Helping parents and children

What you can usefully do to help

Three simple questions about your child

Some common worries

What I can do by my training and experience. I try to make my therapy FUN, give children the experience of success, minimise the sense of failure, and build CONFIDENCE

Speech and language therapist, with a lifelong fascination with speech and language

Personal history of speech, language, and literacy delay

Respect for children and diversity

Three degrees, a qualification in speech and language therapy, and on-going research

Discovery of a long lost tradition of therapy involving the notion of ‘possible words’

Treatment is a team effort. Only parents can observe subtle and detailed changes from one day to the next, new interests, expressions, words, or saying things in a more grown up way than previously. My job is to analyse what I can see and what I am told.

Your work may include keeping a diary as a sensitive and accurate measure of a child’s language, giving your child your time, conversation, talking ti your child in a special way, letting him or her take the initiative.

My work involves diagnosis, assessment, counselling, treating the child’s issues in various ways, as by Possible words therapy, particular issues such as those involving and Z, being positive and making things fun, collaborating in stories, songs and devising new bits of songs to help with whatever we are working on, taking account of what may be going on in the child’s mind., which

Our work often involves a checklist of all the possibly relevant factors, covering the whole range of ages from toddlers to teenagers, taking account of both exceptionalities and norms, which may be no more than that,  distinguishing between what the child says and what her or she appears to understand, keeping up to date, detailed records, and of course, deciding whether and when some treatment is necessary and appropriate.

Speech and language therapy as a profession.

What children say is endlessly fascinating. Children say more than anyone guessed before it became possible to sew a radio mic into their clothes and record everything they say, and work out how much they are learning from day to day. Curiosity seems to be a driving factor.

Language is infinitely creative, but there is a paradox in how their language becomes languages. There are three well-accepted milestones…

There are regularities and universals… by the proposal here, by the way human language has evolved. But particular words are mispronounced in particular ways at particular stages of development. And developmental problems with speech and / or language are typically complex. Why should these things be so?

Literature, poetry and political discourse were once considered the main reason for any interest in language. But four almost 400 years now it has been recognised that there is interest in how speech and language develop in children and how the process here sometimes goes wrong. We experience language in conversation.

There are conventions about taking turns to talk, These conventions are sometimes regarded as rules. But the rules of conversation, if this is what they are, are quite different from those which make PSKETTI for spaghetti not a possible word of English.

Most children with problems learning to read and write previously had or still have a problem with speech and language, suggesting that there may be an underlying commonality. The bare necessities of the processes involved are worth delineating and tabulating.

In work with children there is a long tradition of trying to make this enjoyable rather than painful. There is also an emerging idea that it is necessary to take account of the process by which speech and language evolved.

Should you want to get in touch and discuss anything further, please use the details on this page.