Socio-demographic and emotional-communicative characteristics of parents and their children with speech development disorders

Abstract

In pursuit of the objective of identifying the part played by the social, demographic, and environmental factors in the disorders of speech development of preschool children, this brief report submits the analysis of the data for 32 non-speaking children aged between 2.5 and 5.5. In 77% of cases, non-speaking children were found to be somatically healthy with the Apgar score of 8/9. Most of the parents reported experiencing communication difficulties, describing themselves as either “selectively sociable” or “unsociable”. Reserved-anxious style of emotional response was found to be predominant among these children’s mothers, whereas the reserved-placid style predominated among the fathers. In this sample, 90.6% of children have been diagnosed as suffering from disorders of psychological development and the autism spectrum disorder. We raise the issue of the need for a comprehensive psychological approach towards working with non-speaking children and their parents.