How Your Child Can Benefit from Speech Therapy

Speech therapy for your child can do wonders for his or her development. Many assume that speech therapy solely focuses on helping your child to improve the way they articulate and speak.
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However, speech therapy does much more than that and can influence their cognitive development, writing skills, social skills, and much more!
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Speech therapy can dramatically improve your child’s quality of life and is beneficial to anyone who is having difficulties when it comes to communication or social interaction.
Here are some ways your child can benefit from speech therapy:

Improved Communication

Speech therapy helps improve communication skills. This is what it’s mainly known more improving and this communication extends beyond just verbal skills.

The ability of your child to communicate their needs and wants easily is the core improvement of speech therapy. This will teach them how to interpret questions and statements correctly and keep conversations going.

Speech therapy will also help improve how your child can communicate non verbally. This means better understanding and control of their facial expressions, gestures, and body language.

Develop Reading and Writing Abilities

Along with improved verbal and nonverbal communication skills, your child will also see improvements in their reading and writing ability. In fact, literacy is a key area of development that a speech therapist works on with your child.

Speech therapists are trained to a greater degree than a general tutor to help identify specific roadblocks that are preventing your child from building their reading and writing skills. They can help tie their verbal and speech programs to ensure phonological letters are associated with parallel with written ones and help improve your child’s ability to formulate different styles of writing such as narratives, summaries, and argumentative statements.

Social Skills

Speech therapy can drastically improve your child’s social skills. It can help them understand emotions and relate facial cues to such emotions. Moreover, it can help your child to understand various nonverbal body language cues and how this can influence their communication such as formality, tone, etc. 
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All of this helps your child understand and relate better to others. It builds their social awareness skills and allows them to build strong social connections with those around them. 

Improve Cognitive Development

Speech therapy will also improve cognitive development, mainly due to how closely tied speech and communication are to overall cognitive development.

Various cognitive-based strategies are used during speech therapy that can help improve your child’s reason and problem-solving abilities. They will also 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.