Parents, It's On Us!

    My blog post today is going to be a little different because I want to address all parents, not just homeschooling parents. I came across an article that concerned me greatly as a mom who is passionate about education. The article was about what experts are calling covid speech delays. 

    Before I go into this topic, I want to first make a few things abundantly clear. First, not all speech delays have a clear cause. The purpose of this post is not to blame parents for any and all speech delays. My own daughter had one. My husband also had speech delays as a child. This post is to address a specific “epidemic” of speech delays in children since the pandemic lockdown. Second, I readily admit that I am not a speech expert. However, I do have expertise in child development and learning environments. I’m a certified teacher with a degree in education as well as certification to teach the gifted. I know these credentials are listed here on my blog, and I am not trying to boast. I’m simply reminding everyone that I’m not just a random mom mouthing off my opinion. 

    Now that we’re all on the same page, let me explain what is meant by covid speech delays. Pediatricians and speech therapists are seeing a huge spike in children with speech delays ages three and under. These are children who would have been infants and young toddlers during the lockdown. One of the most alarming things is that many of these children aren’t speaking at all, but merely using gestures, grunts, and temper tantrums to convey their desires. This is manifesting in completely healthy children with no other delays or conditions. In other words, these are not children with hearing impairments, autistic children, preemies, or children on feeding or breathing tubes (these being some of the most common causes for speech delays).
 
    Why is this happening? Was it masks? No, it wasn’t masks. After all, these children spent most of the last two years at home with their families. Experts are blaming isolation, for the most part. These kids missed out on daycare and early learning programs, they say. They weren’t going to playdates, the library or the grocery store, so they didn’t interact with anyone. They had no one talking to them.

    But . . . wait a second. Is anyone wondering the same thing I am? 

    Where were their parents?

    I know how you’re probably answering that: they were on Zoom. Okay, yes, most of their parents were trying to work from home, I get that. Many people will also argue that prior to covid, they were around a lot more people. Don’t you need a community, not just mom and dad to learn to talk? I don’t mean to offend anyone when I say this, but no, you really don’t. 

    Think for a minute about pioneer families back in the 1800s: a farmer and his wife and child on vast stretches of prairie with no one around for miles and miles. Those children learned to talk just fine. “But the moms didn’t work!” you might argue. Are you sure about that? Yes, the children were with mom all day long, but these mothers were still working from sunup to sundown. Chores we consider simple today, like doing laundry, would take these women an entire day. Just putting food on the table was a constant chore. These children were also isolated with parents working at home, yet they still learned to speak. 

    What was the difference? The difference was interaction. Yes, mom was doing laundry or baking or scrubbing the floors, but her child was right there with her. There was no television, no tablets, no phones. I imagine it got lonely and quiet, so it would be only natural for the mother to talk and interact with her baby. Children were pretty young, too, when mom would start teaching them things: how to hang socks on the line, knead the dough, fetch the water. 

    I’m not one of those “go live on a farm” homeschooling moms. Far from it (I don't even grow houseplants). What I’m saying is - and this may sound harsh - parents were never supposed to rely on outside institutions to teach their babies. Even if you have your infant in daycare all day, their main teacher should be you. Sadly, these little ones spent the lockdown parked in front of screens so they wouldn’t bother mom and dad. And now we have an epidemic of kids who can’t talk. I can’t tell you how sad that makes me. 

    When I earned my gifted certification, we talked a lot about nature vs. nurture. Basically, we were tackling the question “are gifted kids born or made?” Like most things, I think it’s a little bit of both. In studies, there did seem to be some common denominators in the parenting of bright children. Not that you can necessarily “make your kid a genius” (sorry, Baby Einstein), but you can give them an amazing foundation in the first three years of life. Guess what one of the habits of these “gifted” parents was? 

    They talked to their children. 

    From the very beginning, they talked. They talked to them in utero. They talked to them as newborns. They talked to them at six months, at one, at two, at three. They didn’t wait for their child to be able to talk back or even make sounds. 

    These parents also talked to their children normally, not in baby talk. I remember one example from my textbook. Say a crawling infant is playing with a ball, and it rolls under the bed. Instead of saying, “Aww, did your bally-wally go bye-bye?” in a sing-song voice, these parents would say, “Where did your ball go? Do you think maybe it rolled under the bed? Look and see!” 

