To feel like I've failed as his mum?

[SnowySwann]

Ds had speech therapy for 3 years and was signed off after a year of intensive therapy when he was 6.

He's now 9 and his teacher has requested a referral for more speech therapy

He sounds fine to me, maybe a little childish compared to others in his year but I'm just so shocked

Why didn't I notice he needed it??

Because it’s not your job! Teachers are trained to look for the signs, which might be very subtle. You know the phrase ‘it takes a village to raise a child’ - it was invented for situations like this.

Your job is to love and nurture and raise him, not to be an expert in speech therapy. Give yourself a break, you’re doing a great job.

Perhaps his teacher doesn’t recognise the amount of progress he has made and is basing her appraisal on the average 9 year old? You are absolutely not a failure.

I believe some very subtle speech issues can take years to be treated ( based on a friend’s son) and frankly I was never especially aware he had an issue at all.

He probably sounds perfectly intelligible to someone who is around him all the time, as you are. Perhaps lower levels of intelligibility only manifest in certain situations, i.e., classroom setting with lots of other children. ST will be in a better place to assess any issue.

I had ST for years as a kid. Talk like someone with a bargepole stuck up my arse now.

Parents aren't always best placed to pick up on these things - generally the only child of any given age that they know really well is their own - a teacher has lots to compare with.

I know but I just can't help it, I thought that part of his life was over with.

He had a few development delays and I thought he had caught up with his peers now. Doctors are happy with him, other teachers never commented on it either.

I don't know, it's just thrown me a bit to be honest, feels like he's taken a step back

Because it becomes normal for you. Last night we found old videos of DS as a tiny baby. His breathing sounded awful, but looking at the dates, it was before we'd figured out there was something badly wrong.

We also listened to toddler videos and it is SO clear in retrospect that he his 'speaking' noises were unusual, but at the time we just accepted them as normal. Listening last night we both commented that if we'd heard a child making those noises in the supermarket we would have assumed a major developmental issue. They are so clearly not right, but we honestly couldn't hear it at the time.