5 Ways to Help You
Welcome to Just Another Speech Mom! I’m glad you’re here. This is designed to be a safe place that exists to help empower parents to improve their child’s speech and language skills. As a pediatric speech language pathologist, I have worked with so many kids a variety of ages who have been diagnosed with a speech or language delay. As a mom of littles, I naturally look for ways to encourage my kids’ speech and language skills at home and want to share what I’m doing with you!
My passion is to help kids improve their communication abilities and to work with families to get everybody on the same page. If you have a child with a diagnosis of speech or language delay, my goal is for this to be a place for you to connect with others, and gain some good resources and helpful tips along the way!
1. Help empower parents with the knowledge and techniques needed to improve your child’s overall communication.
Let me just say – if your child has a delay, you are probably working with a speech language pathologist. Great! I’m sure they are giving you lots of helpful tips and ideas to work on at home, just like I give to my clients’ parents. It is obviously wonderful to have your child in speech therapy, but let’s be clear: we as speech pathologists spend maybe 1 hour max. with your child during a week. That leaves 167 hours/week where your child is at school, sports/activities, or at home. If the only time they are working on their strategies is 1 hour/week in speech therapy, they are not likely to make progress as quickly!
2. Provide easy to follow guidelines and activities to make working on speech and language fun!
I know from experience – if your child has fun in speech, they will be excited to go to speech! Similarly, incorporating fun activities at home to help improve your child’s speech and language skills can help them make progress without necessarily knowing they are “working.”
3. Recommend fun strategies and activities that I have tried and had success with.
My goal is to share activities that I have had success with in therapy with my patients, as well as sharing what I’m doing with my littles at home to help them develop good speech and language skills.
4. Help you as parents instill confidence in your children.
This is a big one! This can look so different depending on where your child is, how old they are, personality type, etc. I’ve always seen it as part of my job to instill confidence in the kids that I get to work with. This means also supporting you as the parent as you are working them and building their confidence. We are in this together!
5. Support you with consistent tips and resources to help you on your journey.
As a mom of littles, the phrase it takes a village has become so much more real. But the reality is that if your child has a speech or language delay, it takes an even bigger village. My hope is that I get to be one of those people that can support you or your child in both making progress and having fun doing it, even if in such a small way.
You can do this, but you were not made to do it alone! As parents, moms, therapists, etc., we all need support and there is no shame in seeking it for you or your child. If this blog serves as nothing but a source of encouragement for you as a parent, then it will have served it’s purpose.
Happy communicating!
Source:
O’Toole, C., Lyons, R., & Houghton, C. (2021). A qualitative evidence synthesis of parental experiences and perceptions of parent-child interaction therapy for preschool children with communication difficulties. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research. https://doi.org/10.1044/2021 jslhr-20-00732
