According to the health insurance company Barmer, more and more children in Baden-Württemberg are suffering from speech disorders. The numbers have been rising steadily for years. Why is that?
According to a study by Barmer, the frequency of speech disorders among children in Baden-Württemberg is increasing significantly. According to the health insurance company, six- to twelve-year-old boys and girls find it difficult to form words and sentences and to understand what they read and hear. They lack words, cannot formulate sentences correctly and do not enjoy conversation much.
Examples are sentences like “The house is colorful” or that children say Eddy instead of Teddy. Omitting or swapping sounds is just as much a part of this as incorrect sentence structure, vocabulary that is not age-appropriate, stuttering, lisping or even falling silent.
Boys more often affected by speech disorders
Barmer refers to extrapolated data from the health insurance company’s own children’s atlas. According to the study, two years ago around 12.5 percent of the children examined aged up to 15 years had similar medically documented language deficits. This corresponds to around 203,600 children. Boys are affected significantly more often (almost 15 percent) than girls (10 percent). The rapid increase over the past ten years is striking: since 2012, the rate of affected boys has increased by 24.4 percent and that of girls by 21 percent.
According to Barmer, parents are responsible
The health insurance company sees the responsibility primarily with the parents. “They play a crucial role in the language development of their children,” says Winfried Plötze, the Barmer regional manager in Baden-Württemberg. Fathers and mothers must be aware that they are language role models. They must actively support and talk a lot with their children. When speaking, it is also important to maintain eye contact with the children and to adapt the speaking speed and language level to the age of the little ones, said Plötze.
Smartphones can be the cause – but can also help
Media consumption, the use of mobile phones or computer games are also considered by scientists to be reasons for stalled language development in children. Boys and girls should also practice regularly at home to improve their pronunciation. Speech therapy apps could help children to carry out speech therapy exercises on a tablet, smartphone or computer in a fun way.
For the study, Barmer health insurance evaluated and standardized the data of its insured persons and extrapolated them based on the information from the Federal Statistical Office on the population in the federal states by gender and one-year age groups in the respective year. At the beginning of July 2022, Barmer in Baden-Württemberg reported that more than 88,100 children in the relevant age group were insured.
Broadcast on Wed., 28.8.2024 6:00 a.m., SWR4 BW in the morning, SWR4 Baden-Württemberg
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