Here's our first Speech and Language Therapy blog! We're starting off by thinking about some topics which often come up as common misconceptions about Speech and Language Therapy.
1. Accents: SLTs are not eloqutionists, we love and value all the accents that we hear and relish the challenge of modelling and supporting family accents for the children that we work with.
2. We just need more therapy: in some cases time in between sessions is vital for a child to consolidate the skills they have learnt rather than being overwhelmed by new skills.
3. Speech and language therapy is just about talking: here are some other things we support: feeding safety and strategies, attention, play, non-verbal communication, social skills, conversation, friendships, and fluency.
4. Therapy fixes everything: the children who make the biggest progress are the children who practise the therapy in between the sessions. children learn best from those with whom they have an attachment. Therefore, a little every day at home goes a long way.
5. One size fits all: all children are unique and our assessments and interventions need to be tailored to meet the needs of the child and the family at the time. We love the challenge of finding new ways to be flexible and creative.
6. Signing or visual communication systems will stop my child talking: providing a way for a child to communicate before they are able to successfully talk reduces frustration and improve quality of life.
An alternative increases motivation to communicate because communication gets you things and if a child is going to be verbal then they will choose verbal communication when it is the quickest and most efficient way for them.
7. Not ready for input: we often hear that a child is not ready for therapy. At TCT our SLTs believe that there is always something that a child can be learning to support their communication development. We as therapists will adapt our advice and sessions to enable the children to access the input.
There will be more Speech and Language Therapy blogs to come and we hope you will find out some useful information and how we can help your child and family. Full details of our Speech & Language Therapy service are available here.