Anyone with experience of tongue tie or SALTs would you mind having a look at my thread

[Loueytb3]

here

Thank you!

Yes. My DD had it. She was due for some other surgery and it was mentioned that the SALT thought she had it. The ENT had a look and concurred and now post surgery, she isn't!

So the ENT snipped it while she was under anaesthetic? He is due to have an operation on his eye next yr but it's at an eye specialist hospital and they don't do other surgery.

Yes, but done ask we when. She's had 26 surgeries over the past 12 years, and my memory gets hazy about some of the finer details.

Did you notice any improvement with her speech?

It seems one of those things that routinely they did but now with cutbacks it's not done unless you are in the right area.

DS3 had it as well but I picked it up when he was a few days old and got it snipped then (privately as midwife told me it wasn't done on the nhs round here)

No but then, she has had massive complications with speech due to small jaw, cleft palate and breathing through a trachy.

my ds1 had his tongue tie snipped when he was 3, it was a completely pain free for him. Just the general anaesthetic that had me worried, but he was fine. His speech improved from the second he started talking after the op, it was noticeably clearer, although he did still have speech therapy to correct what he had already learnt to say wrong, if that makes sense! Obviously that is just our experience.

That is exactly what is supposed to happen, Ninja!!!. My DD is just built in a unique way.

My 5yo had his tongue tie snipped at 4.5 after speech therapist stated his poor pronunciation was totally due to his inability to use his tongue correctly - He had speech delay which we had thought was because of the tongue tie, but turns out may have been coincidental as he has other delays too.

Yes his speech improved afterward and with therapy was able to correctly pronounce all those letters he previously could not - joined sounds were the hardest to crack and it took quite a while for the old way of saying it to disappear...he sometimes got confused which words he had been pronouncing right and sometimes assumed all the time he said a particular letter sound, it was wrong....like his pronunciation of yellow was yeyyo....so he changed it to lello for a while...had to get him properly listening to hear the difference, which was a challenge in itself.

He can pronounce all sounds perfectly well now, if we can only get him to slow down and bother to actually pronounce them.......

..but then everything eslde is done at breakneck speed so why wouldn't speech also? That is another issue though!

Ninja - that's reassuring that the op was relatively pain free. Did your DS have problems with the letters that are normally affected by a tongue tie? I ask because DS1 can apparently make all the letter sounds. Its when they get put together we have problems. Sometimes I get him to repeat things several times and still don't know what he is trying to say. Its very frustrating.

His SALT thinks he is compensating quite well with his tongue tie but that snipping it may improve his pronunciation. As he has ASD, he is hampered enough on the communication front as it is and if there is a chance that his communication might improve then I think we need to take it. He gets very frustrated when he can't make himself understood. And that often leads to hitting (me) or doing something dangerous.

ds1 had all the speech sounds, like your ds, you just couldn't understand him, even we struggled to get what he was saying. His salt was totally against him getting it snipped, she was adamant it wouldn't make any difference but he was 3 and about to start nursery so I felt I had to give him the chance to sort it.

Thanks Ninja - that sounds quite similar to our situation.

I have 2 children who have tongue tie. My dd 13 has never had any problems with speech but I do wonder about wether it will affect her kissing when older as it is connected right to the tip! My DS 5 is not as severe however he says w instead of l and he cannot make himself lift his tongue. He is unders salt for phonological disorder but even though that's improving I still can't tell what he's saying a lot of the time which makes me sad. The salt says his tongue is nothing to do with it but I'm not convinced!

I think the problem is that they can affect children's speech in quite different ways. And it's not always apparent how bad the tongue tie is from the front as some people also have posterior tongue ties. Most of the salts seem to say that if it isn't affecting letter sounds then it isn't the cause of speech problems but on the other hand there are so many cases of children having improved speech after having it cut that I really think they aren't always right.