.

The focus of stuttering therapy is now a balance of focusing on the emotional and physical aspects of stuttering, depending on what you need from therapy. It is on learning to not just accept your stutter, but to stutter the best you can.

Our voice is part of our identity.

We rely on our voices in every day life. We need a voice to join in social situations and everyday activities that involve others. Some of us may need our voice as an essential part of our jobs, like teachers, singers, actors, sales people, lawyers and others.

The most common voice difficulties result from vocal abuse or trauma. You might talk about your voice ‘letting you down’, or ‘giving out’ on you, but in reality, we don’t often realise that our body is telling us to mind our voice more.

We have been given warning signals, like hoarseness, weakness, or maybe even pain. This usually happens when the vocal cords are swollen and is asking for some TLC (Tender Loving Care).

We often ignore the signs and keep pushing our voice harder. If we could see our vocal cords, we might take it easier on them, but as we don’t, we often push our voice harder than we should.

A tongue thrust occurs when the tongue moves forward in an exaggerated way during swallowing, pushing against or between the front teeth. Orthodontists will refer for tongue thrust therapy, if they have concerns that orthodontic treatment will be reversed or will relapse, due to a tongue thrust swallowing pattern.

Tongue thrust therapy, as carried out in our clinic, is not to work on speech sound production, but to focus on avoiding reversal or relapse of any orthodontic work.

Tongue thrust therapy is carried out if dentition is affected, and usually not for any other reason.

Therapy is carried out with children from the age of 8, adolescents and adults.

A mature swallowing pattern usually emerges between ages 6 and 8.