Mchatting with your girlfriend, asking the kindergarten teacher for help and telling the parents in the evening what happened during the day: children are rarely quiet. This is important for their development. “Talking is social anchoring,” says Katrin Neumann, director of the clinic for phoniatrics and pediatric audiology at the University Hospital in Münster, which also advises the World Health Organization. Speaking can be compared to how monkeys groom their fur; talking also serves the purpose of social bonding.
In the corona pandemic, however, many occasions for discussion were lost, says Sonja Utikal from the German Federal Association for Speech Therapy. Due to closed kindergartens and closed playgrounds, the youngest would have spoken less often to people outside the family. However, these conversations are particularly effective for learning how to communicate wishes or ideas. “The parents may know what the ‘e-ä!’ what is meant, but you have to explain it to other children or adults.”
The long phases in which kindergartens and schools were closed worries speech therapists and doctors. Children may have developed “environmental abnormalities,” says Utikal. They do not get enough linguistic stimulus from outside and therefore remain below their potential. Every child is dependent on their environment when it comes to language acquisition, she says. “If you don’t get enough support in the sensitive phases, there can be a backlog that can no longer be made up, or only with a lot of effort.”
Speaking needs regular practice
But the lockdown also hit children who could already speak well. “The principle of ‘use it or lose it’ applies,” says Neumann. Language skills have to be trained regularly, otherwise the language level of some children will stagnate. “During homeschooling, many children were gradually left behind, especially those whose mother tongue was not German.” She expects that more students will need language tutoring in the future. “That’s one reason why there has to be face-to-face teaching.”
At the same time, there were 6.4 percent fewer therapy sessions with speech therapists in 2020 than in the previous year, says Utikal. During the pandemic, they were allowed to carry out video treatments for the first time, but this is not suitable for every child. In addition, not every family has the technical requirements. Patients also had to interrupt therapies more frequently due to quarantine periods.
How many children have problems with language acquisition is not precisely recorded in Germany, says the speech therapist. Statistical uncertainty also prevails because the causes are not reliably recorded, says Utikal. Research assumes that two to 15 percent of four to six-year-olds have a language development disorder, i.e. disorders in the development of the “language system in the brain,” says Neumann: “Where is my vocabulary stored, where are the sounds I use for my need native or surrounding language? How good am I at getting them out? How do I control my throat and mouth muscles?”
Watch “yes” and “don’t know” sayers closely
But what can parents do who are unsure whether their child has developed speech problems during the pandemic? First of all, Utikal gives the all-clear. “Fathers and mothers are specialists for their child.” They usually have a good sense of when the language is not developing well. If in doubt, parents could write down which words their child already knows. A first alarm signal is when they are using fewer than 50 words by the age of two. In the case of multilingual children growing up, it is irrelevant from which language these words come.
“Anyone who says ‘yes’ or ‘don’t know’ at home should observe their child more closely,” says Neumann. If a child often answers questions in the affirmative, succinctly, unspecifically or with phrases and does not comply with requests, there could be more than an attitude of refusal behind it: children tend to behave in this way if they do not understand their parents correctly, but are also unable to formulate any questions. Parents should get medical advice quickly, says Utikal. “Anyone who acts early can already provide good impetus with a few hours of therapy.” Often, however, abnormalities are only treated shortly before school starts – but by then they would have been ingrained. “The older the child, the less effective the therapy is,” says Neumann. The basic features of language development are already complete at the age of four. “Everything after that is just a matter of filing.” Poor reading and spelling, for example, are often developed by children who had language development problems even before they started school.
Utikal advises anyone who wants to support their child to build language support into everyday life. When shopping, for example, you can actively communicate with your child: “Where are the pasta? and what are we doing now? Exactly, pay.” It is important to ask the child open questions that they cannot simply answer with “yes” or “no”. You shouldn’t lecture your child either, says Neumann. It is better to repeat wrong words or sentences correctly and in a wider context. Even small changes in everyday life can make a big difference, says Utikal: “It helps to reserve undisturbed time for the child to put the cell phone away.”