The Lisping Third Person
I received an email from babycenter talking about my 5 year old child's progression and an article about how to tackle your child's lisp. Now the first thing that popped in my head is, my daughter doesn’t have a lisp but that thought had me wondering, does she? We do try to help her work on her annunciate but try not to be to hard on correcting her speech. Clem and I have already talked about keeping an eye on the kids speech because when he was a child, he did develop a lisp which was corrected in his teens.
So I took a step back and from what I can tell, she doesn’t have a lisp but she does struggle from time to time with new words. Which, lets be honest, is normal for a child. We are happy to report that Paley’s tendency to talk about herself in the third person is slowly melting away. We were never overzealous about correcting that little quirk but we certainly had some critics. Our pediatrician said that she would outgrow the habit. All kids are quirky, some people just think they should behave or be more adult like. I will admit that I’ve had moments where I caught myself with similar expectations but identifying and curbing behavior is very important to growing.
While she’s slowly moving away from talking about herself in the third person, she has developed a new habit of saying things like “my tummy would like some cheese”, “my arm would like some milk”. Again the doc says, she will grow out of it. Many say that just going to kindergarten next fall will create a whole new person. Regardless what the future holds for our kids, the quirkier the better in our eyes. We will take on each new challenge or hurdle as a family.