The Tribune

By ALESHA CADET

Tribune Features

Reporter

acadet@tribunemedia.net

THE real joy for Bahamian speech-language pathologist Sharon Clarke is seeing children achieve their goals after months of therapy.

Working with adults and children under the Ministry of Education for more than 30 years, Ms Clarke said fulfilment for her also comes from the transformation each student goes through in becoming a better communicator.

Speech and language disorders that may lead to a need for speech therapy sessions include stuttering, childhood apraxia of speech, voice disorders, language based learning disabilities, dysarthria and more.

“There is a wide range of conditions but the main ones would be in the areas of stuttering or what Bahamians call ‘heavy tongue’,” Ms Clarke said. “Then there is a whole range of speech and language disorders that result from neurological disorders, strokes, autism or brain damage.”

While the Ministry of Education does not have statistics at hand, Ms Clarke said these conditions are quite prevalent in the Bahamas. She said parents are now more and more open about it and are looking for help as opposed to back in the day when people tried to hide it if their children were “different”.

As the supervisor of the unit in the Ministry of Education that works within special services, Ms Clarke said she often works along with the educational system, testing and counselling, providing speech therapy.

The sessions are operated by way of a referral process where each child is referred either by a school teacher or a medical doctor.

“We do this because we want to make certain that the person who is involved with that child educationally or medically remain aware as well as the parents. It is just for validation so that everyone is on the same page. When the child is done, so that the results are channelled, these persons can know what our recommendation and findings were,” said Ms Clarke.

When it comes to the results of speech therapy sessions, Ms Clarke said they are very individualised, as one child may need six to nine months to clear up a speech impediment, while another may take just three months.

“With the stuttering, it is a learned behaviour for the most part. What happens is the persons may start off just repeating words and that goes on into the blinking, stomping of the feet while trying to bring out the words. It is like a coping thing, just trying to get words out, and that is what I mean by the learned behaviour theory,” Ms Clarke said.

“We know all children go through it between the ages of two and five because they are just learning the rules of speaking. You would hear some of them do what we call easy stuttering, but there is nothing associated with it. It disappears and goes away if it is handled correctly. It is the child whose parents stomps at them and constantly makes the child aware of it, it won’t go as quickly as it came.”

Even though she has participated in many workshops and speech therapy awareness events over the years, Ms Clarke said Bahamians are still not as aware as they should be when it comes to speech impediment conditions.

“You still have inappropriate referrals being made where a child would come to you after a teacher has referred them in the third or fourth grade. So that mean the child has been in the school for the first four years and they didn’t think it was a severe problem to warrant them looking for help earlier on. A number of times we would have family members say, ‘Oh his Daddy used to talk like that, that is where he picked it up’. That was OK maybe 30 years ago, but it is not now,” Ms Clarke said. “We even have some persons in the medical community that still tell parents to leave the child until they are five years old to see if it gets worse; meaning don’t do anything about it until then, hoping they will grow out of it.”

She said awareness and prevention is the main focus in her field, because if a parent, teacher or doctor helps in preventing the condition before it becomes a real challenge for a child, then the battle has been won before it really got started. Ms Clarke said prevention comes with public education and awareness.