LN: Number of children with speech impediments on the rise

Prague, July 9 (CTK) - The number of children who seek speech therapists has been rising steeply in the Czech Republic, while their parents are often to blame for the situation, according to doctors, the daily Lidove noviny (LN) reports yesterday.

At the end of the 1990s, over 90,000 people were seeing a speech therapist, while ten years later it was over 130,000 and last year the figure rose to 138,000.

Most of the patients, some 90 percent, are children and youth under 18 years, mainly first graders and kids in pre-school age, LN writes.

Moreover, 14 percent of Czech kids suffer from such a serious speech defect that afflicts not only their ability to talk but also to understand what other people are saying, LN adds.

The number of consultations with a speech therapist has increased by 15.7 percent to over one million in the Czech Republic in the past five years, LN writes.

Children under 18 years most often suffer from wrong articulation of some sounds (49 percent), followed by belated development of speech, (23 percent), LN adds, referring to statistics.

Experts say that many of speech disorders could be prevented if parents paid a higher attention to their children and if relatives were not lisping when communicating with infants.

At present, parents rather switch on a television or a computer for their kids and they are not reading them very much, speech therapist Katerina Denemarkova told the paper.

It is alarming that so few small children know traditional fairy tales, she pointed out.

Another problem is that people, both adults and children, are generally talking to each other very little nowadays, the paper notes.

"We are communicating mainly via e-mail and text messages, which affects our vocabulary," Denemarkova told the paper.

Experts say the rise in the number of children with speech defects could be slowed down at least thanks to a special training of kindergarten teachers.

The Czech Association of Speech Therapists has been training teachers in speech defects prevention within an EU-funded programme, LN writes, adding that the Education Ministry is considering expanding it to all kindergartens, LN writes.

On the other hand, the daily's commentator Martin Zverina is challenging the experts' results.

He indicates that the increasing number of children with speech defects is rather the result of a more thorough monitoring and rising demands on kids and it is not caused by the parents' lack of attention.

Zverina writes that people can be living life to the full with most of speech defects, citing the example of the late Czech president Vaclav Havel who became a brilliant speaker during his presidency in spite of his guttural pronunciation of "R."

Parents are definitely not to blame for some speech defects, such as dysphasia (a partial or complete impairment of the ability to communicate), Zverina says.

However, speech therapists do not hesitate to provoke the feeling of guilt in parents for letting their children watch TV, for instance, he adds.

"yesterday's inflation of experts in all situations in life makes absurd demands not only on children but also on their parents. Theoretically, they should jointly meet demands of paediatricians, teachers, allergists, speech therapists, nutrition consultants, child psychologists and sport coaches, and yet have time left for their normal existence," Zverina writes in LN.