Mum Star

Speaking is one of life’s skills that you really can’t manage well without. We are social beings, and our need to communicate has been vital, in our history, to our survival. It is now a skill that is necessary to enable children to communicate with their parents and with each other to have their basic needs met and to socialise.

Speech difficulties are many and varied. If a speech difficulty is undiagnosed or untreated, it cans cause huge frustration for a child and curb their abilities in the classroom (since they can’t express all that they may know, they may be classed as being of lower ability and become bored and frustrated as a result). Interestingly, the prison population and the population in Pupil Referral Units (where children are sent to be educated if they are excluded from a school and not accepted elsewhere) have a high percentage of people who have had undiagnosed speech difficulties in their youth.

That is not to say, of course, that a child with speech difficulties will end up bored, frustrated, truant and incarcerated. No, not if they have supportive family and teachers who recognise their difficulties and accommodate them.

Asking a young child with a speech difficulty a question like, “What’s that colour?” when they can’t tell you can lead you to think that they don’t know their colours. Ask them “Can you point to the blue one?” can let a child show you what he knows.

If your child gets to the age of 2 years old and is not speaking so that others can understand him, he can be referred to speech therapy. However, as a parent you will probably have known for some time before then that there is something amiss (particularly if your child is otherwise bright and their lack of speech is anathema) so by the age of 2 years you will have been pulling your hair out wanting help that isn’t forthcoming. This is on the basis that many children just don’t talk until the age of 2, so not talking before that age is not deemed ‘abnormal’.

There are several possible causes of speech delay or defects. They can include temporary ones like glue ear (which can be resolved by the insertion of grommets, though the time waiting for this procedure, particularly if your child has frequent colds and has been without proper hearing for a long time, can mean that they effectively have to re-learn their language and this can be a slow process), or long-term ones like speech dyspraxia (which is a problem with co-ordinating the muscles of the mouth, tongue, lips and voice/air flow). There can be physical causes, like a cleft palate or being tongue-tied (having a short frenulum, beneath the tongue, which prohibits its free movement). It can also be part of a global developmental delay, which may be clear from other aspects of the child’s development (like slowness to move, lack of eye contact or interest in the world).

Next week, we will summarise the ‘normal’ pattern of speech acquisition, and the role of speech therapists.

I may have won a battle I have been waging with my mother-in-law this week, as I read the articles in the newspapers about children’s cereal being so filled with sugar they should be kept on the biscuit aisle in the supermarket. My mother-in-law keeps her cupboards stocked with all the sugary, chocolatey cereal you could imagine in a bald-faced effort to win favour with my young son. She doesn’t have to live with the consequences, of course, so she gets to make a fuss and spoil him whilst I have to worry about fillings and obesity and looking like the boring baddy who only gives him boring, healthy cereal for breakfast. But she’s a grandma, and I suppose that’s what they do.

Anyway, what about this research into the sugar content of cereal, then?

Independent consumer watchdog, Which? surveyed the nutritional value of fifty various breakfast cereals on sale in the UK. They looked at shops’ own-brands and named brands, and found that 32 of the 50 surveyed contained ‘high’ levels of sugar, and that 86% (12 out of 14) of the cereals aimed at children had ‘excessive’ levels of sugar added to them. On the plus side, the levels of salt has decreased over recent years.

Which? also found that the weight of a serving varied between brands and cereal types, so that it would be hard for a consumer to compare how much salt, sugar etc. would be contained in bowls of different types of cereal.

Whilst many cereals boast proudly of the amount of added vitamins and minerals they contain (which do make them a good part of a balanced diet, especially as they contain iron which can be hard to fit into a child’s diet if they are a fussy eater), they are not so forthcoming about their sugar content.

Of the 14 cereals marketed towards children, only Kellogg’s Rice Krispies (which had a ‘medium’ level of sugar) and Weetabix (which had a ‘low’ level of sugar) did not contain high levels of sugar. The worst offender, in terms of the amount of sugar contained, was Kellogg’s Frosties (37% of which is sugar…), followed swiftly by various shops’ own-brand versions of Coco Pops (36% sugar) and Kellogg’s Crunchy Nut Cornflakes and Coco Pops and Honey Monster Sugar Puffs (35% sugar).

Which? recommends that cereal producers should make a wider range of healthy cereals, and make their nutritional content obvious (such as with the traffic light system used on other food types, on the front of the box).

