Valuable Wisdom and Insights

Over 30 years as a Speech Language Pathologist, A Mom and a Grandma…

At the beginning of my career I worked very hard at trying to isolate problems children were having and validate my observations with testing results. If a child had trouble saying sounds I would do the Goldman Fristoe or the Kahn Lewis (Articulation and Phonological Process Tests which are used to look at how children label pictures and say sounds when they produce the words). I would document the substitutions and distortions I heard, and how they impacted their performance compared to their peers and norms of children across different demographics also known as a Standardized Test.
Quickly I began to notice that there were patterns that could make or break the students scores and eligibility for Special Education and that if I could find the right words with the “right” sounds I could remediate and the student could be found ineligible because they would “pass the test”.
Now I realize that children have a million different reasons for their speech sound differences and they are not really "disorders". They are likely dialects, or oral motor developmental differences that can be dependent on experiences and structural and functional practices.
My 3 grandsons have shown me how different speech can develop in one family. Each one at their own pace and with their own patterns, each one becoming more intelligible at the right time for them. By taking off my Speech Language Pathologist hat I learned, I watched and I changed:

I learned to observe and be patient and notice what they were doing instead of what they weren’t doing.
I learned to enjoy the way they each made their ‘r’ sounds and substituted other sounds for different periods of time depending on the word and how often it was used.
I learned to love how they said "ecause "instead of "because" because it didn’t really matter to them.
I learned to love them, and their speech and language just as it is!
I learned to listen more carefully and pay attention.
I learned to stay in the conversation longer and stay present.
I learned to ask Mom or a sibling if I needed clarification
And then I watched.
I watched them develop their speech sounds and language - use pronouns and use sentence structure that was more "conventional".
I knew they had models, I knew they loved books and were read to several times a day.
I knew there was nothing wrong with them, and that they were developing the way they were developing, not the way I had learned they were “supposed to” when I was in graduate school.

I changed the way I was, so they could be themselves.

I changed the way I viewed them so I didn’t project my limiting thoughts onto them.
I believed that they would change and grow and show me how special they are.
I changed.
I was the change I want to see in the world.
I want to see the world more understanding of child development and the impacts of relationships, experiences and development

I believe that we can see the children in our world differently.

We can open up to the possibilities and the unknown with them.

We have been projecting our limiting thoughts and beliefs onto them for a long time.

Let us change that.

Let us project their ability to grow and develop back onto them.

From there we too will grow, we will see what we never "thought " we would see!
We will hear what we never “thought” we would hear.
We will experience JOY that we didn’t know was possible.
Our children are our best and most amazing teachers…

What do they teach us?

Be Present…

Don’t judge

Listen carefully

Trust

Watch

Grow with them...

If you are going to project, project amazing things!

Change for them!