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Health & Fitness

How to improve your Child's Mumbling

Helpful tips are offered to parents on how to improve their child's mumbling. A positive and constructive approach should first begin with exploring the cause.

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Judith Rosenfield, Neighbor
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Tips for Mumbling

Is your child's mumbling driving you crazy? Here are some ways to address the problem in a non critical manner:

  1. First, ask yourself why he/she is mumbling. Is it confidence, postural, a structural problem (e.g. restrictive frenulum/ tongue tie), talking too fast, too soft, or just not opening their mouth enough?

  • Seek psychological support if you think the root of the problem is a more significant emotional, or psychological cause (e.g. depression), and speech remediation if you think the cause may be medical, developmental, or habitual that does not improve with your prompting.

  • Praise, praise, praise when he is presenting himself well, or exhibiting any  positive behavior such as sharing, helping, or offering a good idea.

  • Use activities that your child excels at to build and reinforce confident be behaviors so that he/she can generalize their confidence to other areas and contexts.

  • Make sure that a sibling or peer is not contributing to low self esteem. A neighborhood or school bully can be toxic to a child's self esteem.

  • Model slow and clear speech on a regular basis.

  • Ask your child to repeat himself, even if you really understand him. This will help get him in the habit of speaking up the first time.

    •  Other suggestions:

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    • Video tape your child, and play it back for your child to self- evaluate. Gently offer your input as well.

  • Target one behavior at a time to improve, such as, rate, loudness, eye contact, or facial expression.

  • Offer positive comments when the target behaviors are demonstrated, while ignoring persistent use of unwanted behaviors.
    • Play a game to guess a message that is mouthed without voice. This will help to increase the level of mouth opening, and accuracy of articulatory placement in conversational speech.

  • For younger children, practice story retelling after reading books to work on self expression,affect, and animation. Set up the task for success by allowing any version of the story to be right. Praise for storytelling and speech behaviors.
    • Have your child practice a school presentation with the family, and/or use of videotape, or audio tape for feedback.

  • Validate what your child is saying on a daily basis, so that he will put value on what he has to say.

  • Be patient. It may take several months to see improvement.

    • Good Luck!

    – Judy Rosenfield, M.A, CCC-SLP (Speech-language Pathology), owner of Wait Your Turn, LLC

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    DBA King's Speech and Learning Center starting September 1.

    For more information, visit http://www.waityourturnllc.com/.

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