Excessive drooling and oral motor skill problems?

[njacoby499]

Hello everyone. We recently had to begin speech therapy for our two year old son with a LOBPI. We have seen excessive amounts of drooling, very decreased tongue control, and other oral motor skill problems. I am wondering if anyone has any information on oral motor skill problems and BPI. If you have any resources or if you are dealing with these problems please feel free to contact me on the General Message Board or by email. Big hugs to all our BPI children and families.

Natalie
njacoby499@yahoo.com

[admin]

Has your child had this problem his whole life or has it recently developed or worsened?

[Connie&Andrew]

Our son also had excessive drooling as an infant and toddler. He has a LOBPI. He also talked kind of late. He wasn't talking very well at all at 2 1/2 I remember. The pediatrician said to give it until he was three and then we would pursue therapy if needed. I used to wonder if it had any connection with the birth injury. He is now going to turn 5 in January. His drooling stopped kind of suddenly, but I don't remember how old he was (probably right about 3). It seemed when the drooling stopped, the speaking really started picking up. I think that there was something that developmentally was a little slow and when he got better control of all those muscles in his mouth, then everything clicked into place. He now has pretty normal speech for a 4 year old. Some of his sounds are still not perfect, but he is understandable and we're really not worried about him anymore. We never did do any type of speech therapy, it just kind of resolved on its own.

I don't really have any help for your problem. I just thought I would share our experience.

Good luck with your little one. I know how hard it is dealing with all of the ordinary problems of childhood compounded with the birth injury, but in our experience it does get a little easier with time.

Connie

[njacoby499]

I appreciate each of you for your reply to my topic. He has drooled constantly and they weren't concerned with it until he turned 2. He was evaluated and they have began speech therapy. He drools so much that he must wear bibs all day and they are usually soaked after an hour or two of wear. He cannot stick his tongue out, but he talks well. His vocabulary is very large for his age I would say around close to 300 words. You can tell that he will have difficulty b/c the way he has trouble with saying things like "th" and "s". I also wonder if this is linked to Erb's Palsy. Thanks so much.