27 Jan Concerned about your child’s speech and language skills development

Did you know that if you encouraged baby’s gross motor skills, it would also promote their speech and language skills

Australian research suggests developmental delay occurs in 5% of children aged from birth to eight years. Other studies suggest that it can be about 10% of children who have developmental delay in their early childhood. Often a child is delayed in multiple areas of their development including gross motor skills, fine motor skills, speech and language skills. At My Favourite Physio, our Expert Paediatric Physiotherapists see many babies and children who have developmental delay, and our main goal is to help little ones learn to move better. Many parents are often surprised to see their child improve in their speech and language skills when baby starts to move better.

Here are 3 Reasons why Baby’s speech and language skills improves when their gross motor skills improves:
1. Helping baby improve their head control by strengthening their neck muscles, so baby can turn their head side to side means that we are also working on baby’s eye follow and eye contact to look and turn their head to toys. Improving eye follow and eye contact is one of the crucial prerequisite skills to talking. We understand that someone is speaking to us when we make eye contact with each other.

2. Helping baby build neck muscle and core muscle strength to learn to sit and to crawl means that we are strengthening the tummy muscles and all the internal muscles that contribute to sound production for baby to learn to vocalise. It also helps baby strengthen the muscles used for eating and swallowing.

3. Helping baby to learn to move from tummy to back and back to tummy, to move from sitting, to crawling, to pulling to stand and walking, they are now interacting with an evolving world versus lying on their backs and staring at the ceiling. There is now more to see and more to talk about.

So if your child is delayed in their gross motor skills, reach out to My Favourite Physio on (02) 9790 4233 or DM us @myfavouritephysio to speak to one of our Expert Paediatric Physiotherapists today!