I know as a parent, it can be stressful when your child shows signs of speech delay. You may be feeling lost, or like you aren’t doing something right, but I’m here to tell you that hope isn’t lost.
From first-hand experience, I can assure you that things can get better. Apart from the great kids I work with every day, I’ve seen a great process speech therapy can make as my own nephew has some speech and language delays.
When I went home on Christmas break, I did a short evaluation to see where his speech was at. Over a few months, I’ve been documenting his progress and can tell you that he is doing great.
During this particular trip, I did a fun little activity with him and the family that introduced a speech therapist technique called the Complexity Approach.
What Is the Complexity Approach?
Developed by Professor Judith Gierut and colleagues at Indiana University in 1999, the Complexity Approach is a treatment or technique for tackling articulation issues and phonological or sound development challenges.
Typically, when we teach sounds, we do it in a slow developmental sequence. This means your ABCs. However, the complexity approach ramps that process up by teaching phonetically advanced and later mastered sounds instead.
The goal here is to produce a change in the child’s entire sound system by teaching complex targets and clusters instead of the traditional method of slowly teaching individual sounds. These system-wide changes make it easier and faster for kids to understand speech patterns and use them intelligibly.
Articulation Speech Therapy: Treatment That Works
With my nephew, I used the complexity approach to introduce to him how to imitate a word with a correct sound and then how to fix that sound. So far, his articulation has improved so much, and I’ve absolutely adored seeing him grow as a speaker.
The important thing about this approach is making sound imitation fun. My nephew is currently enrolled in speech therapy and articulation therapy, and like many other young kids, has shown fantastic progress. Does he get it right 100% of the time? Not always. But the strides he is making shows that this technique is working. And maybe it can also work for your little one.
Get a Head Start on Speech Therapy
Everyone learns differently and at a different pace, but it’s important to start intervention early if you notice signs of speech delay. Check out my blog on the right age to start speech therapy if you are feeling hesitant to get started.
Here at Walkie Talkie Speech Therapy, we are dedicated to helping parents navigate speech therapy, so feel free to reach out if you have any questions.
If your child has graduated speech therapy and is back enrolled in speech therapy, that’s okay too! That often happens and is entirely normal.
I want to assure you that re-enrollment doesn’t mean that anybody messed up. It just means that child has grown and developed to a new area where that child needs some extra help. And you know, we all need extra help sometimes.
Our Specialized Speech Therapy Pathologists Love to Help
I encourage you to seek out speech therapy pathologists to help you in-person with articulation therapy. It takes expert speech therapists to identify the problem and how to fix that problem in the best way for your child.