This past week, I actually had a lot of feedback about this little blog of ours. So, to all of you reading, thank you! Make sure to leave comments below to start further conversation.
In one of the bits of feedback, a friend from high school and college shared a story with me about her experience with speech therapy as a child and how she was made to feel very vulnerable, embarrassed, and unsuccessful with her articulation, or speech sound, therapy. She asked if I could share strategies on how to make therapy less traumatic for children and make them motivated for working on their sounds.
I loved this idea and thought for a bit about how I wanted to address this issue. I think the three key elements to getting your child a) excited for speech therapy and b) excited to work on sounds with you would be:
1. Rapport
2. Target selection
3. Cueing strategies
In order to avoid an extremely long post, I will be breaking this topic into 3 separate posts. So, this week only, you will be getting a blog post Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday! (*Cue the trumpets*).
These posts will serve as a guide to parents to assure that their child’s therapist is a good fit for them and that they are utilizing a good level of “chilled-out-ness” while also working on targets at home.
Rapport
Rapport is the interpersonal relationship you have with someone. You can have good or bad rapport with someone. Think about your relationship with a teacher, a boss, a friend. How did that relationship happen? Time and energy spent toward the relationships with positive interactions built a good rapport. Little to no time spent together with demands placed right away, negative interactions, or just plain old sharp words at the wrong time may have built a negative rapport.
Well, this needs to be taken into consideration with a speech therapist too. Typically, I tell parents to give a new child and myself about 3 weeks to build a rapport. Sometimes, this takes longer. Sometimes, it takes a lot more positive energy and calmness for a child to trust that I will not be demanding more than they can handle. I liken the process to dating: it takes quite a few dates to determine if you truly like a person or not and if you are willing to open up to them. Remember: children are people too. They have complex feelings just like us. They just don’t have the language to express all of those feelings quite yet.
Rapport also needs to be considered when you want to work on speech sounds at home. Although you are the one person your child trusts most in the world, when you are working on speech homework, do you turn into mean-mommy/daddy? Is your child just refusing to practice? Ask yourself, is this fun in any way? How can I incorporate these strategies into a game, a fun craft or activity, or into an everyday-routine?
Some strategies I suggest include:
- Work on speech sounds in the car on the way to/from school. Work on them as soon as you get in the car and don’t worry about them when you get out. I tell parents, if you are working on these sounds 5-10 minutes/day, that’s an extra half hour to hour per week. Better than nothing
- Play board games and have your child practice 3 words before/after taking a turn.
- Read books together and emphasize words with their target sound; have a special, silly hand gesture that tells them to repeat a certain word after you. For example, if you are working on the /s/ sound, you can read, “Brown bear, brown bear, what do you see?” and touch your nose dramatically to tell your child to repeat “see”.
- Make a big poster board list of things around your house with their sound. It can become a scavenger hunt and as they find things, you can add them to the list. Sometimes, kids are more willing to practice something that they have created.
I think the most important thing about building rapport is remembering the quote at the top of this blog post. My friend who suggested this topic even said she does not remember much about the therapy, she just remembers how lousy she felt that she could not get the sounds right. We do not want these kiddos growing up thinking, “God, I hated Miss Kathleen. She was such a work horse!” Don’t get me wrong, I push my kids to work, but I always try to make it fun. You should too!
What do you do to personally motivate your child to clean their room, do their homework, or practice an instrument? Do you have some kind of reward system that you could also implement for speech therapy practice? In my home, I my 3 year old earns 2 quarters if she cleans her toys right away when we tell her to do so. If she is having a hard time following the directive to clean her toys, we set a timer for how long we think it would take to pick up her toys (example: 2 minutes). If she cleans them up before the timer goes off, she earns 1 quarter. Lastly, If she has a hard time and still doesn't clean her toys within the time frame, she gains no quarters and she still has to clean up her toys, usually with hand-over-hand assistance from us. Within a month, she typically earns enough to buy herself a small toy and it is super motivating and pride-invoking for her. Is there some way that you can think to positively reinforce and internalize your child's speech practice? Leave a comment below and let us know.
Tomorrow, we will be discussing different ways that SLPs select target sounds and words in articulation therapy. If you have any comments or questions that you would like to speak directly with us about, our contact info is in our bio.
Until next time!
Kathleen
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