Palm Beach therapist sees increase in children’s speech delays during COVID-19
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention say putting a face mask on your child is a critical tool in slowing the spread of COVID-19, however, some in the health community are now sounding an alarm.
Therapists say they are seeing children with speech delays.
“This has been a very challenging year,” said Jaclyn Theek, a clinic director and speech-language pathologist at the Speech and Learning Institute in North Palm Beach.
She said that during this pandemic, her speech therapy clinic has seen an enormous shift in the ages of its patients. Before the pandemic, only 5% of patients were babies and toddlers, while today it’s soared to 20%. Many parents call it “COVID-delayed.”
“We’ve seen a 364% patient increase in patient referrals of babies and toddlers from pediatricians and parents,” Theek said.
When asked if they are children having a difficult time speaking, Theek said they are “speech-delayed.”
Babies start learning how to speak by reading lips at as young as 8-months-old. So when lips and faces are covered up by masks, therapists say for some kids, they can work around the mask and still learn to speak perfectly fine. But for others, it can cause speech delays.
To compound this problem, some places are requiring speech therapists to be masked while doing speech therapy, which makes it effectively useless.
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1484651659263287297
This hits very close to home for me.
My son is very smart. He’s 7 years old and in the second grade. He’s doing 4th grade math (multiplication, division, and fractions) and has read the first three Harry Potter books (6th grade level).
Early on, he was tested for special education because he had a language issue. He had an inner ear problem and was speech delayed. A minor surgery and speech therapy later, he’s doing advanced work.
Speech delays and communication problems can be confused for slow learning and intelligence deficiencies.
All of this brought about by mask mandates which turned out to be totally useless.
We let a bunch of septuagenarian and octogenarian politicians create a cult of fear around Covid that had destroyed every level of child development.
This shit makes my blood boil.
Ever story like this makes me want to put every Covidian to the wall for what they did to children.
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