What Is The Reason Behind The Surge In Cases of Kids With Speech Disorders?
COVID-19 Pandemic and lockdowns have triggered a sense of fear and anxiety across the globe. This phenomenon has led to many short-term as well as long term impacts on the mental health of children. Various factors impact that impacts the developmental outcomes of children and toddlers are their developmental age, pre-existing mental health condition, financial status, quarantine, COVID infections, family structure, screen viewing times, the opportunity for social exposure and play, and neglect, family discord, loss of a parent etc. These factors play important role in determining the quality and magnitude of impact on the developmental outcomes of our toddlers. TheHealthSite.com spoke to Dr Himani Narula Khanna, Co-founder & Director of Continua Kid, to understand more about this condition. Here's what she says.
COVID-19 has impacted the lives of children across the world in an unprecedented way, the essential step taken for prevention from COVID-19 infection has been isolation and social distancing strategies to protect children from the risk of infection. Some of the measures taken during lockdowns were the closure of schools, educational institutes, and activity areas. These inexorable situations lead to an increase in the level of stress and anxiety in children as well.
A surge in cases of children having speech, behavioural, and developmental problems has been observed by child specialists, teachers, speech therapists and other developmental therapists. Doctors who are currently examining children born in the COVID era of age between 2-3 years report an increase in the number of children with speech and communication delays. Typically, a child begins to babble around the age of six months and says their first word between 10-12 months, by 18 months can speak at least 6-10 meaningful words and have a vocabulary of more than 200 meaningful words with the use of 2-word phrases to communicate at 2 years of age. Children learn by sensory inputs from surrounding, sounds of parents, conversations of family members and sounds in immediate surroundings that influence the development of speech. Research says that we need to speak at least 21000 words per day with a baby from 28 weeks of gestational age for them to acquire age-appropriate speech at 2 years of age.
During the Covid era with lockdowns, quarantines, social distancing and closure of schools and educational institutes led to an increase in the use of alternative methods of engaging children which includes increased exposure to screens and gadgets. On one side the worldwide recommendations on the use of screens say no screen time till 2 years of age and less than an hour from 2 to 6 years, the children were on screens for longer than 2 hours a day. Fewer members at home, working parents, and lack of exposure to social scenarios in play areas, day cares, schools, and activity areas further reduced their sensory and social exposure to the language leading to significant delays in social and communication skills. In post COVID era children are still not able to speak a few words properly and have significant delays in their communication skills. Many children sound like cartoon characters, with robotic speech, and speak with the same accent as the cartoon. Speech for many is not meaningful; they are unable to express their needs and share their emotions in words.Children are experiencing challenges in interpreting and understanding various sensory inputs from the environment and are finding it difficult to adapt and interact with the change of going back to school or play areas. More and more professionals are reporting behavioural problems like separation anxiety, nervousness, fears, temper-tantrums, meltdowns, aggressive behaviours etc
Lockdowns have resulted in a spurt of need for child developmental experts like Developmental Pediatricians, speech language therapists, occupational therapists, Child psychologists and other rehabilitation experts. This must alarm us to empower our schools and teachers by training them on early identification, and behavioural strategies to manage children with developmental challenges in classroom environments. Parenting workshops can be good an initiative to empower parents with the parenting styles and tips. Accepting every child and being able to provide equal opportunity for all must be our vision.
