How to Include Your Child’s Sibling in Their Speech Therapy Progress

Full transcript

Hi, I’m Nicole Kolenda, speech-language pathologist, adjunct professor, and founder of Creating Voice for Possibility. Today I’m coming in to talk to you about how you can include your child’s sibling in their therapy process.

Teletherapy and the family

It’s still August 2020. We’re in the middle, hopefully, of the pandemic, though sometimes I feel like it might still be the beginning. Teletherapy is on the rise, and especially with younger children with speech motor difficulties, parents are really the main conduit for a lot of the therapy targets and goals. So I find myself often not only working with the parent but working through the parent. For me, a practicing speech pathologist for 20 years who always preferred to get the parent out of the room as soon as I could, that has been quite a challenge. It’s a new direction to take therapy, and I think it’s necessary with teletherapy.

One of the things I have also been capitalizing on during this time frame is the siblings in the home. I’m going to share one instance of how I was able to include a child’s sibling in her progress, and what that meant for the family. I think it’s helpful for all of us who are working right now to find creative ways to get progress with our clients. It’s important to share what we’re doing, because we’re all learning this together, as a collective.

The family

I am working with a child right now who will be two in October, and I know her parents very well. I worked with her brother, who is a little bit older than her. I always forget ages, but I believe he is six right now. I worked with him about two years ago, for about a year. He had a very mild articulation case. I only saw him one time a week, which generally goes against my golden rule of at least two times a week to make effective change, but quite honestly he didn’t need it. His family was really involved, and his parents always followed through on the homework. I had a really great rapport with him and his family, and I was there when his sister was born.

Cut to almost two years later, and his parents have asked me to work with his sister. Speech is challenging for her. One of the things we noticed is that she loves to impress her older brother, and he has this unique vantage point of understanding how challenging speech is for her. So he wants to help, and it’s adorable and really quite touching.

Bringing the brother on board

Let me tell you what I did. I asked the parents if I could meet with him alone in a Zoom room, to go over what my target goals were for his sister and to get him on board and let him feel good. He was also feeling a little bit bad that his sister was now getting my attention and seeing me, and he wasn’t. So this was a good way for him to know that I still care about him and still want a relationship with him. Obviously it looks a little different now that he doesn’t need speech therapy.

I met with him for about a half hour, and I basically talked to him like an adult. I told him what the target goals were for his sister. We have been using a modified DTTC technique, based on the motor learning principles developed by Edith Strand. One of the things you do with this technique is create a word list for the child, and you base it on what they currently have in their speech motor system: what phonemes they have, what’s in their repertoire, what vowels they have, what syllable shapes they have. I had about seven words on this client’s word list that I wanted the parents to go through on a daily basis.

I sat down with the brother and talked to him about the word list and why I chose it. I shared my screen and showed him the list. I talked to him about sitting down with his sister and having her practice these target words, and what might be good times. One of the words was “eat,” and we surmised together that when the family gets together for dinner, practicing “eat” is a great time. But he also said that he likes to have a snack when he’s in the backyard with his sister, and that he thought that might be a good time to work on this word alone with her. Of course, I agreed.

Another thing we came up with together was having him get a copy of the words. He wrote them out on his own and posted them in their shared playroom, and in his bedroom, so he could remember. In her bedroom, I mean. How sweet. This prompted him to remember what the target words were and gave him the ability to target these words with her on the fly.

The results

He was super excited when we got off our Zoom call. He felt good about himself, and he wanted to be involved. I want to stress that, because not every sibling wants to be involved, and we have to respect that, and that’s okay. This particular child wanted to be involved.

Cut to about a month later. The progress we have seen in this client has been absolutely amazing. She’s working on her target words all the time. She’s now able to combine words to create two-word utterances, which she was not able to do prior. I’m hearing a whole bunch of new sounds in her repertoire, or new attempts, and I see a definitive increase in her confidence as a result. I couldn’t be happier or prouder.

Carryover to daily life

In these times of teletherapy, and I know this is something I’ll be thinking about after teletherapy too, we’re always looking for ways to involve the family and to generalize target skills. The reality is that we really have to think about and scaffold how what we’re teaching in therapy translates and generalizes to that child’s everyday life, because they’re not in therapy all the time. They have to go home, and what we know from the principles of motor learning is that they have to do repetitive practice of these targets over and over and over again. If we are not there to do it, we have to enlist the help of the family. Siblings are a great choice, especially if parents are busy, or working, or in another Zoom room with another child who is doing virtual learning.

This happened to be a really great success, a wonderful way to involve the sibling, and we saw a big uptick in my client’s progress. So again, if you can, I highly encourage you to think about how you can foster growth and success in your child, and to think about including your child’s sibling. It really was an awesome success story in this case.

Thank you, as always, for listening. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me at [email protected]. I’ve been trying to come in and give quick snippets, so if there’s anything you would like me to talk about, or if you have a question, I would so appreciate you reaching out. Thank you again for tuning in and following. Take care, bye.