The Benefits of Speech and Language Therapy for Children

Benefits of Speech and Language Therapy for Children
Speech and language therapy consists of techniques and activities aimed at improving overall communication by addressing delays. At Arotahi, our speech and language therapists work closely with your child to assess their ability to speak and understand others properly before creating customised therapy sessions based on the child’s individual goals or challenges..

Speech therapy has many benefits for children, here are some of the key advantages:

Improved Social skills

Speech therapy can play an essential role in improving your child’s social skills. It can help teach children core social skills such as how to carry a conversation and how to understand emotions and link facial cues to such responses. It can also assist them in understanding nonverbal body language in others and learning how to adapt their communication to cater to different people and surroundings. All of this helps your child understand and relate better to others. It helps them to build strong connections and fulfilling relationships with those around them.

Improved articulation

For children who struggle with impaired speech, articulation plays an important role. As children learn to articulate words properly, their communication skills grow, as does their self-confidence. A common example is when people are unable to make the ‘R’ sound. Some people grow up with this problem because they aren’t exposed to the right articulatory exercises.

Develop Reading and Writing Abilities

Literacy is one key area on which a speech and language therapist will often work with a child. A trained therapist can identify blockages that are impacting a child’s reading and writing skills. They can link verbal and speech programs to ensure phonics are associated in parallel with written letters and help improve your child’s ability to formulate different styles of writing such as narratives, summaries, and argumentative statements.

Improved Cognitive Development

Speech and communication are closely tied to overall cognitive development. Many reasoning, thinking and problem-solving processes are linked to the use of language and speech, whether through internal thought processes or verbal communication.
As children develop their language and speech abilities, they can improve their problem-solving skills and vocabularies to support their cognitive development. Speech therapists can give children cognitive-based learning strategies to support this. Children will be able to learn more efficiently and effectively and be able to organize their thoughts better. Improved memory recall is another area that will benefit from speech therapy as well.

If you’d like to find out more about how speech and language therapy can help with your child’s communication skills, call 8180 8503 or email info@arotahi.sg to speak to us.