What Can You Expect When Hiring a Therapist From Brooklyn Speech Therapy?
Peace of mind, we hope! But let’s talk about how speech therapy works.
Step 1: A 30 minute, complimentary phone consultation
This is where you get it all off your chest: your concerns about your child’s communication, their developmental history, strategies you’ve tried to help them, and what you’ve been told by their doctors/teachers/your in-laws (let it out). We will do a lot of listening, but we will also chime in with a few questions. These can help us get a more specific idea about what is contributing to your child’s experience. We will then go through the basics of what a program could look like for you and your family. Lastly, we’ll chat about the logistics of meeting for an initial session if you wish to proceed.
Step 2: A 90 minute - 2 hour diagnostic therapy session in your home
All speech therapy programs begin with an evaluation of sorts. When working with a therapist at a school, clinic, or hospital these are typically centered around the administration of standardized assessments that score your child on a variety of measures. However, at Brooklyn Speech Therapy this isn’t our default. We feel that it takes more naturalistic interactions over a period of time to truly understand the nuances of what is happening for children when they are struggling. Our diagnostic therapy sessions kick-off this more informal evaluation process via play with your child that makes them feel comfortable and trusting of us. Typically this period of time is enough for us to get a good sense of the direction therapy should take, and some initial action items for your family so that we can hit the ground running with support!
Step 3: Regular, weekly 60 minute therapy sessions in your home
These sessions look different for every child and home. Our therapy sessions are always playful, but they can vary in the degree of caregiver presence throughout. Sometimes sessions are one-on-one with your child and their therapist, or sometimes caregivers join us for emotional support, or training. We always adjust along the way. All of our sessions include 50 minutes of direct intervention and 10 minutes afterward for a thorough debrief with caregivers. This is essential, as therapy is a blip of time in your child’s week. Our goal is to empower you to be mini speech-therapists so that you can support your child all week, and ease their progress along.
Step 4: Ongoing diagnostics + tips for skill carry-over
Throughout the weekly therapy process we keep our detective hats on. As your child responds to intervention and progresses in their goals, we must keep a keen eye to adjust our intervention and assessment of their needs accordingly. Maybe that means a new way of cuing them to get that word out; or maybe as we begin to hear their voice more, we have new revelations about the cause of their struggles. Regardless, we will always use our 10 minute debrief to share all of our insights, make sure you are clear on how your child is progressing, and where therapy will go next. Each week we share tips, or practice suggestions to keep their learning going after the session ends.
Step 5: Collaboration + Referral (if needed)
The more people in your child’s life who know how to support their speech the better! This is why we always reach out to the important people around them to let them know about what your child is working on in speech therapy, and how best to support them. Most commonly these important folks are your child’s classroom teacher, day care provider, grandparents, or other therapists.
Since we are always treating with a holistic eye, we can easily see if your child might benefit from additional developmental support services. If this is the case, we will guide you through a referral process. Sometimes children have difficulty with their communication and that is all; but sometimes a child’s challenges communicating exist in the context of developmental challenges more broadly. Maybe they have a weak core, impacting their breath support and gross motor function, so we call a Physical Therapist in to help; or maybe they struggle with sensory integration, so we call an Occupational Therapist. Referrals in this manner can also look like a suggested trip to the doctor, or an audiologist to have hearing checked.
Step 6: Graduation!
Yay! The reason why we’re here: getting those goals met and graduating from regular speech therapy. The timeline for this differs greatly from child-to-child and family-to-family. How long your child is in speech therapy depends on several factors, such as: the reason for a communication delay, responsiveness to intervention, your child’s attention levels, social-emotional world, behavioral patterns, and degree of caregiver involvement for carry-over.
All that being said, our weekly chats will give you a good sense of when your child is approaching the end of therapy. Once we know there will only be a few sessions left, we designate our last session to be a celebration with something super fun. This ensures that your child feels as proud as they should about working hard to overcome something challenging. After this party and a happy goodbye we set up a check-in call for 6 months later to make sure things are on track.
As we tell all of our speech therapy graduates: Make sure to say hi to us around the neighborhood! Seeing you at the playground, or grocery store makes our day.
If you’re ready to kick off this speech-therapy process with an initial consultation call, click here.
