Communicating Partners
Dr. James D. MacDonald's Website
Helping Parents Help Children. Programs for Parents, Therapists & Educators
Q. I am a parent of a late talking child. I have not train to be a speech therapist or a teacher, so I rely on professionals to teach my child to talk. Now, I find that many professional have little training with non-talking children. What can I do?
A. I hear this question very often. A major purpose of Communicating Partners is to educate parents and professionals to work together on goals and strategies that focus on making children communicative persons before compliant students.
Please remember a few things about language development:
Try to understand the many often conflicting jobs teachers and therapists and help them and your child be working with them. Many of the Communicating Partners programs (see Resources section of this CP) are designed for parents to use with professionals. Language and communication is one subject that cannot be learned only in school.
Therapists and teachers can certainly help but you as a parent have much more opportunities to make your child first interactive, then communicative them verbal. Please do not expect that isolated therapy sessions one or twice a week will by enough for your child to become social and communicative.
The more you participate in this training the more your child will learn these natural goals that are often assumed to exist when children enter school. Communicate openly and frequently with the professionals and your child will benefit greatly. No one can accomplish the big job of social and communicative development on their own.
