When it comes to articulation carryover at home, wouldn’t it be great if all parents understood how to support their child?

 This podcast does what we often don’t have time to do—it explains all about carryover, and gives parents realistic ways to support carryover at home.

 Today’s episode covers:

• What’s a tipping point and why is it important for speech therapy?
• What is the SLP’s role?
• What is the parents role?
• What is the child’s role?
• How to make home practice a positive experience
• Ideas for FUN and EFFECTIVE home practice

 The number one take away when it comes to parents supporting generalization is: As the parent, your role is not to correct their speech, your role is to heighten awareness and accountability. Their role is to correct their speech.

— Useful Links —

Snack Recipes

Impossible R Made Possible Video Course 

Simple Tools: Tally it Up! 

Simple Tools: Science Box 

Science Bob

Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission

Transcript

Denise: Welcome to The Speech Umbrella, the show that explores simple but powerful therapy techniques for optimal outcomes. I’m Denise Stratton, a pediatric speech language pathologist of 30 plus years. I’m closer to the end of my career than the beginning, and along the way I’ve worked long and hard to become a better therapist.

Join me as we explore the many topics that fall under our umbrellas as SLPs. I want to make your journey smoother. I found the best therapy comes from employing simple techniques with a generous helping of mindfulness.

Hello. Welcome to episode 71 of the Speech Umbrella. Just for fun, I counted all the states in the US where I have listeners. It turns out I have listeners in 34 states, so that’s only 16 more to go. Where are you, Alaska, Hawaii, Louisiana, and you other states? You’re missing out. Seriously, one of the reasons I do this podcast is to help us work more efficiently and effectively. Have you ever wished you had, oh, 15 or 20 minutes to spend with a parent and explain what generalization really is and how they can help?

Soon after I started this podcast, I realized I could do a whole episode on this and direct parents to it, when I didn’t have time for as thorough of an explanation as I wanted to give them. So I did. But those were my early days of podcasts before I really knew how to edit myself, and it turned out to be almost an hour, and who has that kind of time? Lately, I’ve been apologizing to the parents when I say go listen to this, because yeah, it’s really too long. So today I’m redoing that podcast, which I call The Tipping Point to serve SLPs and parents better. And this episode is called Home Activities for the Final Stages of Speech Therapy because I’ve also learned that clever titles are not as good as titles that say what the podcast is actually about.

But I’m still going to talk about tipping points because it’s a very important concept to grasp. Here’s a question for you parents out there. Do you have a teen or a preteen who has been working on a single sound, maybe an R, maybe an S, and they’re inching to the finish line? Perhaps your speech therapist has been telling you how well they’re doing and that they’re almost ready to graduate, but you aren’t hearing the correct sound at home very much.

They don’t sound like they’re ready to graduate at all. The main question I’m answering today is what parents need to know and what they can do to close the gap between performance in speech therapy and at home. I want you to have complete confidence that your child will not only graduate from speech, but will sound the best they possibly can.

And to do that, your child does need to reach the tipping point. A tipping point is the critical point in a process beyond which a significant and often unstoppable effect or change takes place. So let’s break that down to speech therapy terms. It’s the point beyond which your child will continue to progress and master the skill they’ve been working on, regardless of whether they keep on going to speech therapy.

It’s working yourself out of the client’s need for you. And in speech therapy lingo, we call it generalization or carryover. This topic is really very important because often I see this happening. Your speech therapist says he’s almost done, and you don’t hear that at home, and so there’s a sort of discomfort that begins to build between you and the speech therapist because the speech therapist is saying one reality and you’re seeing another reality, and then a tension can begin to build between you and your child. You’re frustrated because she isn’t carrying through, and maybe you’re anxious she’ll be released without having reached the end goal in therapy. And in turn, therapists can become frustrated because they are running out of activities to do with a client who has little or nothing left to work on in the speech therapy setting.

And this is a point when a mother might ask me with a little note of uncertainty in her voice, do I just nag her then? Well, the answer to that is a big resounding no, nagging never works. So let’s talk about what does work. Here’s what we are gonna cover today. There are some key skills that are the therapist’s responsibility, things your child needs to learn before they can carry over. I’ve got a two-tier approach to working on carryover at home based on the child’s needs, along with activities you can do. The first tier is called breathing room. The second tier is called awareness and accountability.

So let’s dive into the key skills. Here’s what I expect a child to be able to do before they reach the tipping point. I expect that they can say whatever sound they’re working on easily in most words, it doesn’t sound like they’re putting extra work into having to say it. Now, don’t confuse this with them saying it thoughtfully, that’s what we want, but it shouldn’t take extra tension or force when they say it.

