How You Can Have a Positive Relationship with Your Child's SLP
An important element of therapy is the interaction and dynamic between the speech-language pathologist, the person receiving the speech therapy and their loved ones. If the child needs speech therapy but has a personality clash with the SLP, speech therapy is going to be an uphill battle. If the child and the SLP get along well but the child’s family does not trust the SLP, this lack of trust will hurt the therapeutic relationship and could negatively affect the child’s progress. If the child’s family is hypercritical of an SLP, that will damage the therapeutic relationship. Basically, a therapeutic relationship is like a stool: the therapeutic outcome is like the seat on the stool and the relationship between the child and the SLP is one leg of the stool, the relationship between the SLP and the child’s family is another leg of the stool, the relationships between the child and their family is another leg of the stool, and the relationship between the SLP and any another professionals on the care team is another leg of the stool. If any one of these legs are damaged, it compromises the seat aka, the therapeutic outcomes or progress the child could make.
How can you create and maintain a positive relationship with your child’s SLP?
Communication
As speech-language pathologists, we help our students, clients and patients improve their communication skills and therefore we also value communication from others. If you are going to be late to an appointment or if you will not be at your appointment, please let the SLP know as soon as possible. If you do not like something about the SLP or how the session is going, let us know and give us a chance to remedy the situation instead of immediately going over our head and complaining to our supervisor. If you are having trouble implementing speech therapy strategies at home, tell the SLP and give us an opportunity to troubleshoot it with you. If there is an issue, we can’t fix it if you don’t tell us.
2. Respect our time
If you will be late to an appointment, miss an appointment, or want to reschedule an appointment, let the SLP know as soon as possible. SLPs spend time planning for each session and getting the materials prepared. If we know in advance we can spend our time wisely and hold off on planning that particular session. Some of us commute to our sessions in your home, at your child’s daycare center or school and knowing that you won’t be available for the scheduled session saves us time, gas and mileage or a swipe of our metrocard and a lot of frustration. Even for those of us who do not commute and provide services via telepractice, it is upsetting if we are ready for a scheduled session and the student or client does not log in during their time slot. Many of us are not salaried workers and are only paid for the time we spend providing speech therapy (not commuting, not planning the session, not writing the session note etc.), so if you miss your appointment, we are not paid for that session and we still did unpaid work to plan that session, contact you to remind you, and document why the session did not occur! If you let us know in advance that the scheduled session needs to be canceled, it saves us the time and energy and sometimes even gives us an opportunity to reschedule your session and perhaps move another person’s session to the time slot that didn’t work for you. Keep track of speech therapy appointments by utilizing a planner, paper calendar, notifications on your phone or Google calendar, a schedule posted on the fridge etc. As a courtesy, we often send appointment reminders the night before or the morning of, please check your email or phone to read them. We go the extra mile to send reminders but ultimately it is your responsibility to keep track of scheduled appointments the same way you are expected to remember your doctor’s or dentist’s appointment.
3. Provide a conducive learning environment
If your child is receiving speech therapy at home, please reduce background noise. It is distracting and irritating for both the person giving therapy and the person receiving therapy to hear the smoke detector chirping throughout a session so please for the love of your SLP and fire safety, put a fresh battery in the smoke detector! Please shut off the tv in the background so we do not have to damage our voice by speaking louder than necessary to talk over it and your child can focus on us better. Make sure the lighting is suitable so we can see your child’s face, and if your child has sensory needs please be mindful that the lights are not too bright for them. If your child is receiving services via telepractice, set your child up with appropriate child size seating at a desk or table versus them sitting or laying in bed during the session.
4. Take an active role
Your SLP has a lot of knowledge, skills and strategies to share with you. The SLP does not work solely with your child, we work with your family as well to provide support and share ideas for how you can utilize the strategies used during the session on your own time at home or in the community. If you are busy on your phone, cooking, dropping your child off for a therapy session and ducking out to get coffee, or not mentally present during the session, you are missing out on a valuable opportunity to try those strategies with your child while the SLP is there to give feedback in the moment. Yes, SLPs work miracles but we cannot be the only people utilizing these strategies with your child, we and more importantly, your child need your support, engagement and commitment to use these strategies when we aren’t there in order for your child to make the most gains and progress. If we give you advice or a homework activity, please implement these things before your next session and report back to us how it went so we know what is working and what isn’t. Practice makes perfect so please practice these strategies with your child when your SLP is not there. If your child is receiving therapy via telepractice, they may need you to help troubleshoot any tech issues. We know parenting is hard work and many people are doing double duty working and parenting. We know when we are with your child it may be the first opportunity you have had all day to use the bathroom and get a few minutes to yourself but we have valuable things to share with you and your child could use your support so go pee and hurry back!
