What Is Childhood Apraxia of Speech?

Childhood apraxia of speech is a condition in which children have trouble planning and coordinating their jaws, lips and tongues to produce reliable speech. Speech is thus a fine-motor skill. The condition is similar to an adult’s loss of speech after a stroke, although with children, their speech hasn’t fully developed as it has with an adult. This condition is a neurodevelopmental disorder, meaning that it affected a child during typical development. Apraxia of speech refers to the total or near-total lack of age-appropriate language.

This condition is common in children with:

• Mitochondrial dysfunction
• Sensory Processing Disorder
• Auditory processing disorder

In This Book

Tori’s book is a collection of blog posts that she wrote on her journey of getting her son Jake diagnosed with childhood apraxia of speech at the age of two and of the lengths she went to have him become a reliable speaker by the age of five. In our experience, her efforts went above and beyond (with great effect!) what is typically prescribed to most mothers of such children in that she looked at the disorder as a whole-body condition, much as Martha Herbert PhD MD describes autism as a whole-body condition.

Tori’s description of her son is almost all too common: As a baby, Jake had ear infections, eczema, gut issues, occasional asthma and an egg allergy. Not wanting him to be on medications for these conditions for the rest of his life, Tori took Jake when he was two years old to a naturopathic doctor whose first order of business was to put Jake on an elimination diet for three months, which Tori describes as “like pressing a reset button on Jake’s system”. The diet helped with many of his other symptoms, but he was still without speech, so Jake began speech therapy with ultimately five different speech and language pathologists (SLP). Tori noted that the Kaufman Speech Praxis Workout Book, Kaufman flash cards, hand cues and the PROMPT method were helpful.

“Aha” Moments

One of Tori’s “aha” moments came when she realized that Jake’s speech improved after eating chocolate, which proved to her the gut-brain connection. Another was her discovery of Claudia Morris’ peer-reviewed medical study from 2009 that showed that apraxia of speech can be due to nutritional deficiencies in vitamin E, omega-3 fatty acids and carnitine as well as due to antibodies produced in the body after consumption of gluten. She began working with an integrative MD who advised to remove both gluten and dairy from Jake’s diet and address his specific nutritional deficiencies with supplements, including those for a methylation mutation known as MTHFR. Tori noted that “Jake said his first sentence within the first week of his diet and supplement plan.”

Yet another “aha” moment came when Tori noticed that Jake’s speech improved after a Pulmicort treatment for his asthma, and she realized that both his body and brain were inflamed. Yet again, she realized that the body and brain are connected. She incorporated a low-sugar diet as well as acupuncture to help address the inflammation in Jake’s body and brain.

In Conclusion

When you read this book, you’ll cheer for Tori and Jake as they progress to Jake’s diagnosis reversal at the age of five. While Tori didn’t know this would happen, she followed her mother’s intuition and kept exploring to discover that a root-cause, functional-medicine, whole-body approach was necessary to help her son heal from all of his diagnoses, except for his allergy to fish. While every child is different, integrative and functional-medicine practitioners such as those listed in our practitioner directory can help you remove the blocks to your child’s healing.

About Tori Starling

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