Communicating Partners
Dr. James D. MacDonald's Website
Helping Parents Help Children. Programs for Parents, Therapists & Educators
Focusing on therapy and education for children having:
Serving infants through adolescents
Communicating Partners is a new clinic for children with social and language delays in Columbus, Ohio. The clinic provides evaluations, therapy, parent education and assistance in program planning to a wide range of children from infancy through adolescence. The clinic is an outgrowth of a 24 year program at the Ohio State University.
Families receive direct clinical service from Dr. James MacDonald and Dr. Paula Rabidoux who are speech and language pathologists with over 20 years experience with language delayed children.
First , rather than treating the child in isolation, Communicating Partners focuses on educating parents as a critical part of the therapy for the child. This family focus emphasizes parent child relationships as the most important source for learning to talk. Speech therapy is much more effective when parents learn how much they can do in the home.
Families are such a basic part of the clinic, that a board of parent advisers is available to parents for referrals and support. Currently, parent advisers are available in the areas of Autism, Down Syndrome, Motor delays, Behavior disorders and Late-talking with typical development.
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Services at the clinic are based on over 25 years of clinical research with over 500 children and their families at the Ohio State University and the Nisonger Center. The director, James MacDonald was an associate professor of Speech and Hearing Science at OSU from as well as director of the Parent Child Communication Clinic at the Nisonger Center from 1971-1995. Since l995, Dr. MacDonald has focused on developing practical tools for parents to use to help their children communicate in the home.
Consequently, the therapy approaches have been tested with hundreds of families and are used nationally in over 200 training sites. Each family the clinic serves receives at the start practical written activities and video training tapes to begin helping their child in the home.
Rather than waiting for a child to have speech problems, the clinic aims to prevent delays by serving infants and preverbal children to ensure healthy communicative habits early It has been found that no child is too young to learn good social and communicative habits. Since parents are often unaware of what a child needs before speech, the clinic trains parents of late talking children to help their children develop the social and communicative skills needed before language.
A fourth distinction of the clinic is it’s focus on the social uses of language for friendships and conversation. Many children learn language for school but have difficulties talking with people and building personal relationships. The clinic is less concerned with the size of the child’s vocabulary than with insuring that the child uses language to become an enjoyable social partner.
A fifth distinctive feature of the clinic is its focus on children who have traditionally been expected not to speak or to develop very limited speech. The clinic rejects the often pessimistic view of children with features such as autistic behaviors, Down syndrome, attention disorders, neurological problems and medical conditions. In his 24 years at OSU Dr. MacDonald demonstrated that many children were much more capable of learning to communicate than many had expected. Consequently, a primary purpose of the Communicating Partners clinic is to help children build social relationships with people at their current level of development. A fundamental principle of the clinic is to help each child become a people person before he is made to be a student.