5. Don’t overshadow your child
Yes, we want you to be active in the session but dial it back a little. For example, if we ask your child a question give them time to think about the question and attempt to answer it on their own. Do not spoon feed the answers to them because that is taking away their opportunity to learn, practice skills and gain independence. We need to see what your child knows on their own in order to determine if a task is too challenging or too easy for them. We need the data that we take during the session to be an accurate depiction of what they achieved and what they needed help with, which types of support they received to complete the task and how often they received those supports in order to guide our treatment plan and to determine if they have met a goal or not. If you are mouthing answers to them and we don’t know that you are providing verbal prompts to them, you are falsely leading us to believe your child accomplished the session goal independently, which skews our data and cause us to make our future sessions more challenging when your child is not prepared for the tasks to be more difficult just yet.
6. Be supportive of your child
Your child is looking to you for your reaction so be proud of them and give them verbal praise or a high five when they make progress. Do not be too hard on them if they make a mistake or don’t progress as quickly as you want. Mistakes are part of the learning process and your child should not be afraid to make mistakes out of fear of your disapproval or anxiety over being punished or ridiculed because they answered a question incorrectly. If your child makes a mistake or isn’t meeting their therapy goals as quickly as you want, please do not scold your child and tell them they are “not trying hard enough”, “being lazy’, or “not listening during their sessions” because hearing that is damaging to their self image and may make speech therapy a negative experience for them. I have worked with a lot of children and I honestly cannot think of one child I worked with who was not applying themselves during speech therapy.
7. Try not to be picky about your appointment time
Scheduling a caseload is always a challenge for us. It is like playing Tetris. We have to be available, the child needs to be available, for telepractice family member usually needs to be available too to assist the child, and for Early Intervention a family member needs to be available to learn carry over strategies from the SLP. Only saying you are available for one specific 30 or 60 minute time slot in a day does not give us a lot to work with. We understand you are busy being a parent, working, having a life etc. We are very busy too, we have lots of students and clients who we serve and it is likely that your narrow time frame of availability conflicts with someone else’s appointment. In the schools, each school or district has policies that we need to follow such as, not being able to see a student during math class or “specials” (art, music, gym) for speech therapy.Legally we are not supposed to see a student during lunch or recess because having a disability is not a punishment and all students need a mental break to eat lunch and socialize and the opportunity to move and play at recess with their peers. These breaks help children develop and concentrate on their learning later on during the day. Please do not complain about how your child is missing class instruction in order to receive their IEP mandated services at school. The reason they receive these services in school is because the IEP team decided your child needs services in order to access the curriculum, if they didn’t receive their services and were in class they would still be “missing” instruction because they don’t have the skills and strategies to access the curriculum without our services. Your child should not have their lunch or recess substituted with a therapy session; taking away the ability to eat lunch with peers in the cafeteria or the ability to have recess has been used as a form of detention in school and having a disability or needing speech therapy is not a punishment. Even if we were allowed to see students during their lunch and recess, we have so many students on caseload that there are literally not enough days in the school year for us to serve every student on our caseload on their class breaks with the frequency of sessions outlined in their IEPs. If you are really concerned about your child missing class time in order to attend their legally mandated IEP services, then talk about reducing the frequency of services or declining school based services at their next IEP meeting. You can seek out a private practice speech-language pathologist and pay out of pocket or through your insurance and have your child attend speech therapy before or after school hours that way.
8. Verify your sessions before the deadline
During the pandemic, we have to get families to verify that we provided the sessions every two weeks. We have to fill out paperwork and then submit them to our company after you verify the sessions in order for them to count those sessions and pay us for services rendered. We do not get paid for our work until you verify the sessions. Please check your texts and your email and verify the sessions by the deadline we give you. I have some families who are on top of this and will verify the sessions right away, and I have a few families go weeks and sometimes months without verifying the sessions and that portion of my pay is withheld while I am texting, calling and emailing them multiple times trying to get the session verifications. I know it is tedious and an annoying process but this system is actually more inconvenient and tedious for the SLP than it is for you so please answer the message the first time and do not take your frustration out on us, we didn’t design the system and we are just as frustrated it as you are. The system is in place to prove that students are getting their legally mandated services and that the SLPs are doing their jobs so it does serve an important purpose.
9. Be open minded
If we share a therapy strategy with you or demonstrate a different way to do something with your child to help promote their speech, language, communication or feeding skills, give it a try. No need to take it personally or be defensive. We are not critiquing your parenting skills and we are by no means saying you are not doing things right, we just want to share our expertise with you for the benefit of your child. We are a team, so be open to our suggestions.
10. Thank us
It costs nothing to say thank you and yet it is so valuable. It means a lot to us to be appreciated. I have students who say thank you at the end of each session and it is really heartwarming and adds to the fulfillment I get from my job. I have families of students who always send a message along the lines of, “Thank you for all of your support” when they verify their child’s sessions and it always makes me happy. If you send us a card, we proudly display it on our bulletin board or desk. We never forget these small acts of kindness and appreciation.