I expect that they can say it quickly, at conversational speed most of the time. Now, they may slow down for a difficult word. Say they’re working on R and the word is worldly. Well, they might have to slow down for that, but most of the words they can say at conversational speed as quickly as their peers.

I expect that they can hear the difference when they say it correctly versus incorrectly. For example, if they were to listen to a recording of themselves, they could pinpoint I said that right, I said that wrong. Of course, that doesn’t mean they’re doing that all the time in conversation or we wouldn’t be talking about carryover, but they can hear it in themselves.

And last but not least, I expect their phonemic awareness is age appropriate. Phonemic awareness means the ability to listen to and analyze sounds within words. Okay, your speech therapist should be able to get your child to that point. And now here’s what you can do at home. Your child’s ready for carryover. Let’s talk about this two-tiered approach. I came up with the first tier based on an interaction I saw in my waiting room between a mother and her teenage daughter. Like I said, I call this tier breathing room. So the daughter, Brianna was ready to be released, I felt, but her mother didn’t feel she was, and she said to me, with Brianna standing right beside her, she doesn’t practice.

Well, you gotta cut the tension in that waiting room with a knife. It’s never a good idea to refer to your teen in the third person when they’re standing right there, especially in a critical way. And parents can forget this in their anxiety. Early, her mother had told me that she was worried Brianna would sound like an adult relative who still had a lisp, so I understood her anxiety, but I needed a way to help her dial it down. Well, after that incident in the waiting room, I emailed the mom and suggested that her primary objective should be preserving her relationship with her daughter. Every kind of feedback should be given with the idea of preserving the relationship. Then I shared some really valuable advice that a counselor once shared with me.

He said that our children know when we don’t have confidence in them and it damages our relationship. Over-anxiety for our children can translate into ‘I don’t believe you have what it takes.’ Finally, I gave her some suggestions for how to practice speech from a ‘we’re in this together’ point of view instead of a ‘do your assignment’ mentality.

So these are the suggestions for giving your child breathing room. Ask your child to show you how to say their sound the right way and the wrong way. Have them teach you the wrong way and explain how to correct it. Learn to recite something together, a poem, a song, a little skit. Have fun with it. Ask each other for feedback, and this is really important – as the adult, ask for feedback.

You may not have a speech impediment, but there will be something you can improve on. Maybe the way you said a line or the way you sang the note, or maybe your intonation, maybe your volume. So model asking for feedback and being really open to accepting it. And when you have that trust in place, you can start to offer feedback to them.

But this is really important. Always mention a few things they did well before mentioning one thing they might want to correct. You want more on the positive than on the negative. Now remember the choice to correct their speech is absolutely in their ballpark, and they need to want it. At this point, your child’s speech error may not be very noticeable to their peers, and so you may be the only one who seems to think that they need to change from their point of view.

So the end of this story is Brianne’s mother took my suggestions to heart and the next therapy session when I asked if they wanted to continue, her mother talked about how capable and talented she was and how she could handle it on her own so they wouldn’t need to come back. And Brianna just glowed. It was the complete opposite to what happened just a week before, and that was all she needed. She just needed some support and some breathing room to reach her tipping point.

But sometimes breathing room is not enough. Then it’s time for tier two: awareness and accountability. What I’m going to say next is really important. You may even want to write it down and put it where you’ll see it. As the parent, your role is not to correct their speech. Your role is to bring them to a state of awareness. Carryover work at home will only be effective when everyone is clear about their roles. Your role is to heighten awareness and accountability. Their role is to correct their speech.

Okay, So here’s how to do that. One thing I love to do is use a game. Pick a game. Almost any game will work, pickup sticks, Kerplunk, Connect Four. You can play this game with a group or just you and your child, but everyone needs to be on board with setting a goal and measuring it themselves. And get this, it’s not an accuracy goal. It’s not, did I say that sound right or wrong? It’s an awareness goal. I’m gonna describe how I would do this in my clinic so you can get an idea of how to do it at home. Suppose the child is working on the R sound and we’ve got this game in front of us, and I’m going to say we both need to say at least one R word every time we take a turn.

And then I’ll say, Hmm, I think I can use two R words when I take my turn. How many are you going to use? And we each write it down on our little piece of paper, our sticky note. And every person, when they take their turn, notes whether they met their goal, they give themselves a plus, a check mark, a tally mark, whatever. And all you’re tallying is if you said what you said you were gonna say, if you met your goal. Did you say one word with R? Did you say two words with R? What is great about this is it’s self-correcting. The game does not proceed until the person who just took a turn has recorded it. And you don’t need to say anything if they forget. You just wait and they’ll look at you like, well, why aren’t you taking your turn? And you look at them like, I’m waiting for you to make your mark of whether you met your goal or not. The silence will cue them in and then they will start thinking about what they said and if they can’t remember whether they met their goal or not, they get to try again, and then they can make their tally mark.

