How parents can help with speech therapy

A Framework for Working with Late Talking Toddlers This week's show outlines the framework for working with late talking toddlers. As speech-language pathologists and parents, when a toddler is not talking yet, we rush in to try to help them learn to … [Read More

How parents can help with speech therapy

Did you know that you can do speech therapy at home?

Speak to a Professional

If you suspect that your child has a speech or language delay, the first thing you should do is to contact a speech-language pathologist SLP in your area. The best way to find an SLP is to contact your local public schools. The public schools serve children with speech and language delays as young as three years of age and their services are absolutely free.

Unfortunately, the evaluation process can take a few months and some children may not qualify at all. Even when a child is enrolled in speech therapy, home practice can increase the effectiveness of that therapy.

For these reasons, parents are often interested in ways they can do speech therapy at home.

How parents can help with speech therapy

The following contains ideas of how you can help your child be understood better as well as improve their use of language to communicate with others in a more effective way. In order to know how you can do speech therapy at home, it is important to understand how a speech-language pathologist would work with your child.

First, the SLP will do an assessment of your child, which will include looking at all areas of speech and language development to see which areas your child is delayed in. This means, what typically developing children are able to do at that age.

This will give you an idea of what skills your child may need extra teaching in and give you a place to start. Next, the SLP will choose a few of these problem areas to work on at a time. Many times, children with speech and language difficulties have problems with several areas.

It is important when you begin therapy to select a reasonable number of goals to address at first.

Speech Therapy At Home

The SLP will typically choose these based on which problems are affecting communication the most, or which skills are typically developed the earliest. For example, if your child has a lot to say but no one can understand him because of sound errors, you could pick a few speech sounds to work on.

All SLPs must take part in continuing education opportunities that will advise them of what the research is saying about various therapy techniques. Each child is different and will respond to different therapy methods.

This is the part where I tell you that it is very important to be working with a speech-language pathologist so they can choose the therapy approach that will work best for your child.

But there are some basic approaches that you can try during speech therapy at home to help your child. The idea is simple: You can do this! You just need to get into the mindset of breaking skills down into smaller pieces.

Check out some of our other articles or head over to the weekly speech and language tips and find some ideas of how you can work on various skills at home.I had no idea that you could do a form of speech therapy at home.

Just as you point out, setting goals in specific areas will help the kids much more than trying to improve everything at once. what is RTI, response to intervention, speech therapy, autism.

Hi Zarah, I would recommend when you write your contract you are very specific about what you will be providing and what you expect of the parents.

How parents can help with speech therapy

This morning I'm saying something I've waited a long time to hear MY NEW ARTIC THERAPY MANUAL FOR TODDLERS IS READY! It's called FUNctional Phonology: A Language-Based Approach for Treating Speech Intelligibility Problems in Very Young .

Speech Therapy At Home - Speech And Language Kids

Thank you for posting this. My son Joshua was diagnosed with low oral muscle tone, and while we do exercises with him, such as blowing, sucking on straws, and chewing Skittles, I was confused as to why these won’t really help with his speech.

Childrens Speech Therapy Orlando Building Communication. Boosting Confidence. Transforming Lives. Speech and language shape your child’s understanding of . Jun 24,  · Speech therapy is an intervention service that focuses on improving a child's speech and abilities to understand and express language, including nonverbal () Hi Lindsey, I understand that private therapy is expensive, and I believe that parents, with a little direction, do indeed have what it takes to help their children.


I can’t remember a time when I wanted to be something other than a speech-language pathologist when I grew up. Both of my parents have been deaf since infancy, so I grew up hearing stories about how wonderful their speech language pathologists were.

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