When it comes to speech therapy for toddlers and early intervention speech and language, parents and caregivers are very important to a child's success. This episode is a follow-up to the previous two episodes: Strategies for Parent Involvement and Compassion vs. Empathy.
In this episode, we are talking about educating and empowering parents when it comes to their participation in speech therapy sessions. It's important for us, the clinicians, to remember that parents must know the why behind what we are doing so they can begin to brainstorm ideas and implement strategies outside of speech therapy sessions with toddlers.
Educating and empowering parents is all about open conversations and building relationships. It's important to encourage parent input and offer up simple, concrete suggestions of techniques and strategies they can implement into their daily routine without causing huge amounts of overwhelm.
Asking parents open ended questions opens the floor for their input. It invites them into the moment and provides an opportunity for you to empower them and give them the tools they can use when you’re not there to help them encourage communication in their child.
It also allows an opportunity for you to talk about the different goals their child has, what techniques you’re using, and how these work to encourage communication/language development.
Always remember, the main goal of speech therapy with this population is to encourage their functional communication skills. By doing this, we improve their vocabulary, teach them social skills, encourage play development, and build the foundation for later language success.
In this episode, you'll also find tips for encouraging parents and caregivers that can be difficult to motivate in sessions, and an easy strategy to increase parent-therapist communication when seeing children in the daycare and preschool setting!
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