As well as the risk of tooth decay, diabetes and obesity, giving high-sugar cereals to children makes them develop a taste for them, so that cereals with low levels of sugar become unpalatable to them. They’re still healthier, overall, than a fried breakfast, but if your child insists on the sugary brands then alternate them with other breakfasts like boiled egg and toast, or porridge sweetened with fresh fruit.

Many of us, as adults, look back on stories that were read to us as children with fondness. So many have been turned into cartoons that we don’t necessarily remember the detail of the original stories as we get older.

But pick up an actual traditional storybook and you might be surprised at the level of gore, treachery, threat and violence in those stories and think twice about reading them to your own children.

You wouldn’t be alone – apparently, one in five parents (in a sample of 2,000) report that they don’t read traditional stories to their children because they deem them ‘too scary’. Instead, they turn to more modern classics, from The Very Hungry Caterpillar to Room on the Broom.

Stories by the Brothers Grimm and Hans Christian Anderson are classics and most people buy them on the basis that they are familiar tales that they heard when they were little. Many modern takes on the tales are adapted slightly (so that, for example, the first two little pigs are not eaten by the wolf but are able to flee to their brother’s house made of brick where they are all safe), but others remain true to their rather gruesome originals.

The parents who were interviewed said that they wouldn’t read their children the stories of Rapunzel or Rumpelstiltskin because of the fear of ‘kidnapping and executions’. Meanwhile, a third of parents reported that their child had cried when the grandma in Little Red Riding Hood was eaten by the wolf.

It’s fair to say that trying to impart moral righteousness on your child is rather hard when reading stories like Goldilocks and the Three Bears. Goldilocks is portrayed as the protagonist, and yet she broke into someone’s house, stole and broke property. Trying to find the words to explain that yes, Jack is the goody in the story, but yes he also sneaks into a castle and steals from a giant, is also rather difficult. The original stories were perhaps intended to frighten children into behaving (don’t go into a stranger’s house, it might belong to bears who will eat you up if they catch you!) but that is perhaps at odds with more modern methods of parenting, when we try to teach children right from wrong by example rather than threat…

Hooray! Snow! At last! We’ve waited more than a year for this Wintery weather and it has finally arrived. Even better, it arrived at a weekend, so there wasn’t the usual chaos associated with snowfall midweek.

Most of the snow has now melted, but it is forecast that more is on its way. If you have young children, chances are you’ll have made the most of the last snow by having snowball fights, building snowmen and, best of all, sledging. And hopefully you’ll be able to do it again soon.

But remember that although it’s great fun, it is essentially a way of hurtling down hillsides without safety equipment or head protection over unknown, hidden terrain and as such – amusing as it is – it can be hazardous. Follow this safety advice and hopefully you’ll be able to enjoy the next lot of snow sledging merrily rather than sipping fluid through a straw in hospital.

Firstly, choose your sledging location with care. Remember that sledges don’t usually come with steering wheels, so don’t choose a hill that looks all right on one side but drops off sharply on the other side – because you just know that that’s where your child will head at the first opportunity.

Choose a gentle slope with a large flat area at the bottom (tip: don’t choose a hill with a lake, or car park or road or barbed wire fence right at the bottom… sounds obvious, but you’d be surprised how many people don’t think about what’s at the bottom).Select a hill that is not too steep and has a long flat area at the bottom for your kids to glide to a stop. Choose one that doesn’t have lots of trees to navigate.
Choose a hill that you’ve walked on during the non-snowy seasons so you know where any large lumps or crests are that may be hidden by the snow.

Wrap up warmly in lots of layers – it’ll be warm walking up and down hills, but exposed areas can get frostbitten and if you don’t dress warmly enough you risk hypothermia. Take a change of clothes for after they’ve done and maybe an extra set if they are drenched before they’ve finished sledging. Don’t let them wear loose clothing like scarves that might get caught up beneath the sledge and strangle them. If you can persuade them to do so, get them to wear a helmet just as you would if they were riding a bike – they’ll be traveling a lot faster than they would on a bike.

Always supervise your child. If they’re under five, you should ride on the sledge with them. Don’t let them sledge on their fronts, and make sure they take turns going down the hills – races tend to lead to collisions.

Tell your child that if the sledge won’t stop, or if they’re heading for a tree, they have to roll off.

Okay, nag over – enjoy!