What are Tongue Ties & Lip Ties?

Speech

A tongue restriction affects speech differently in each child. We work with a team of local experts to make sure your child’s speech difficulties can be related to the presence of a tongue or lip tie. Some children with a “to-the-tip” tie can produce speech sounds clearly (but may struggle with increased effort when speaking). Other children, with a less visible or more posterior tie, may have a global speech delay or difficulty producing the sounds such as L, R, T, D, N, TH, SH, and Z.
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We have seen that many tongue-tied children begin saying new words, even just hours or days after the release! Dr. Kennedy’s favorite story is the four-year-old child who proudly returned to the office after being able to say “Thor” for the first time- his favorite superhero from the Marvel series of movies. There is no guarantee that every child will have immediate results, but we often see this type of drastic improvement.

Sleep

Dr. Kennedy will be the first to say he was skeptical of the claims that releasing tongue ties could improve a child’s sleep. But the results speak for themselves. The tongue is meant to rest passively in the palate (top of the mouth) with the lips closed during sleep. This promotes healthy nasal breathing and greatly reduces the risk of abnormal facial growth patterns and a number of other issues later in life. When the tongue is held down in the floor of the mouth from a tongue-tie, a child compensates his or her breathing pattern towards open mouth or noisy breathing, which can disrupt healthy sleep. A tongue-tied child will often grind his or her teeth at night, snore, or experience other sleep-disordered breathing problems.  Sleep-disordered breathing can cause frequent waking, restlessness, bed-wetting, failure to feel refreshed upon waking and accompanying difficulty focusing (which is sometimes misdiagnosed as ADD or ADHD).

Because multiple factors contribute to the problem, such as large tonsils and adenoids, a narrow palate and tongue-tie, often a child will be seen by multiple specialists to try to remedy the problem. In addition, children with tongue-ties often have a history of multiple ear infections and needing ear tubes. They may have had tonsils and adenoids removed. All of these can be complicated by the mouth-breathing that frequently occurs in tongue-tied individuals, due to the low resting posture of the tongue. We have found that when there is a tongue-tie, sleep can improve dramatically after a simple in-office procedure.

Feeding

Children that are tongue-tied often have eating issues when transitioning to solid foods. They may choke, gag, or have difficulty swallowing certain textures. These children can get labeled as “picky-eaters” when in reality they simply refuse a pattern of foods that are difficult for them to easily swallow.
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We work with a team of local feeding experts to help make sure your child’s feeding problems are related to a tongue or lip tie. Following the simple procedure, we strongly recommend continuing the relationship with your feeding therapist for the best results.