Imagine if you wanted to pick up a glass of water to drink, but your hands wouldn’t cooperate, leaving you thirsty and frustrated.
For kids with childhood apraxia of speech (CAS), this is what they face when they try to communicate — their brain knows what it wants to say, but the muscles that move their mouths aren't receiving the right signals.
The speech therapists and pathologists here at Celebrations Speech Group have extensive experience with childhood apraxia of speech, which affects between one and two kids out of every 1,000. In the following, we discuss why speech therapy plays such an integral role when it comes to CAS.
The first thing we want to emphasize about CAS is that it’s not a reflection of how your child thinks or their intelligence — they know in their brains what they want to say, but there’s a disconnect. With this motor speech disorder, there’s an issue with the signals between your child’s brain and the muscles in their mouth that prevents them from communicating clearly.
Some of the signs of childhood apraxia of speech include:
CAS can vary in severity — some kids can’t speak much at all, while others only have minor issues in certain areas, such as only occasionally mispronouncing words.
Frustratingly, in kids born with CAS, the cause of the motor speech disorder is largely unknown, though genetics is thought to play a role. Please note that apraxia of speech can develop at any time, in kids and adults, if there’s an issue in the brain, such as trauma, a stroke, or an infection.
No matter how your child develops CAS, the issue won’t simply go away on its own. Unlike other speech issues, such as stuttering, kids don’t grow out of CAS, which is why speech therapy is so critical. And the earlier the better.
Depending on your child’s needs, we start with intensive one-on-one speech therapy sessions, during which we work on reconnecting the neural pathways between your child’s brain and mouth.
There are many ways in which we accomplish this, and we enlist different tried-and-true speech therapy techniques, such as:
Just like physical therapy can help a person to regain use of an injured body part through targeted exercises, speech therapy works the same way for CAS. We work the muscles around their mouth and focus on reconnecting them to your child’s brain.
When it comes to starting speech therapy for apraxia of speech, early intervention can give children a big advantage. Even as young as 2 or 3 years old, we can help guide them around their CAS to help them communicate more effectively.
If you’d like to explore speech therapy for your child’s apraxia of speech, we invite you to contact one of our offices in Brentwood, Stockton, or Elk Grove, California, to schedule an appointment.
