• When we want to teach baseball to our children, we don’t expect them to immediately step up to the plate and hit a small baseball. We start with whiffle balls and T-ball and move on from there, because we know they are not developmentally ready to hit a baseball yet. The same is true for the need to have muscle development for speaking. It takes the coordination of many complex muscles in the throat, jaw, tongue and  lips, (just to list a few!) to make speech possible. Whisper the song, “Row, Row, Row Your Boat”, to yourself and feel all the different muscle movements in your lips and tongue and jaw—it’s amazing what complex patterns emerge! For these reasons, many sounds do not develop in a child's speech until as late as 7 or 8 years old. Sometimes it's the ability to say all the sounds together in words that is more difficult to develop.

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