Speechless! by Joell Hlasnick
I would like to share Nathan’s story with you, in hopes that someone might be listening and can truly change a child’s life.
Our son, Nathan, has always been a healthy, beautiful child. We have dedicated our lives to him, as so many parents do for their children but when Nathan turned two, my husband and I started to question why he wasn’t speaking. We read to him each night since we brought him home from the hospital; we sang lullabies and played CD’s in the car; we bought every educational tool out their on the market for him to play with. So why was he only saying “mama”? When he wanted a cup, he said “mama”, when he wanted something to eat, he said “mama”, when he wanted my husband, he called him “mama”, Nathan said “mama” for everything.
If that didn’t convince us that something was wrong, then the tantrums that followed did. Nathan would walk into a room and grunt, point and would climb on chairs to get what he wanted. When we would question him as to what he wanted, he would respond “mama”. Of course we had no idea what that was suppose to mean, because it meant so many things. It became a guessing game! If you guessed right, we had a happy little boy but if we guessed wrong, well, we had a very frustrated little boy. We felt horrible disciplining him because WE were the ones who didn’t understand him.
Eventually we became pretty good at predicting what Nathan’s grunts and shrieks meant. Our family however, did not understand him at all and we were afraid to leave him, for any amount of time, because we knew that the first time he made a request and they didn’t know what he wanted…look out! No one could predict him as well as we could, so we took him everywhere. Each time, we risked him throwing a tantrum. It was a lot, but we couldn’t allow ourselves to let someone else have to deal with Nathan’s monster moments. How were we suppose to know how our family would handle his tantrums when they were so trying for us? Our family accused us of talking for him and felt that was why he wasn’t progressing. To me that only confirmed that they didn’t understand him or the frustrations we felt as parents…embarrassment, failure, disappointment, scared, denial.
We finally asked the pediatrician why Nathan wasn’t talking and explained how he was only saying “mama” and throwing tantrums when we didn’t understand what he was saying. The pediatrician told us not to worry about it that Nathan would talk in his own time. Still my husband and I had an unsettling feeling inside. The pediatrician wasn’t living at our house. We knew our son and we knew that he wanted to talk. We watched him at his gymnastics classes, watching the other kids with such amazement. He wasn’t watching them play, he was watching them talk.
The final straw was when my husband and I attended a function sponsored by a group of teachers. Of course, we didn’t get a babysitter for Nathan and brought him with us. Towards the end of the night a fellow teacher of mine approached us and recalled how he could remember his twin boys at Nathan’s age. He continued with stories of their development and then slammed us with how they didn’t talk when they turned two. My husband and I looked at him like he held a golden key that would unlock this mystery we had been trying to solve.
My colleague went on about this agency, called the Alliance, and how they provide a number of services to infants and toddlers. I called the next day to set up an evaluation for Nathan. They came to the house and evaluated him in all developmental areas and discovered that his expressive language was significantly below his receptive language. In a nut shell, Nathan understood everything we said to him, but couldn’t communicate back to us. They suggested speech therapy once a week. We were ecstatic!
The Alliance sent Ms. Julie to our house once a week for about two months before she slammed us with Apraxia. My husband and I were trying to be open to Ms. Julie’s suggestion to have Nathan evaluated for Apraxia because after all we had an unsettling feeling that there was something wrong. My husband had never heard of Apraxia and I heard of it only in association with Autism, so I was completely taken back by this. With a back ground in special education I knew Nathan did not exhibit signs of Autism but still I couldn’t deny that Nathan was struggling with speaking. I went online and looked Apraxia up and the description was undeniably Nathan. Apraxia is a speech disorder/delay characterized by inability to speak, or struggle to speak clearly. It occurs when the oral- motor muscles do not or cannot obey commands from the brain, or in severe cases when the brain cannot reliably send those commands.
We called Children’s Hospital and made an appointment for Nathan to be evaluated.
It took about a month for Nathan to get in for an appointment but as we continued to read up on Apraxia and watched Nathan with a more knowledgeable eye, we knew that he had Apraxia. The research said that it takes years of therapy, intensive therapy, for children to deal with Apraxia (learn to speak). When the evaluator came back to us and said that Nathan had Apraxia, we were relieved that we finally had answers and could help Nathan. The evaluator had a number of resources for us to look through but we already knew it all and what it all meant.
Nathan is a normal developing child, but he struggles with language. Nathan’s Apraxia was more of a coordination issue; he needed help with where he should place his tongue in order to make sounds for speech. We started with sign language to ease the tantrums, while he learned to make sounds (goo-goo and gaa-gaa) and we were amazed at how quickly he picked up on signing. We were able to communicate with Nathan in three word phrases within one week of using signing. I can’t explain the feeling of understanding Nathan after two years…what a blessing God grants us to go with our gut feeling on things!
My husband and I looked around for programs to enroll Nathan in to help with his language development and we cannot express how much Kindermusik has played a tremendous roll in that development. The classes that Kindermusik offered Nathan allowed him to sign and express himself musically at his own pace. It provided the right amount of repetition for him to be able to predict and feel comfortable with the songs and books that were being read in class. Part of Nathan’s speech therapy was to pick up on the beat of the syllables in words, much like picking up on the beats in songs. It has been a wonderful experience for Nathan and I. When they say that music is good for young children, they truly do not give themselves enough credit!
Nathan is still enrolled in Kindermusik and has speech therapy three times a week, but his vocabulary is outstanding, he speaks in full sentences, asks and answers questions, retells stories or events, and sings to himself as he plays. Within the past year Nathan has received numerous compliments on how well he speaks and my husband and I chuckle to ourselves thinking…. if they only knew. The progress Nathan has made within the past year leaves us speechless!
