Effect of Pandemic on the Speech and language development of Children – What Parents can do?

Covid-19 pandemic has hit people globally with different intensity. We as adults have shaped ourselves and are in the process of modifying our ways further however the pandemic’s effect on children is of another level. It’s been more than two years since the children are away from school and hence completely absent from their significant development through inter-personal interactions (teachers and friends). This is developing as a major concern for us professionals and parents for the children’s speech and language development especially for those who were born after 2018.

Few surveys suggest that children who started their academic journey in 2020 required more support than the children in previous years. The greatest area of concern was observed to be their communication and language development which directly affects children’s personal, social and emotional development.

Being confined at home has been a blessing in a way for most of us as we are getting to spend quality time with our loved ones. However, it has also become overwhelming for parents to ensure safety and good health of their children in this period along with taking care of their overall development. Having access to very few activities and constant restrictions on meeting extended family and friends has been a challenge for many.
This affects children’s exposure to new vocabulary when they visit new places or interact with different people. Further, this leads to lack of confidence in social situations which eventually affects the child’s ability to reason, draw inferences and make decisions.

“Wash your hands, wear your mask and maintain a social distance” has now become a lifesaving mantra to the whole world now. Widespread mask wearing has also made us realize of how much we rely on lipreading. Now we know that we not only hear people with our ears but we hear them through the movement of their lips, the quality of the sounds produced and also through their facial expressions which are majorly hidden by masks.

nowadays. Children who have ear infections or experience temporary hearing loss have added difficulty in following conversations due to the existing norm of wearing masks.

Several toddlers in preschool are unintelligible in their utterances and have many of their sounds misarticulated. This happens due to lack of phonological awareness during early years of life. This can be corrected when they are exposed frequently to correct production of sounds. Nowadays with children being around people wearing mask in all social contexts and them attending online classes with compromised visual and auditory information, it might make the process of self-learning even more difficult. This can have an impact on children’s development of social and emotional skills too.

Spending time indoors has brought down opportunities to interact and hence has affected the speech and language development for all children. Needless to mention how far this has affected children facing developmental issues. Children with special need or needs consistently need professional guidance and therapy. Due to continuous lockdown situations and regular infection scare, parents faced a big challenge to meet professionals and to maintain consistency with their child’s therapy. Also, a major shift with therapies was the adaptation to teletherapy. It took children a while to adapt to this new form of interaction and still there are quite a few children who are not comfortable with the same.

This has become a big struggle for parents who are working from home and need their child’s speech and language skills to improve and not get affected or regressed.

There are few key things that parents can do to build on children’s speech and language skills.

For babies and toddlers, it is very important to keep talking to them and make sure they are oriented to their environment and can relate and respond to their caregivers. It can be gestural, through vocalizing or even through meaningful utterances. Create communication temptation wherever possible as this would give the child opportunities to approach his/her caregiver and communicate his/her need. Encourage all attempts of meaningful communication by them whether they are gestural or unintelligible words. If its gestural you can appreciate their attempt by saying related utterances, Eg. Give, open, bye, no, come, go, a hug, a kiss, etc. or if they are incomplete or unintelligible utterances, appreciate the attempt with the correct production of the words. Children learn when the words keep falling in their ears frequently. Hence, consistency is the key. Also talk to them with simple sentence structure and encourage one-word utterances from them.

Our goal initially is to get the children to get comfortable with communicating their needs verbally or gesturally and then we can work on other aspects of communication.

Play is an essential tool to get connected with children and to be welcomed in their world. A study by Nermeen E. et.al. in 2010, suggests that children with highly involved parents had enhanced social functioning and fewer behavioral problems. Thus, once an engagement is established with our children, it opens doors to several other opportunities to connect with the them and work on their speech, language and cognitive skills.

These tips can be applied in general routine of the child which will help parents to understand their child better and find ways to communicate with them.