    You don’t need to read a parenting book or get a college degree to do this. My parents did neither, and they excelled at this. From my earliest age, I have memories of my parents talking to me. They never spoke down to me or my siblings, and they listened in return, taking what we had to say seriously. At meals, in the car, at the store - they talked to us. I remember being in a roomful of adults and speaking up with my opinion. The adults would all laugh at me, but not my parents. I would get very annoyed because my parents never looked down on me when I shared my thoughts. Why were these adults being such jerks? Now I realize how blessed I was, and I have tried to emulate my parents in conversations with my own children. 

    I challenge you to think about this seriously: do you talk to your kids? When you’re nursing your baby, do you talk or sing? Or are you on your phone? Do you have conversations in the car, or are your kids on their tablets? Do you chat with your kids as you walk through the store, or are they all staring at a phone? This covid speech delay highlights a huge problem in our society, and the only ones who can change it are us - the parents. 

    These are guidelines we follow in our family to ensure that the lines of communication are open. I hope you’ll consider some of them. 

    #1 Tablets, DVD players and other electronics are only allowed on long car trips of two hours or more.  
       The car is a huge opportunity for conversation - don’t waste it!

    #2 No cell phones at the table!
    Well, first you actually have to sit down at the table, so do that first! Even if it’s not every single meal, set aside some mealtimes for the whole family to sit down together. Homeschoolers, take advantage of this. You have the luxury of not just dinner, but breakfast and lunch. Stop doing dishes or dusting and sit down and eat with your kids - without your phone!

    #3 No devices at the store 
    I feel like I’m the only mom who isn’t handing out tablets and phones to each kid as they pull out the shopping cart. It’s so sad to me to see a family at the store, and everyone is staring at a screen. You can have great conversations, even with your baby, at the store. “Do you see that huge poster of puppies? Aren’t they cute?” “Should we get green apples or red?” “Ooh, look at the fish tanks. Isn’t that lobster huge?” This is vitally important for their speech development, even when it’s a one-way conversation. It’s also exciting when you get that first laugh or squeal of understanding! Listen, I know shopping trips can be extremely stressful with little ones. Believe me, I have some epic stories of disastrous shopping trips. However, even when I was tempted, I have stuck to this rule, and now I am blessed with an eleven-year-old and a thirteen-year-old who actually talk to me and aren’t staring at a smart phone 24/7.

#4 Let your kids be bored
     When my kids tell me “I’m bored,” I first basically ignore them. I’ll say “hm, that’s a bummer.” That’s it. If they ask for screens, I say “no.” If they come back a few moments later and tell me they're bored, I give them suggestions, but I still don’t go to the screens for a solution. (Often my suggestions include chores - amazing how they suddenly aren’t bored anymore!) It’s always amazed me how standing my ground will often result in creativity. I’ll realize they are now in the midst of some elaborate imaginative play, or my daughter is crafting, my oldest is writing a fanfic, and the middle one is outside shooting hoops. What does this have to do with communication? Excessive screen time affects kids in so many ways, one of them being their ability to problem solve and interact socially. Less overall screen time = better social and verbal skills. 

#5 Delay getting a video game system
     We didn’t get a video game system until my kids were ten, seven, and six. We knew that once the oldest had one, all bets were off. Therefore, my oldest couldn’t have one until we were okay with all of them having it because . . . 

#6 TV and video game systems are only in the main room of the house, not in our kids’ bedrooms
    This isn’t just about limiting screen time, this is about keeping us together and interacting, even when the TV is on or video games are being played.

#7 No personal devices until adolescence - even then, my thirteen-year-old only has a flip phone
     There’s tons of research out there about the dangers of screens and the internet. I won’t belabor the point because, let’s face it, we all know it. Access to pornography is also way too easy, even with supposedly “safe” devices. Check out Exodus Cry for more information on this. It's extremely sobering. Also, have you ever seen those families at the restaurant, and everyone is on their personal device, even the infant in the highchair? It’s a depressing sight, and I always vowed that would not be our family. Once everyone has a device, policing it gets to be exhausting, so we have opted to just not allow it at all. 

     I realize this is considered over the top to a lot of people. I realize it is extremely counter-cultural. However, if we want to get serious about connecting with our children and improving their verbal skills, we actually have to take steps to do something about it. This covid speech delay issue is actually only one symptom of a much bigger problem. Parents, I’m pleading with you. Take responsibility and let's turn this thing around.