rushed / garbled speech at 4yo - normal?

[Abelia]

ds is just 4, very articulate, big vocab. But he is always rushing his words, in particular swallowing the ends of words, and I realised having spent the day with a friend yesterday that other people often find his speech hard to understand.

is this normal? just a 4yo so desperate to chat that he rushes, or is there anything I can do to help? I'm trying to repeat words that he rushes back to him slowly and clearly, I also sometimes say that he has to calm down so I can understand - but of course I do get nearly everything he says so don't always realise that he is garbling. Also don't want to "crush" him - awful to keep pulling a child up on their pronunciation or grammar when they just want to tell /ask you things!

(I also speak very quickly and I know sometimes rush with my words, so can't be helping as his sole parent)

Go and see gp to see if you can get some advice via speech and language team or behavioural team.

A child may stutter over words or rush them. But he should be pretty univerasally understandable by now. Get some advice before this becomes ingrained.

I am sure it is nothing much but as you say, some advice would be helpful as you don't want to make him self conscious . But not being understood will become difficult for him soon anyway

It sounds like you're doing everything right by prompting him to slow down and repeating things back to him. At 4 children often have so much to say that their mouths can't keep up with their brains.

If you're prompting him in a positive way, you're not likely to crush him.

I speak very quickly too because of my accent. Unfortunately I live in an area where the accent is very slow so people often struggle to understand me and I have to remind myself to slow down.

Speech therapists will often only start looking at things like this as an issue when children are 4/5 as a lot of it is developmental.

I'm a speech therapy assistant, but I work with adults so I'm no expert. However my 3yo DD has speech problems too, and I did, so I'm very aware, but I also know that when I saw a speech therapist they said I'd probably grow out of it by the time I was 5 and I did. It's worth getting advice though as it's usually an 18 week wait to see speech therapists.

that is kind of my point bilblio

ds2 has very severe spech delay.
i am bitterly aware of how long it takes to get a referral and an assessment, let alone help.

as this child is already four, flagging a concern is at least getting the ball rolling. if the problem sorts itself out in the meantime then great - no harm done.

if op waits though and it is an issue that could have done with early intervention then valuable time has been lost.
with very small children it may end up being 'wait and see' but asking the question early enough is important

I totally agree with you Pagwatch. I should probably have said "It's worth getting advice" before the last sentence. I've been getting informal advice from my colleagues for the past 2 years.

I also wanted to reassure OP that she's doing all the right things too.

Thanks both v helpful. I will ask his pre-school teachers what they think too and look into referral. I suspect I'm being PFB but as you say better to look into it now.

It sounds normal to me, but pp advice is good.

DS is now 4.5 and generally speaks very well. However, if speaking to adults he doesn't know or when he is excited or more anxious for any reason he will garble/rush. Often grandparents (a bit deaf admittedly) won't catch what he says and I ask him to repeat it more clearly which he generally will.

Pre-school should have a good idea of how his speech is on the spectrum of "normal".

easier to start ball rolling re referral to SALT now than in a years time.
A few appropriate interventions now might well mean your kid can start school with everyone understanding their speech . If you don't always understand them others outside family have less chance and you won't be at school to translate.

My very chatty, confident, big vocabulary using 4 yr old turned out to be missing about 6 key sounds, no wonder people didn't tune into him... after 6 months of work by a very motivated little boy he started school understandable and was discharged from SALT services .