Caitlyn Sabo, whose son Evan was born in 2019, said she noticed he was less verbal than his peers when he was 1½.
If Your Toddler Isn’t Talking Yet, the Pandemic Might Be to Blame
Children who spent little time socializing are talking later and treatment is scarce
By
Sarah Toy | Photographs by Pete Kiehart for The Wall Street Journal
May 19, 2023 9:00 am ET
"Add delayed first words to the list of the Covid-19 pandemic’s lingering effects.
Babies and toddlers are being diagnosed with speech and language delays in greater numbers, part of developmental and academic setbacks for children of all ages after the pandemic. Children born during or slightly before the pandemic are more likely to have problems communicating compared with those born earlier, studies show. Speech therapists and doctors are struggling to meet the increased need for evaluation and treatment.
“I have patients who have been waiting for weeks and weeks,” said Dr. Caroline Martinez, a developmental pediatrician and medical director of developmental pediatrics at Mount Sinai Health System in New York.
In an analysis of nearly 2.5 million children younger than 5 years old, researchers at health-analytics company Truveta found that for each year of age, first-time speech delay diagnoses increased by an average of 1.6 times between 2018-19 and 2021-22. The highest increase was among 1-year-olds, the researchers said.
Social isolation coupled with pandemic-related stress among parents likely contributed to the delays, Martinez and speech therapists said. Families were less likely to start therapy or get their children evaluated during the pandemic, they said, creating a backlog of patients longer than ever, they said.
A poll published in April of more than 1,000 members of the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association working with children between birth and 5 years old showed that nearly 80% of speech-language pathologists were seeing more children with delayed language or diagnosed language disorders than before the pandemic. Nearly four in five reported treating more children with social-communication difficulties than before the pandemic.
Young children with delayed speech should get treatment as early as possible because children with communication problems tend to have more difficulty in school later on, speech and language experts said. Speech and language skills are a strong indicator of future reading ability, said Jeannette Reiff, a speech-language pathologist in Fairfax County, Va..."
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