So if you’re playing pickup sticks, you might say, I’m removing this stick. This one is hard to get to. Now it’s your turn. This is worth three points. Here’s an easy one, and so on. See how easy that is. The only thing you might need to say is, did you meet your goal? If they have the key skills I talked about, they will almost always be correct on the sound.

So it’s the awareness and the accountability that they need. Another way to build awareness is described in a video I made called Tally It Up. Basically, your child makes a tally mark every time they say their target sound while they’re reading or reciting a poem. You can find that video on thespeechumbrella.com or on YouTube search for The Speech Umbrella.

Okay, but sometimes you need to do even more, or you just might want to change things up a bit. Then it’s time to harness the power of audiovisual. That’s right, it’s time to make your child a potential YouTube star. This one takes a bit more work, but it can be very, very motivating. In the clinic. I will do this with a snack or a science experiment where they give instructions to the audience in how to make this snack or how to perform the science experiment.

For example, they might make a fruit pizza with Nutella, a flour tortilla, fruit, blueberries, strawberries, see all the Rs in there? Or they might make a fantastic foamy fountain science experiment. That one is really awesome. There’s four steps I suggest if you’re going to do this video, A quick review of the steps to take and the words that might trip them up. So they just have a little pre-practice. Then you actually do the video, and then this is the key part, reviewing and analyzing. So you watch it back together, and if they are doing it by themselves they’re going to say, oh, I didn’t say that one right. You’re going to stop the video whenever you hear the target sound and have them decide whether they said it right or wrong.

Now you always take data on the right and the wrong, so they can see that they’re getting more right than wrong. Usually at this point, they are getting more right than wrong, that’s a real boost to them. And then you do a redo. If it could be improved, if there’s enough words that sounded like they were wrong, then do a redo.

And your goal should be to show improvement, not necessarily 100% because Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither is the tipping point. But you want to show steady improvement over time. Don’t make it too complicated or you won’t do it. Trust me, this is coming from someone who has made those too complicated

There are very simple science experiments and snacks out there, and I have a snack recipe book in my free resource library, which you can get at thespeechumbrella.com/free, and a link to the science site I use in the show notes. Now if you do this as a group, perhaps a sibling wants to participate in the science videos.

It’s important that everyone in the group finds something they can do better and also things that they did correctly. Hey, I did good on that. So your child isn’t the only one having issues. So here’s just some ideas you could look at. Did they make eye contact with the camera? How was their voice volume?

How was their intonation? Did they interrupt each other? Clarity of speech. All those things are things that someone else could look at too, who doesn’t have a speech impairment. Now it may sound like I’m telling you parents to do the same activities I do in the clinic, and that’s right. So you might ask, what am I paying a therapist for then?

That’s a really great question. The answer is the therapy room is a very controlled environment and the home is not. You can involve siblings and friends and there are bound to be interruptions. It’s real life happening all around you in a real life situation. And all these kinds of distractions are what kids who struggle to generalize need to learn to deal with while maintaining the skills.

The videos in the therapy room are one of the most unstructured, hands-off, on your own activities I can do, but it’s still no match for the home environment. Also what the therapist does is it helps the child learn to produce the sound in the first place, learn to isolate it, learn to use it in a word, in a sentence, in conversation, and all these skills that they need to work on in a more contained environment before they’re ready to work on carryover.

If you take anything away from this podcast, I hope it’s this: always build the relationship. It’s not your job to correct their speech. So think about it this way, if you’re still struggling with this, Oh, I just want to tell him to say that right. If you’re thinking, yes, that’s my child. That’s my child, you’re describing.

He’s not sounding like the therapist says he can. And if you’ve been in the habit of pointing out their errors, I’d like to point out it hasn’t worked for you. So you need a new plan. The new plan is to nurture your child’s role as the one responsible for their speech. And the last takeaway, you can absolutely have fun in the awareness and accountability stage of speech therapy.

Think outside the box besides what I’ve suggested. Recite poems together, sing songs as a family, or tell family stories, act out family stories, do magic tricks. All sorts of things you can do with these video activities, which the kids absolutely love. So relax, know you don’t have to nag, and have fun helping your child to the tipping point.

Because when your child masters awareness and accountability, their speech will take care of itself. Thanks for listening to the speech umbrella and try this. Let me know if it works for you.

Thanks for listening to The Speech Umbrella. We invite you to sign up for the free resource library at thespeechumbrella.com. You’ll get access to some of Denise’s best tracking tools, mindfulness activities, and other great resources to take your therapy to the next level. All this is for [email protected]. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, subscribe and please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and other podcast directories.