There’s a wide range of what’s expected when it comes to a child’s speech and language development. As a general rule of thumb, we expect kids to be understood by parents and close relatives about half of the time when they’re two years old, about 75% of the time when they’re three, and close to 100% of the time they’re four.

If you feel like you have a hard time understanding your child, there’s a good chance they would benefit from some testing. Plus, even if our speech-language pathologists find that your child’s skills are within an expected range, you’ll still get recommendations for how to help them continue to develop and strategies to work through any possible areas of relative weakness. A child who has been diagnosed with autism, a traumatic brain injury, or social communication disorders may require speech-language therapy. This is often the best way to address language delays in infants and young children.

Our monthly subscription plan is great for kids who have a hard time pronouncing sounds because it’s designed based on what we know about motor learning, accent modification, and speech improvement. Learning the mouth movements that are needed to produce a sound a certain way can be hard, but it’s what your therapist is trained to do. Think of a coach teaching your child the technique to score a basket. The other half of the equation is practice, practice, practice.

Our games are designed to engage kids and make them want to come back for more speech practice in between sessions. Plus, our proprietary software allows the therapist to determine what types of productions your child needs to produce to progress through the games. This way, they learn the muscle automaticity needed for improved speech. Meeting with the therapist every other week allows them to check on progress and increase the complexity of the task. Think of it like a physical therapist adjusting the exercises you’re doing to help maximize your physical therapy efficiency. By building a program around motor learning principles, we’re able to have your child see the therapist when it’s most beneficial to them—at those points in the process when they need a skilled professional to help them try something harder to advance their skills. By looking at your child’s specific milestones, we can make better recommendations and adjustments.

Slow progress in speech therapy can be related to several causes. Still, two of the major reasons have to do with difficulty knowing how to make the sound or challenges related to getting enough repetition. Different articulation disorders and deficits affect people of all ages. However, addressing communication problems in young children means you need to look at their individual needs. When the problem is that the child has never learned how to make the sound, the solution is using various techniques to help them be successful with the components of how that sound is made—and our speech therapists are trained to do this. With the right tools, home practice teletherapy and in-person therapy practices can stand on equal footing and address specialized audiology and speech therapy needs.

You can get some ideas of tips and tricks that speech-language pathologists (SLPs) use by checking out the resources on our blog.

The second problem—not enough practice or repetition—causes issues in how the skill gets generalized into everyday speech. If kids don’t get enough practice to build muscle memory or automaticity of the skill, then they stay in therapy for a long time because they haven’t quite cleared the hurdle needed to graduate. That’s why we’ve created video games that allow them to practice their speech sounds. Once a kid knows how to produce their sound and has the motivation to practice as much as possible, progress follows!