On the Flip Side

So, the other day I got a little nudge.

Kristin got her cousin to send me a hint. Where's the educational SLP? Isn't he suppose to post things as well? His he permanently stuck writing progress reports and IEPs?

Well, yes. He is.

So, I am going to blame the same things I always blame... parenthood and netflix. What can you do?

Anyway, I wanted to talk briefly about my experience on the flip side. What is it like to be a parent with a child who has special needs, at least from my perspective.

My son, Logan has always been a bit rambunctious and a little behind his sisters when it comes to many developmental milestones. Yet we didn't right away recognize that he might have special needs. Many people had told us that boys are more difficult than girls. We just assumed that they were very right. Once our little boy became mobile then he learned real quick how to get into just about everything. He also demonstrated many characteristics that were similar to students with ASD. At the time he was very echolalic, he wouldn't socialize with others, he couldn't handle any changes to his routine, and he got hyper-focused (obsessed) on particular items or topics.

Sometimes parents get a blindside to their own children which was definitely the case for us. It wasn't till our child was old enough to go to the children's class at our church when we began to realize that our child wasn't like the other children his age. He was the only kid who couldn't sit still during class. We had the "problem child", the kid that people tend to question what the parents are doing. Were the parents doing any discipline in the home at all? Don't get me wrong, most of the people at my church were very nice about it, trying their best to help Logan participate in primary
. Yet, we knew that something was wrong, or at least suspected.

I called up my sister-in-law and point blank asked her, "Do you think my son has a disability?"

She replied, "I would never say anything negative about your son. You know we all love him, but to be honest, none of my kids were ever that hard."

I felt like I was kicked in the stomach. What did I do wrong? I was suppose to know how to fix children who had problems. I was suppose to be a better father. Did we not give him enough attention? Were we not consistent enough in our disciple? What did we do wrong? My wife took it equally hard. She felt that everybody hated our son. She felt that people thought we were bad parents when he was melting down in public over one thing or another. My wife also has Special Education background. So, she also felt the double guilt that I was feeling. Not only were we bad parents in our minds, we were also bad professionals.

Its easy to tell parents that it isn't their fault that their child has special needs, but its difficult as parents to listen and believe that simple truth. That nagging feeling of "what if I just did this differently?" clings to our minds. It's difficult to shake off.

We had Logan tested. The local elementary school's preschool team gave him a variety of assessments including developmental, cognitive, expressive and receptive language, social, etc. We had to wait even longer for special Autism testing.

Several labels were thrown around willy nilly. I started to realize why first person speech was so important. We could tell who saw our son as a disability first and who saw him as a little boy first. It was a huge difference to us. Parents are a lot more perceptive than you might think. They can tell if you really care about their child or not. It makes a big difference to have people working who want the absolute best for your child, people who will look at their strengths as well as their weaknesses. I found also that I didn't care about the label; it seemed much more important to other people.

This experience has completely changed how I see my profession and how I interact with students and with parents.

There is much more I could write about this, but frankly I need to get back to my family.

Guest Post: Humor, the Secret to Early Interventions

We've had several people request to write guests posts for our blog. We promise that we only agree when we feel that it adds a meaningful contribution. I liked this particular post because I work with a lot of children on the Autism Spectrum and many of them have a difficult time with humor. So, this one goes out to my fellow educational SLPs. Enjoy.

Humor is the Secret to Successful Early Childhood Interventions

Humor is known to improve the quality of an individual’s life, it helps people manage stress, develop healthy social and communication habits, enhance creativity, and develop reading and language skills. The sound of a child’s laughter may be taken for granted as a naturally developing aspect of a child’s personality.  However, a more sophisticated assessment of the development of humor in children requires an understanding of how the development of a child’s sense of humor is directly related to the development of the child’s cognitive, social, and linguistic abilities.  When humor is viewed from this perspective, it becomes an overwhelmingly important aspect of the educational and development process. Humor may even be used as an intervention tool for children experiencing developmental challenges.

In order to use humor as an intervention tool practitioners must first understand that situations, actions or words found humorous by children often occur when there is a violation of a social, behavioral, or linguistic norm.  Therefore, a child’s ability to find something humorous relies on their ability to recognize these norms and understand actions or behaviors that would violate them.  The chart below summarizes the stages of humor development in children, and provides examples of violations of recognized norms a child might find humorous.  This data is described in the article Head, Shoulders, Knees and…Peanut Butter What Makes Young Children Laugh, by Paul E. McGhee.

Using humor in an intervention has many benefits; it is useful in generating interest in the lesson, it may help explain complex concepts, and it may help develop a strong relationship between the child and the practitioner.  In addition to these benefits, using humor in intervention techniques may serve to enhance the child’s social skills by improving the child’s confidence in their ability to tell jokes and be funny, and helping them to understand the jokes and play of their peers.

Consider the following example: If a pre-school aged student is having difficulty recognizing or naming an object such as a pencil playing a game that uses the pencil in every way except for its intended use will explain why this play is funny and help the child to recognize the pencil’s intended purpose.  To enhance language development rhyming games would help to improve the child’s memory of the pencils name and enhance the child’s understanding of the humorous nature of playing with different sounds.

Using humor to treat developmental disorders in children has many mental health and social benefits. If you’re interested in helping children through their developmental stages of life, there are many career paths that allow you to help these kids such as Speech Pathology.

The challenge of this treatment is in determining what level of development the child is at and appealing to that humor to make the therapeutic process fun and effective while enhancing social skills. Approaching the treatment of a child’s developmental disorders in a way to nurtures their humor helps develop necessary cognitive and language abilities and helps them to get along and play better with their peers.

By Stephanie Small and edited by Laura Morrison, the Content Manager of GradSchools.com. For tips and information on continuing education in Speech Language Pathology, please visit www.GradSchools.com .

New SLP iPad App: Caseload Tracker

Hey everybody, I hope your summer is going well. Probably better for the education SLPs out there.

I wanted to announce that the Caseload Tracker app has finally been published and is now up and available on iTunes.

This app is designed to help SLPs and Special Educators keep track of their caseloads and stay on top of IEPs and Eligibilities. I came up with the concept as I was getting completely bogged down by meetings with no good clear way of keeping track of all of them.

This app has a built in system for tracking these important due dates by color coding alerts in the app as well as using the iOS's push notification alerts to keep you informed of the total number of students with upcoming meetings. Its also a great resource for keeping your caseload information handy.

For those such as myself, this will be a very useful tool in staying organized with your students. Let me know what you think

And we'll be having a contest on here soon to win a code for this app. I'll stay in touch.