Meet Sam’s friend, Marshmallow – a bantam with plenty of attitude. You’ll see a little sequence over the next few posts. She’s in the distance, admittedly, but there’ll be a close-up later on. Sam is eating some dried food.

Jj is for Jottings 12: Some quick statistics.
An Australian study done in 2010 found that 20% of 4-5 year old children were assessed as having a speech impairment.
Following on from that a separate study showed that, from a sample of parents who had expressed concerns about their child’s ability to talk and produce speech sounds, 60.4% did not attempt to access any speech pathology services. In fact they did nothing about it at all.
That’s worrying, isn’t it? One fifth of 4-5 year old actually have a speech problem, and 60.4% of parents who had detected the problem did nothing about it.
It’s not really possible to separate speech/language from learning to read and write because they are all intertwined. A child who begins school with speech sound problems is very likely to have difficulty in learning the sound made by each letter of the alphabet so they can sound out words when reading. Sometimes children with speech problems don’t perceive sounds in the same way as we do, and so it takes a lot more direct instruction to learn the things that other children may pick up without any difficulty.
If you have any doubts at all about your child’s speech (or language), it is always best to have an assessment so that you either be reassured (which is always nice) or can then do something about it before it impacts upon success at school. A word of warning here – consulting a GP or even a paediatrician about speech or language is not the best course of action. I have had many parents over the years say that “the doctor said he’d grow out of it”, thereby wasting valuable time when they could be having therapy. This is not their area of expertise. Likewise, we speechies wouldn’t presume to make medical diagnoses, although sometimes we have a pretty good idea of what a problem is, but we refer it to the expert.