Why do children speak late?

Many babies cannot speak until they are about one year old, and some can even walk smoothly but cannot speak. At this time, mothers need to observe whether their children have other problems besides delayed speech development, such as hearing, malnutrition, etc. They also need to determine whether it is due to the surrounding environment or the parents' lack of training. This article introduces several reasons why children speak late. Let’s analyze them together.

1. The most common cause of delayed language development is intellectual disability. Intelligence and language are closely related. Children with mental retardation cannot pay attention to what others say to them, cannot concentrate, have poor imitation skills, and cannot express and understand the meaning of words.

2. Hearing impairment can also affect language development. Children with severe hearing loss cannot learn to speak. If the hearing loss is not too severe, they can learn pronunciation by observing other people's lip movements. The sounds that have obvious changes in mouth shape are easy to learn, but the sounds that involve tongue movement are very difficult to learn.

3. Some parents are too doting and accommodating to their children. They always meet their children's demands based on their gestures and eyes, and neglect the children's language training. As a result, they gradually develop the habit of using gestures instead of speaking, thus delaying the children's language development.

4. Long-term malnutrition, poor health, or poor hearing in children may also cause delayed language development.

5. Frequent changes of guardians or unfamiliar environment.

6. Autism is one of the reasons why children start speaking late. Children with autism tend not to pay much attention to others and therefore lack the ability to imitate, which naturally means they have fewer opportunities to practice language.

7. There are many people in the family with different accents, and the child does not know who to learn to speak from, which causes the child to speak late.

8. Parents are too submissive to their children and give them what they want before they even ask for it. This practice makes children too lazy to express themselves verbally and get used to pointing with their fingers, resulting in language backwardness.

9. Parents have too high expectations of their children when speaking and use a harsh attitude. This makes the children feel pressured when speaking, making it even more difficult for them to speak.

10. Parents lack opportunities to communicate with their children. Some parents are taciturn and do not like to talk. When taking care of their children, they are often silent, so their children have fewer opportunities to learn to speak. Some parents are busy with work and only pay attention to taking care of their children's lives and seldom talk to their children. In some homes, there is no one to play with the children, and the children play here and there by themselves, and silence becomes a habit, so they naturally learn to speak late.