This is sewious (or is it?)

I had a conversation with a friend of mine a while back about a kids TV show called “The Wonder Pets” that airs on Noggin. One of the characters is a duckling named Ming-Ming who had difficulty pronouncing her “r” sounds.  Since then I’ve wondered on and off just how common that sort of issue is.

ChaosGirl has what I at least consider to be a good vocabulary for her age but she has problems pronouncing both her “r” and “th” sounds. I’m not too worried since she’s only 3 1/2 and I figure she’ll grow out of it. If she doesn’t, then we get to start working with her on it. The thing is, I don’t want her to start being self-conscious about how she speaks at this early age.

I am still moderately self-conscious of my voice. It used to be a lot worse. When I was in high school I did competitive speech and drama. At that point I found out that people tended to either love or hate my voice. It has a nasal quality (many people have asked me if I’m from New Jersey over the years) and my normal speaking pitch is lower than it should be which has done some cumulative damage to my vocal chords. I worked with a speech therapist in college for a while to work on raising my speaking pitch which led to the cultivation of my “Receptionist Phone Voice” but never really influenced my everyday speech. I hate how I sound recorded if I’m not using the RPV and even that grates on me sometimes.

I’m not sure when to start being concerned about enunciation of consonant sounds but I’m guessing this sort of thing is pretty common through kindergarten. For the moment, I think I’ll just enjoy teh cuteness of her asking for “yogwet and ganogla” for breakfast.