Mason Motz’s parents had just about given up on hopes of being able to have ordinary conversations with their six-year-old son.
The Texas boy had been diagnosed with Sotos Syndrome, a genetic disorder that results in learning disabilities, and had also suffered a brain aneurysm at 10 days old.
But this still didn’t completely explain why their school-aged son could barely speak.
“Nothing was really working,” his mum Meredith told Inside Edition. “He had probably a five-word vocabulary, and we were looking at alternative means of communication.”
Then, at an ordinary dentist check-up in April 2017 (which they’d had difficulty getting Mason to settle down for at that point) their world completely changed. Within hours of leaving the office, their son was speaking complete sentences.
As Mason’s dad and mum learned that day, Mason had been suffering from tongue tie since birth – a condition where the tongue does not separate properly from the bottom of the mouth in-utero and results in restricted tongue movement.
It was a condition that doctors and speech specialists the family had seen since Mason was born had failed to notice.
But dentist Dr Amy Ludeman-Lazar spotted the tongue tie, and immediately asked Mason’s parents if she could perform the 10-second procedure to split the boy’s tongue from his mouth using a laser.
After a quick Google search, they agreed, and were shocked by the results.
“We took him home that evening, and then he started talking about, ‘I’m hungry, I’m thirsty. Can we watch a movie?’,” Meredith said.
“Like, blowing our minds with these full sentences for the first time, within seven or eight hours of coming home.”
Why Mason’s vocabulary – formerly that of a one-year-old – had more than doubled in less than a day, the little boy still had a lot of catching up to do.
Top Comments
That’s a pretty simple thing to have been overlooked before by so many prefessionals, I would have thought a speech therapist would check for something like that. Glad they finally have it sorted.
The majority of the professionals we've seen with my delayed daughter don't believe tongue ties impact everything so the speechie probably knew it was there but never bothered mentioning it.