Little elf and I have been dancing to the new Sharon Van Etten. Suddenly, she stops and says “I don’t like my hair.”
This isn’t unusual. She seriously resents how her hair stubbornly refuses to grow as fast as her longer haired friends. It doesn’t help that she’s obsessed with Tangled and that her idea of long hair is proportionally unrealistic. Yesterday, I caught her quietly cutting chunks off it – luckily she’d only managed a couple – on the grounds that it would “help it grow faster.”
Then she said “I don’t like the front of it.”
Then “I want it down my back and it isn’t.”
Then it took a turn for the worse.
“I don’t like to look at myself in the mirror…
“I don’t want anyone ever to recognise me… “
By now, she was curled up in my lap and getting teary. I tell her that she’s beautiful and clever and that hair grows slowly and that she has to be patient – and how much more hair she has than me in any case. But then we reach the heart of it.
“I don’t like my voice – everyone think’s its funny…
“All the grown-ups think my voice is funny. Everyone else’s voices aren’t funny but mine is.”
Ah. Little elf has a speech impediment, or rather, her speech is developing more slowly than it should do. It’s reached the point where her school have referred her to a speech therapist who’s given us some flash cards to work with and assured us that it’ll probably sort itself out. Basically, there are sounds that should be at the back of her throat that she enunciates from the front and vice versa. I had a similar problem which led to years of torture in elocution classes.
There are days when she speaks quite well and other days when we can hardly understand a word she says which for a bright, chatty, talkative little four year old girl must be a nightmare. And she does talk – her teachers tell us that she’s clever and sociable – but that she’s also wilful, mischievous and inclined to only do the things that she wants to do. Is there a correlation of some kind?
She talks some more and nestles into my arms then suddenly jumps up and asks to watch Whatnots. It’s like a switch has flipped.
I don’t think there’s a self-image problem so much as a self-esteem problem brewing and its all to do with her talking. But later on, she and dudelet put on a bit of a performance and little elf tells us three long and incomprehensibly complex stories about “Fahder Cwissmass” and his body parts (I don’t think you want to know). We all applaud enthusiastically. Thankfully, her dudelet (who’s eight) understands that of the things he chooses to tease her about, her speech is off limits.
There isn’t an easy answer to this one – her nursery teachers work hard with her and are very supportive and we – the three of us – do what we can to provide the most nurturing environment we can manage. I just hope it sorts itself out before more structured intervention becomes necessary.
February 11th, 2012 at 9:26 pm
Ah, that was hard to read.
It must be hard to be school age and have a speech impediment. It’s also hard when you’re a little girl and already experiencing pressure to look a certain way and have your hair a certain way.
But it sounds as though your little girl has the most important thing to keep her afloat that she could possibly have, and that is a loving and supportive family. She’ll find her way with you lot on side.
February 11th, 2012 at 9:47 pm
Thank you – It’s not serious – but I do worry that it might not improve fast enough for her to avoid the kind of issues I ran into.
February 12th, 2012 at 9:56 am
It’s so hard to build their self-esteem when they’re small. Once they’ve decided that something about them is wrong, there seems to be nothing you can do or say to change their minds.
I can’t give you any advice. We had similar issues with the girl (she developed a stammer at roughly the same age, maybe a bit younger) and I don’t think anything we did made any difference, it resolved itself in the end. I do however, remember speech therapists telling me that she’d grow out of it and being enormously irritated with them!
February 13th, 2012 at 9:51 am
Thanks! The speech therapist means well but clearly has too high a case load and too few resources to give each child the attention they need…
February 12th, 2012 at 6:16 pm
Oh, my heart aches for Little Elf. One of the most enduring, hard to recover from, memories from my childhood was going to the speech therapist. I hated it, but more than being singled out that I had to leave the regular classroom to go to Speech lessons, was the teasing. I do think that it helped me to develop a more extensive vocabulary, as I would do anything to not say a word with an “R” in it. I made mention of this once, when I was in my 40′s. Both my mother & my sister said that they had no recollection of my having an obvious impediment. Perhaps it was just me, but I can’t help but wonder if this isn’t true for most kids: that being singled out is magnified for them. I would never think it was “out of proportion” though. If it is significant to the child, it is significant to be dealt with by the family. How wonderful that Dudelet knows that teasing her about her speech is off limits.
