Online speech and development support for families in Canada

Most are Pakistani parents in the GTA or Calgary, worried about a toddler who is late to talk or a school-age child whose behaviour has started appearing in the teacher’s notes. Some are waiting on a provincial list and want to start now. Others have had a school-board assessment and want it explained in plain Urdu, because the report was written in an English nobody actually talks in.

We also work with families who take long trips back to Pakistan and do not want progress to stop for two months every winter; being based in Multan, we keep going straight through the visit. Families often reach Canada by way of the Gulf, and a move need not interrupt anything — the support described for families in the UAE and Qatar is the same support on a different clock, as is our page for Urdu-speaking families in India.

No. Speaking Urdu at home does not cause a speech delay, and dropping it will not fix one. The major speech and paediatric bodies, including ASHA and the Canadian Paediatric Society, are consistent on this: growing up with two languages does not delay language. Keep the language you are warmest and most natural in.

What does change is how a bilingual child is counted. If your child says doodh and also says milk, that is two words, not one, and a fair vocabulary count adds both languages together. Judged on English alone, a typical Urdu-speaking three-year-old can look delayed. That is a common reason a newcomer family is told to worry when nothing is wrong — and occasionally the reason a genuine delay gets waved away as “it is just the two languages”.

What we listen for is whether your child is communicating at all — pointing, gesturing, taking turns, following a simple instruction in either language. That matters far more than which language the words arrive in.

Start four things at once: refer your child to your province’s preschool speech and language service yourself, ask for a hearing test, begin ten to fifteen minutes of daily home practice, and keep written notes of what your child does. Waiting lists move slowly. None of these four steps has to wait for them.

The route differs by province. Ontario’s preschool speech and language program accepts a referral from the parent, with no doctor’s note required, and runs up to school entry. British Columbia usually points families of under-fives to their regional health authority or public health unit. Alberta families may be directed both to health-service rehabilitation and to a separate disability support stream. Names, age limits and waits differ a great deal, so confirm the route where you live.

We plan around the clock rather than wishing it away. Canada runs roughly nine to twelve hours behind Pakistan depending on the province, so the workable windows are your early morning before school and work, or your evening once the children are settled — both ordinary working hours for us in Multan. Our timings and the ways to reach us are on the contact page.

A session is a plain video call on a phone or laptop, in Urdu, English or a mix, and you need no special equipment. We would far rather watch your child play through the camera and coach you as it happens than work from a description given afterwards.

The first call is mostly you talking. We ask what your child does, not only what they do not do: how they ask for something, whether they bring you things to show you, whether they look up at their name, what happens when they are frustrated. We ask about hearing, ear infections and sleep, and which language each adult speaks to the child.

Then we pick two or three targets and show you how to work on them live, with your child in the room, rather than as a handout. The small things shift first: more attempts, more turn-taking, more pointing and gesture, before any new words arrive. If we see something we cannot properly assess over video — a hearing concern, a feeding risk, a possible loss of skills — we say so and send you to a clinician in Canada.

Some things should not sit quietly on a waiting list. Contact your family doctor, your public health unit or your child’s school directly if any of these apply:

• Your child had words or gestures and has lost them.
• No babbling by around 12 months, no single words by around 18 months, or no two-word phrases by around two years.
• Your child does not respond to their name or to loud sounds, or has had repeated ear infections.
• Choking, coughing or gagging on food or drink.
• You are frightened, and nobody has taken the worry seriously yet.

That last one counts. A parent who keeps raising the same worry is usually right that something is worth checking, and asking for a hearing test and a developmental review is a reasonable request, not a fuss. We can help you word it — but the assessment belongs with a clinician in Canada.