How to Get Buy-In From Older Kids in Motor Speech Therapy

Full transcript

Hi, it's Nicole from the NYU Motor Speech Lab, and I'm coming in to answer a question someone asked last week when I posted about partnering with older kiddos in motor speech therapy. The gist of the question was: how do you get buy-in from older kids for this treatment? We know this treatment is intense, and we know older kids can be a little tricky, so I wanted to share some strategies.

The first one builds on what I talked about last week. We don't only want to partner with the child; we also want to partner with the family. What does that mean? We can talk with them about target words. One of the target words for one of my older kids is a sentence that includes his sibling's name. When we partner with the family, we can also talk about the schedule. For us, it's an eight-week treatment program, so maybe at the end of every week the child does or gets something little, and they're working toward something big or meaningful that happens at the end of the eight weeks. You can talk with the family about this and explain how hard the treatment is.

The other thing I like to do with older kids is give them the illusion of control. I'll ask, "What target word do you want to work on next?" I don't care, as long as we get through the words. "How many productions do you want to do?" I don't care, as long as it's more than ten or fifteen. When we're varying prosody: "How would you like to vary it? Do you want to say it angry? Do you want to say it sad? You pick." As long as we're getting through the protocol, giving them a little bit of control goes a long way.

And lastly, what's really been helping is explaining the process. I have one little boy I actually give my notes to, and he checks off each time we say the word and where we got in the hierarchy. He's been really responding to it.