February 13th, 2012 at 9:55 am
You too? I wonder if anyone’s ever researched whether people who write have a higher proportion of speech difficulties when young? I love the idea (taking a little licence as a fellow sufferer) of the inventively tortuous ways you must have come up with to avoid ‘R’s!
February 13th, 2012 at 12:41 pm
The only two that come to mind are auto for car (how I wished my dad drove Pontiacs or Buicks rather than Chryslers!) and violet for purple. There were many others, though.
February 13th, 2012 at 2:20 am
Firstly an apology unrelated to the post. I realise you are not a spammer now that I am not tired and in pain. I hope you weren’t offended too much, I just didn’t get at the time what you were saying. Please forgive me.
Little Elf sounds wonderful. I agree it must be hard for her but I also think it is brilliant that she can verbalise ‘how she is feeling’ which makes me think to myself that as she gets older she won’t have too many self esteem problems. Just my penniworth. My mother was a headteacher
I used to work in schools, sometimes when children are described as wilful etc it just means that they have an intelligent child who stretches their ‘ideal’ classroom environment. It makes me so cross when words like wilful are used to label someone so young, I hate labels they can shape a childs future. In response to that terminology I would ask for a description of the type of activity that was happening in the classroom when the ‘wilfullness’ occured and if there was any pattern to it. Putting the emphasis squarely back on their classroom management skills and how they could improve on them.
Mine are 21 and 19 now, the cuddles when they are four are those to cherish. Oh and both of mine at times can be wilful, but then so can I as can their father. I like a bit of wilful, it shows spirit.
February 13th, 2012 at 9:58 am
No worries – there was a reason for the confusion! Her nursery teachers actually explained it too us in terms of her actually being very intellectually smart (which left us feeling very guilty – we’ve never thought of her as being the smart one for a wide range of reasons, most of which probably have to do with typical socially constructed gender norms. Aargh! That’s a whole other post…) and they’ve managed it very well. The documentation of her classroom behaviour is quite terrifyingly thorough and gave us an insight into a whole other person than the one we’ve been experiencing at home.
February 13th, 2012 at 8:50 am
Oh, man. It’s hard to read that stuff, and I don’t look forward to the time when my kids become self-conscious. At 2.5, they’re starting to compare one to the other. One is bigger, one has longer hair, etc. It’s only a matter of time, I fear. It seems like speech problems do work themselves out, right? You don’t hear too many adults with them. I mean, except for upper-crust Brits, of course.
February 13th, 2012 at 9:59 am
Upper crust Brits, of course, don’t have speech impediments – they just have difficulty talking around the canteen’s worth of silver cutlery in their gobs.
February 14th, 2012 at 6:31 am
I’ll ignore the helpful advice here, because so many have given it, and I don’t have any…she’s already getting help, you’ve been through it and can commiserate with her and maybe try to make light somehow…but your post did remind me a bit of one of my favorite picture books when my daughter was that age, Chrysanthemum, in which the titular character was teased every day for her name, and came home broken and discouraged, and her parents gave her love and Parcheesi and chocolate cake, until she came through it. They didn’t help her, actually, it was a teacher, but I just loved how much they SUPPORTED her.
And gah, the self esteem thing is HARD. I hate that so much of their self worth is based on looks. I HATE it. It’s different than the speech, and yet, the same. They want to be perfect and funny and beautiful and like a Disney princess, rather than like a real life person. They get to the point where they can’t even see the beauty looking back at them in the mirror. It’s horrid, and SO hard on girls. My daughter has been through hell and (thankfully) back on this one.