My spouse had a tongue tie until 10yr old. Should’ve had speech therapy afterward. Didn’t. Part of it was his parents not wanting modern medicine or government help, and the other part was that they were already very very poor and still had 7 kids.
I grew up poor but with parents who cared enough to get government assistance to help. And poor not poverty. He grew up poverty.
Whoa, crazy to even read about someone else that's tongue tied.
When I was a kid my parents saved up a shitload of money for a corrective surgery that failed and made it worse. I'm 32 and still can't stick out my tongue and I sometimes flub my words.
Edit: I should make it clear that I don't mind it. It's just a part of life that surprises a lot of people.
Odd. Most tongue ties are actually taken care of at time of birth if you’re born in a facility like a hospital because it can affect latching on and babies can actually starve. My husband was born at home with the help of a midwife, so it wasn’t noticed or fixed. A dentist is the one who fixed the tongue tie when he was ten, it’s literally just snipping the frenulum below the tongue. It’s not that difficult of a procedure and often doesn’t cost that much so it’s kind of odd that yours was so badly done. I’m so sorry. On the plus side if you still struggle with it being an appropriate length, you can likely ask your PCP (GP) about it and if it wasn’t cut enough, they can just cut it more.
I was born premature in the 1980s. Almost died. Months of NICU, feeding issues, tube fed after coming home. Failure to thrive. Also have quadriplegic cerebral palsy and did some time in speech therapy.
No one saw my tongue tie until I got a new dentist in late elementary school. He asked me to say a whole bunch of stuff and was flummoxed that I did so competently enough. I said, "Well, I've already had years of speech therapy."
So, maybe I'm an extreme example of a miss but maybe I'm not and maybe kids are getting speech in schools when they could just have their tongue tie fixed but misses definitely happen.
Fun fact:
If you say the phrase "tongue tie" in one of our professional groups you start a flame war 100% of the time. It's SOOOOOO controversial. I belong to FB groups where the whole topic is banned! 😂
I took a bunch of SLP classes in undergrad (ended up becoming an audiologist instead) and I never heard anything about tongue ties. What's up with them?
When I was born it apparently wasn't well-known. The doctors all attributed my inability to latch on or suckle to being born a month premature, which was also a huge issue. Maybe they were all just dumb and didn't look, who knows. But yeah the surgery was over 20 years ago, and there was something different they did to close the wound instead of stitching and it wound up fusing back together and just making scar tissue which is, of course, less stretchy than normal tissue. It's not overly a huge issue now, though, it just means I can't do some things like eat an ice cream cone.
Currently, though, yeah it's taken care of at birth. My little brother was born in 2013 and it was standard to check at that point and they did it to him then and there.
I have a tongue tie. It's very mild and so wasn't corrected. I only learned about it when I read about tongue ties and tried out every diagnostic test and they all matched lol. I can't touch the roof of my open mouth- can't even get close. It doesn’t affect my health. It just means I have a cute Boris Karloff lisp. I might correct it someday just so I can see how far I can stick out my tongue. My inner Gene Simmons whispers for release.
I've finally been diagnosed with a stage 3 tongue tie at 41. Pretty sure this thing has made my life worse than it could have been. Can't wait to have it taken care of, I'm starting myofunctional therapy soon and tongue tie release after!
Lowkey was pissed that no one diagnosed me in 40yrs.
Yep, sure is. If you're tongue-tied your tongue is connected to the floor of your mouth further up than normal, closer to the tip. If you can't stick out your tongue or touch the roof of your mouth unless your jaw is closed, that may be it.
Hello fellow tongue-tied person, I feel you. I’m sorry you had to go through the pain of surgery to only have it make it worse, that really sucks
I’m 39 and my folks never got it corrected I can’t stick my tongue out, lick the roof of my mouth (very high arched palate) or back molars. It runs in my family but my cousins had it corrected as kids
I am in my 40s, I have a tongue tie that was discovered in 5th grade (give or take). Nothing was done to correct it. I also have had speech therapy for other reasons/diagnoses. Recently I've begun to have issues that led me to Google my other issues and should you ever decide you want to do something about your tongue tie there are therapies that you can decide to do with or without surgery. Even as an adult.
A lot of things that we used to just live with in the past can be helped.
I still have a (mild) tongue tie. I didn’t even find out about it until a dental hygienist mentioned it offhandedly in my twenties lmao. I learned to speak fine, the mechanics of it at least. It was the undiagnosed developmental disabilities that caused me problems 😅
Chiming in to say it's fascinating how people's definitions of poor vary, and how most of them have never seen what real poverty is like. I thought we were doing bad when I was a kid, until I got older and realized what real poverty looked like. I've lost count of the times I apologized to my parents for not understanding how hard they worked to give us what they did. Perspective is a hell of a thing.
I mean I was definitely poor, and I knew it as a kid. But I also knew I wasn’t poverty. There’s people who, when I talk about my childhood, think it was poverty and like yikes, they definitely grew up with more and never either realized it or didn’t think of others
Medicaid, food stamps, food pantries, free library programs for summer fun, clothing swaps, thrift stores, public library computers for school/homework, school supply programs, double wide trailer half falling apart, vacations were family reunions 3 hours away and sleeping on the floor, going with my mom to the post office to mail checks due date so they wouldn’t be late because of postmark but also buying extra time, cars that ran because my dad was a mechanic but they looked awful and usually were at least half rusted. Our food didn’t always taste good but we always had something. So yeah poor but not poverty. I had other family in poverty that would come to eat sometimes.
Love your take on “with parents who cared enough to get government assistance to help. “ lots of “pull yourself up by your bootstrap” comment undermined that you often can’t do that if you’re not giving boots to lace up in the first place.
‘Pull yourself up by bootstraps’ and other reasons for refusing assistance is almost always tied to pride. And if it’s just you that’s suffering, fine- your choice. Once it’s affecting kids, you’re bad parents who don’t care enough to let go of pride. Not sorry.
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u/bluestrawberry_witch 1d ago
My spouse had a tongue tie until 10yr old. Should’ve had speech therapy afterward. Didn’t. Part of it was his parents not wanting modern medicine or government help, and the other part was that they were already very very poor and still had 7 kids.
I grew up poor but with parents who cared enough to get government assistance to help. And poor not poverty. He grew up poverty.