Late-talking toddlers grow out of behavioral problems

By Deborah Kotz, Globe Staff

Since I’m often reporting on worrisome health findings, here’s a little comforting news for parents who have kids with speech delays. Those who aren’t uttering words by age 2 have no increased risk of behavioral or emotional problems when they reach elementary school. In fact, they usually outgrow any language delay on their own, according to a study published online yesterday in the journal Pediatrics.

That would have been reassuring for me to hear when my own 2-year-old son Joshua was struggling with speech delays more than a decade ago. Like the toddlers in the study, Joshua had some behavior issues: frequent screeching tantrums and physical outbursts of kicking his feet and banging his fists when he couldn’t make himself understood.

But those tantrums largely vanished once my son developed a string of words like cheese, bebe (for his blanket), and cup. Weekly therapy provided by our county helped him along, and he must have also been encouraged by his parents’ cheering whenever he used a newly acquired word.

In the study, Australian researchers followed a group of 1,600 toddlers until they reached age 17, assessing their language skills, as well as behavioral and emotional problems like attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. They found that while the 10 percent of 2-year-olds with speech delays were more likely to act out and be temperamental, those behavioral differences disappeared by age 5.

“Expressive vocabulary delay at age 2 years is not in itself a risk factor for later behavioral and emotional disturbances in childhood and adolescence,” wrote the study authors.

Previous research indicated that an estimated 70 to 80 percent of 2-year-olds with language delays catch up with their peers by age 4 to 5. What this probably means, say the researchers, is that those emotional problems that accompany speech delays probably result from a failure to communicate rather than longer term psychological problems.