Parents: You are a CRUCIAL part of the team!

Parents, 

As we start this school year, I just want to express how important you are to your speech and language development, progress and success!

• You know your child best. Your input is valuable and helps us to gain insights on your child that we otherwise may not know. We appreciate your input as we strive to support your child in being maximally successful across all domains, academic, social, emotional, etc. 
• Learning happens all day, every day. Your child is only able to spend a sliver of his/her week in speech/language therapy with me. They spend the majority of their time, and life as children, with YOU, their parents and families. Positive speech and language development is directly related to parent participation and practice at HOME. 
• Practice communication with those who matter most.  Guess what? That is YOU! Many of the primary goals of speech therapy is improving the effecivness and efficiency of communication between individuals to build relationships. Practicing at home with those who matter most is highly motivating and results in positive outcomes in the long-term.
• Safe Environment. Part of learning new skills is making mistakes. Children need safe spaces where they can have opportunities to practice and feel safe. If children don't practice, they don't make progress. If children feel unsafe, anxious or worried, they will not practice. Working to create a safe space for practice at home leads to positive gain and outcomes!

These are only a few examples. I hope you understand how important you are!

Your child will come to speech therapy to learn a skill. The real change and progress comes when they go home and practice, practice, practice outside of the speech therapy room. 

This study from Roberts and Kaiser (2011) is fascinating! In this study, parents were trained to support speech/language intervention and practice at home! The results indicated that:

• Parents could successfully learn strategies to support their children's speech and language development.
• Parents had a positive effect on their child’s communication development. Overall, the children showed improvement in both verbal and nonverbal communication domains, including comprehension, vocabulary use, grammar, and the general frequency with which they communicated.
• Given proper training and guidance, parents could be just as effective at helping their child at home as speech therapists were in the speech therapy setting.
• In fact, when it came to understanding language and grammar, parents were actually more effective than their therapists!

I hope these examples help you see the potential you have to support your child and why I am so passionate that we work together. 

I hope that this webpage and these JagTips, which I will share periodically, will help you to support your child's communication skills and development. 

Let's make this a great year!

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Source

https://blog.expressable.io/parental-involvement-speech-therapy/