Number of London-area kids who need speech help in kindergarten has tripled, report says
The number of kids in Grades 1-8 with complex communication needs has doubled
The number of kids with complex communication needs in kindergarten has tripled in the last six years and doubled for students in Grades 1 to 8, officials with the Thames Valley District School Board say.
But help for those kids, both in schools and in the community, has not increased and the trend will likely continue, said Jeff Bruce, a superintendent with the school board in charge of special needs.
"As a team, we have been observing this trend in our schools and hearing about the increasing needs from families, educators and provincial partners," Bruce said in a statement.
"This trend, particularly in kindergarten, underscores the demand for early and tailored interventions to help these students communicate and interact with their peers, families and educators."
Kids who are identified as needing help in junior kindergarten are wait-listed because there isn't enough help available, said Randy McGivern, who oversees school therapy services such as speech language pathology at the Thames Valley Children's Centre. "There is more demand for service than the service that is available, so most students are wait-listed," he said.
Some students have been waiting for three-to-four years to see a speech language pathologist, McGivern said.
Most significantly, there's a "notable rise" in kids who can't speak or can only speak minimally, Bruce said.
That mirrors what speech language pathologists and literacy experts have seen in other parts of the world, said Tricia Zucker, a professor and co-director of the Children's Learning Institute at UTHealth Houston, and an expert in early early literacy and language development.
"There's a major uptick in referrals for speech and language and reading difficulties in those kiddos who were born around the pandemic time and are now entering school," Zucker said. "Some of the blame likely goes to COVID, but there's also the fact that we all adjusted our social norms about what was acceptable amounts of screen time."
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Increased media use by kids and their parents has contributed to delayed language and literacy development, said Mohamed (Mo) Oshalla, a speech language pathologist in London for the last 16 years who has seen the change in kids and families.
"We've known for several decades that children's language acquisition, which is fundamental to literacy skill acquisition, is directly linked to the content, volume, and quality of the talking that parents do with their kids."
Simply put, parents aren't talking with their kids enough, or in meaningful ways, the experts say. "Our tendency as parents to spend time on devices is going to take away from the time to engage with our children face-to-face," Oshalla said.
Talk to your kids, experts urge
Nearly all children in Canada are exposed to screens by the age of two, and in the United States, most two-year-olds use a digital device daily, studies have found. The percentage of adults who spent four or more hours a day in front of screens on a non-work day increased 9.8 percentage points, from 27.3% in 2018 to 37.0% in 2021.
Babies and young children need to watch their caregivers' faces and mouths as they speak, which is how they pick up language skills. Without that, there are delays, Oshalla said.
Not getting that face-to-face, uninterrupted time, or getting much less of it, leads to kids not knowing how to understand language, said Sonia Cabell, a former Grade 2 teacher and literacy coach and now an associate professor of reading education at Florida State University.
"Screens prohibit the conversations that we want parents and children to have," said Cabell, who co-authored the book Strive-for-Five Conversations: A Framework That Gets Kids Talking to Accelerate Their Language Comprehension and Literacy, with Zucker.
"A course correction is needed. There needs to be a societal move to make sure that we know that conversations are important. We have to be more deliberate in how we encourage conversations because there are a lot of missed opportunities," Cabell said.
Teachers and speech language pathologists offer "a range of evidence-informed interventions" for students with complex communication needs, Bruce said. Those include assessments and tools to help students express themselves more effectively.
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