Looking for advise from a speech therapist or parent who has dealt with speech delay?

[mommalow]

So in recent weeks I’ve become increasingly more concerned about my toddlers speech development. I have been concerned since she was 20 months (she’s now almost 23 months), as she only started to get a handful of words at this time and all of them were “half” words. For example, cat is cah, gone is goh, down is dow, etc. On top of this, she also struggles to pronounce words starting with D (dada is gaga, doggy is goggah, etc). I assumed that over the coming months those words she did have would start to become clearer as she says them constantly, but they haven’t. On top of this, in the past 6 weeks so has only said roughly 3 new words, so the speed at which she is gaining language has basically stopped. She only has about 25 words all together, and apart from mama none of these are “full” words.

In the past week or so my concern has doubled, as she has started to use the same two “sounds” for several words (very specific words). These weren’t words she had previously said before. For example, she uses the sound “bah” for the words hand, leaf, flower, keys and close. She uses the sound “nana” for blankie, water, and strawberry. I know that she’s using these sounds for the words as she repeats after me when I say them, or she points at her water and says nana, etc. I’ve found this bizarre and she continues to add new words to these two specific sounds all the time. It’s got me very worried about her development.

she has also started to babble like a baby almost nonstop. Just wandering about making babbling sounds and talking to herself but not at all in what feels like an age appropriate way.

she has a speech therapy consultation but it’s weeks away and they’ve basically told us already they won’t do much until she’s 2.5.

her hearing was tested at 18 months and was fine.

Are there any speech therapists out there who can offer any advice or perhaps concerns or even peace of mind if I’m over reacting? I feel as if she is not progressing at all in terms of her speech and these new random things she’s doing are stressing me out to no end!

We've had one with speech delay. How does your DD do on the 18 month SLT progress checker?

My son was speech delayed. Due to COVID we didn't pick up on his speech delay until the 2-2.5years timeframe because we weren't seeing children of the same age, therefore unable to compare! He is 5.5 years now and was just signed off by the speech therapist.

Unfortunately the NHS have long waits for speech therapy. Are you on the waitlist? Or will they not put you on it until 2.5 years? Either way I would keep nagging them. It was only through nagging that I eventually got an assessment.

If you are able to pay for private assessment I would do this because it gave us a really good understanding of where he was at and what we could do to help.

Whilst waiting for your appointments I would check out Pippin the speech delay app. It has loads of helpful content on it which you could try at home.

https://www.pippinspeech.com/