Imagine as a parent being told that your child would never speak much. As a parent this would be devastating to hear, knowing that your child will be different for the rest of their lives. Imagine speaking to your child and not knowing what they're thinking, how their day was or what they need or want because of the inability to communicate with others. The devastation that clouds families that have experience with this disorder are just heartbreaking. Childhood apraxia of speech, which is also known as developmental apraxia of speech, is such a complicated and devastating speech disorder that causes pain and anguish for a family, especially the child that can only hope for a cure.
Although apraxia causes many difficulties and struggles for children, extensive speech therapy can help children to be able to form simple syllables and sounds to be able to form sentences of few words. Time and effort is needed in order to connect the brain to the muscles in order for a child to be able to form words. In addition, to the extensive work that is put into this disorder, childhood apraxia is also controversial. As said by Allison Balfard, “it's also a controversial disorder, with experts debating about its cause and its long-term effects” (Ballard 2)*. The controversy is whether or not children will be able to overcome the enormous obstacles that come with this disorder. Without extensive speech therapy, the connection between the muscles, mouth, and brain will never occur.
Not knowing the cause of the existence of something so particular for doctors, speech pathologists, and parents is like having their heads in the clouds. In connection to childhood apraxia, the definite cause is still undetermined, but the main conclusion for why the brain, mouth, and jaw can’t make the right connections is because of impairment or malfunctioning in the brain. Although doctors have come up with a cause for the lack of connections are being made, there is no current evidence of what causes the brain impairment at such an early age but there are a few ideas out there. For instance, Guild states, “theories range from supposing the impairment is a very specific small injury of difference in the speech area of the brain to saying that is a very diffuse change that is not possible to locate”(Guild 1). It’s quite apparent that there are many theories as to why the brain is this way, but it’s also evident that there’s no clear explanation either.
The logical thought of what causes developmental apraxia of speech is an injury to the newborn occurred before birth or during birth where there was a lack of oxygen to the brain. In addition, a second theory to what causes developmental apraxia is genetic disorders and a stroke that occurred to the child at a very early age. Plainly stated by all medical experts around that function with the brain is that there is simply no known cause yet. As stated earlier, the only really known “cause” of developmental apraxia is a malfunction that occurs in the brain that inhibits the appropriate connections between the brain and motor functions which allow for this unfortunate motor disorder to occur. At this rate, with no cause of childhood apraxia of speech and only theories, there is no cure to the motor disorder that creates an intense amount of pain for families.
