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This week in Australia marks Dyspraxia Awareness Week. Why should you care? Well imagine being only four or five years old, and unable to communicate like most children your own age.

Dyspraxia is a movement disorder than can affect children’s motor development. It can affect only speech development, or it can also involve other areas of motor skills eg jumping, running, using scissors and pencils

Verbal Dyspraxia

Speech requires an enormous amount of rapid movement of tongue, lips and soft palate and breath control. To form a word requires planning a series of movements and executing them smoothly and rapidly – for most people, this becomes automatic.

Children with dyspraxic speech find complex movements difficult and constantly simplify their productions eg one common feature is to leave the sound from the ends of words, so that words with three sounds (b-a-th) are made with the two (b-a).

Typically, a child with dyspraxia of speech is very late talking with good comprehension of language. As a baby, they may have been quiet, not babbling very much.

When they do talk, they have a limited number of sounds, and they usually omit sounds from the ends of words. They are very hard to understand. As you watch them, you may see them ’grope’ for a sound – the tongue and lips move around as if trying to find the right spot.

Dyspraxic children often find some sound combinations more difficult than others, and there is sometimes variation in the sounds selected eg they may say ‘car’ but ‘tat’ for ‘cat’. Some children find it hard to control loudness, or top have a flat monotonous sounding speech. As well as speaking too quickly.

Sometimes, children with dyspraxia can become frustrated with the problems of communication. They may be more difficult to manage than other children, have a very short fuse, or may be withdrawn and self-conscious about their speech

Children who are unintelligible are at risk of having comprehension and language delay, partly because they do not have the same social opportunities as other children.

People outside the family may give up trying to engage them in conversation. The same information flow does not come their way, they do not learn to interact with a wide variety of adults and peers, and their self-esteem suffers.

Given appropriate help early, all but the most severely affected dyspraxic children learn to speak clearly. However, some continue to sound ‘different’ through into their primary school years.

They have periods on the day when they go back to being hard to understand, particularly if they are tired or excited. Some dyspraxic children require extra help in learning to read and write.

Sometimes, the secondary problems (being withdrawn, acting out, not socialising, low self-esteem) last beyond the original speech problems.

Fine & Gross Motor Dyspraxia

Any activity involving movement requires planning and execution. For example, sitting down at the table requires several actions to be performed – pulling out the chair, getting your body at the right place, sitting down and pulling the chair into the table. Each action has to be done in the right order, and carried out quickly and smoothly.

As adults, all this is second nature to us, but very young children initially have to think about how they are going to achieve their goal. Dyspraxic children continue to make mistakes in planning and executing movements far beyond this early stage.

These issues are further compounded by the fact that many dyspraxic children have an above average or high intelligence.

My 5 year old son, Davis, has moderate Verbal Dyspraxia and mild Fine and Gross Motor Dyspraxia.

Davis was diagnosed with Dyspraxia before he turned two, and was taught to use sign language between the ages of 2 and 3 ½. If tired, he sometimes reverts to this but most of the signs are very obvious to understand (he no longer signs daily). He has been in speech therapy for the last three and a half years.

He does therapy at home every day with my wonderful wife, and sees his Speech Therapist once a fortnight, and his Occupational Therapist every other week.

His speech has improved a hundred fold over the last twelve months, to the stage that most people can understand much of what he says, and he doesn’t need to sign any more. Davis’ speech should be mostly normal in the next couple of years. However it is always extremely difficult to know exactly how dyspraxic children will turn out.

Dyspraxia affects up to 10% of the population. Please take a moment to think about what life must be like for dyspraxic children, and if possible, donate towards any fundraising activities.

Australian National Dyspraxia Awareness Week runs from September 1st to September 8th 2006. You can read Meredith’s post about Davis and his journey with Dyspraxia, visit the Australian Dyspraxia Association website or these links for more information.

Photo: Mundaring Weir Wall, Mundaring, WA.