A recent report from the UK found that one in five boys and one in seven girls aged one to seven experience problems talking and understanding speech. This is significant as the ability to talk, listen and understand is fundamental and underpins all learning and communication.
This result indicates that one in six children will never reach their learning potential because they lack basic communication skills.
One in six!
And this situation can be easily be avoided.
The author of the report Jean Gross, England’s first Communications Champion, stated that the reason for these dismal numbers could be traced to busy parents. Being busy leads to lack of face-to-face conversations, conversations that help children learn how to communicate.
Some parents are so busy trying to earn enough money to pay the mortgage that they never sit and eat with their children. Taking the time to eat together as a family means that parents and children can talk about what has happened during the day, can exchange ideas and information, and help children develop the language skills they need to communicate.
Jean Gross says that children are primed to respond to a face, especially the faces of their parents. Watching TV and hearing other people talk is just no the same and does little to improve children’s ability to communicate. In other research the amount of TV a child watched had a direct impact on their language development – children who watched a lot of television had poorer vocabulary and communication skills that children who watched less TV.
One of the first things I ask when I work with parents is whether their child has a television in their bedroom. Not only are children with a television in their room often much too tired to learn in school but they also lack the one-on-one communication that helps them develop their language skills. In this report some children under the age of one already had a television in their bedroom! What chance will these children have to sleep well and to develop the language skills they need?
Some language issues can be picked up when a child goes to school. But it can be very difficult for them to get the remedial help they need, speech and language support is always in big demand and waiting lists are long. Language is so fundamental to learning that any delay in language development is bound to lead to learning issues.
Gross did not mention the possibility of learning problems for these children, instead she described how children with poor language skills that are not corrected run the risk of developing mental health problems or getting into trouble with the law later in life.
This is serious. One in six children are at risk.
Time to talk to your child!
