Speech Delays: Cause and Healing

Do you have a child (or know a child) who struggles with speech delays? Do they have trouble communicating their thoughts, only to get frustrated that their mouth can't form the words their brain wants to say? Have you tried speech or occupational therapy with little results?

Speech disorders can be frustrating and discouraging for both the child and parent - especially when traditional therapies aren't working. Thankfully, neurologically-based chiropractic care can help - by getting to the ROOT CAUSE!

Read on to learn:

• What is childhood apraxia of speech?
• Causes of apraxia
• How to help a child with apraxia
• How to determine if your child has nerve interference between their brain, muscles, and nerves.

What is Apraxia of Speech?

While there are many types of speech disorders, childhood apraxia of speech (CAS) is a condition in which the child’s brain and nervous system have difficulty processing and planning the sequence of movements involved in producing speech effectively. The brain knows what it wants to say, but there is interference in the processing and actual expression of words.

What Causes Childhood Speech Disorders?

Birth trauma, such as breech presentation, vacuum extraction, and c-section have the highest correlation of speech disorders and apraxia. Birth trauma commonly interferes with the vagus nerve, which helps control and coordinate speech.

Other common red flags leading to speech delays in kids include:

1. Subluxation (nerve interference) alters the nervous system’s ability to properly perceive and coordinate communication between the brain, nerves, and muscles, which is the central issue with apraxia of speech.
2. Hearing Impairment 🦻
3. Neuro-Motor Dysfunction 🧠

You may be wondering, how do these areas affect my child's ability to speak? Let's break this down a further...

1. BIRTH INTERVENTIONS: Birth interventions such as C-Sections, vacuum deliveries, forceps, and doctors pulling on baby's head lead to trauma and stress on a baby's head and neck! So often we are careful about supporting our baby's head while holding them, but think about the trauma to their head and neck with these types of deliveries! No wonder babies come out of the womb with a stiff neck ➡️ torticollis!
2. HEARING LOSS: Babies or kids who have limited hearing, or no hearing at all, will have a challenging time learning language and developing their speech. It’s hard to learn to speak if you can't first hear the words and second, hear how you are forming your speech.
3. NEURO-MOTOR DYSFUNCTION: Neuro-motor dysfunction or energy inefficiencies (dysponesis) of the motor nerve connections to the muscles of the back, neck, head, and jaw, is often the root cause of speech delays or apraxia of speech. Kids may understand words and comprehend what mom or dad are telling them, and even know what they want to say, but they can't get their body to produce understandable words because there is a disconnect between their brain's messages to the muscles of the head, neck, jaw, and tongue that control speaking. These nerves and muscles have an elevated amount of tone. We see this heightened level of tone and over-activity a lot in kids when we scan them with our neuro-motor scanning technology (surface electromyography)!

How to Help Kids with Apraxia?

While speech therapy is great at helping to learn methods and options for working around the challenges caused by apraxia, pediatric chiropractic care seeks to uniquely address the ROOT CAUSE: Nervous system dysfunction.

The goal of a trained Pediatric Chiropractor is not to treat or cure the apraxia of speech, but simply to address the nerve interference (subluxation) that may be contributing to a child’s speech delays through gentle, specific adjustments that remove the primary points of subluxation along the spine.

By improving the tone (or tension) within the nervous system the communication pathways in a child’s brain, spinal cord, nerves, and muscles are restored, allowing the muscles in the neck, jaw, and tongue to receive messages from the brain 🧠 to properly form words. 🙌

How to Know if Subluxation is Present in Your Child's Nervous System?

Our office performs 2 - 3 different neurological scans (depending on age of child) that show if and where subluxation is present within your child's autonomic nervous system and motor nerves (that control the muscles).

Get your child scanned to know for sure if they have neuro-motor dysfunction leading to their speech challenges.

✨There is so much that can be done to help your child HEAL and RESTORE neurologically, and the sooner you start, the better the results can be! Give us a call at (612) 516-3090 or schedule online to have your child's nervous system checked.

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Reviewer: Dr. Kyle Trontvet