What is Pediatric Speech Therapy?

Pediatric speech therapists address the impact of a child’s communication abilities and feeding/swallowing capabilities throughout their day.  Children’s understanding of language, along with the ability to accurately express themselves, plays a very important role in development.  Other areas of development include the ability to produce intelligible speech or production of certain sounds.  Safe eating and swallowing, including safely swallowing liquids from a bottle or cup, transitioning to textures, and safely eating table foods, are essential skills in a child’s health and development.  A speech therapist may address delays in any or all of these areas:

A child may have difficulty in using words to express themselves or in producing sounds that allow others to understand what they are saying.  A speech therapist will create learning environments to require them to produce a communication attempt.  This could include a sound, simple gesture, pointing to a picture or even eye contact to indicate their desire to communicate. 

When a child isn’t comprehending or understanding what is being said to them they may exhibit frustration and disinterest in interacting with others in their surroundings.  A speech therapist will assist in identifying where the break down occurs and simplifying the task or language so the child can successfully interact at their level.

A very young child may exhibit difficulty in coordinating sucking, swallowing and breathing to safely eat by traditional means such as bottle or breast feeding.  A toddler may have difficulty transitioning into different textures and table foods.  A speech therapist works to strengthen the muscles of the face, mouth and tongue and promote appropriate awareness of foods in the mouth while enhancing safe feeding experiences. 

Dysarthria

Some children with neurological issues demonstrate a weakness of the mouth, which contributes to inaccurate placement of the tongue, lips and jaw for speech.  A speech therapist works on strengthening, increasing oral awareness and improving accuracy of placement so speech is understood. 

Apraxia: 

A child may exhibit difficulty with planning the movements of the mouth for connecting sounds into words and words into sentences.  This can create unintelligible speech or a delay in language acquisition.  The words they want to say may be in their brain but they can’t find the plan to get the words stated.  A speech therapist works to simplify the words into smaller sound components as building blocks for connected speech or sentences.   

Cognitive Skills and/or Language Processing:

Some children demonstrate difficulty in processing questions, understanding complex sentences, problem solving, memory and reasoning skills.  A speech therapist teaches the child strategies to compensate when tasks become overwhelming.  Beyond strategies they work in therapy to develop new brain pathways to connect the language with the task. 

Social Skills:

Some children have difficulty responding appropriately in social situations.  A speech therapist would work with the child on appropriate greetings, conversation skills, joining in, phone skills and role-playing various situations in order to help the child function in broader social settings.  This may occur in one on one or group therapy environments.

Augmentative Communication:

Augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) is a field of endeavor addressing the expressive communication needs of people with significant speech disability.  AAC interventions range from no technology (gestures, signs) to low technology (communication board) to high technology (voice output communication aids).  The speech therapist helps determine appropriate means to allow the individual to say exactly what they want to say in a timely manner.