As a parent, coming to terms with the need for therapy can be hard on the heart. However, once your child starts speech therapy, your therapy team becomes a part of your family. Obviously, the ultimate goal is to reach dismissal. Your child has met their current goals and the therapist proudly hands over a certificate of graduation! What a glorious day, or is it?
Sometimes, parents may feel that continued therapy would be beneficial. Understanding how your child has reached the point of dismissal is often confusing. Perhaps Johnny still doesn’t say his R sounds or misuses verbs. As a parent, these types of performance errors can cause concern.
Here are a few things to consider:
- Therapists follow specific developmental guidelines, use nationally normed standardized assessments, paired with professional experience to determine when your child is ready to be dismissed.
- Your child may have many articulation errors when speaking. If the national guidelines show that the errors are acceptable for your child’s age; continued therapy would not be recommended.
- The majority of children will gain these skills without intervention.
- Your child may have a mild delay that does not warrant direct therapy but would be better served through home programming.
- Many parents are able to target skills during daily activities!
- Your child may need the opportunity to be around peers to gain the skills. For example, many young children show pragmatically unexpected behaviors. As they start school and interact in peer groups, they will learn many skills naturally.
Should your child be re-evaluated after dismissal?
Here are examples of scenarios where a child that may have received services in the past would benefit from a closer look at skills via a re-evaluation.
- A child has had ample opportunity to gain social skills via peer groups, family groups, community exposure, and parent modeling; yet continues to be inappropriate and show lack of social awareness:
- Pragmatic Skills Reassessment Needed
- A child is age 8, not showing awareness of continued articulation deficit, misarticulates all R sounds, has obvious lisping of S/Z, or misarticulated multiple sounds when speaking.
- Articulation Skills Reassessment Needed
- A school-aged child cannot tell you what he/she has read, cannot answer comprehension questions, cannot problem-solve with peers, and/or compromise.
- Language Skills Reassessment Needed
- A school-aged child commonly uses the wrong vocabulary, does not know grade-level vocabulary when reading, has trouble asking or answering questions expected of their peers, or struggles with grammar when writing.
- Language Skills Reassessment Needed
This is not a comprehensive list of reevaluation skills need; however, if you feel that specific skills are behind peers, have not improved, or commonly get discussed in parent/teacher conferences; a reevaluation can help determine need and assist with planning for future skill acquisition.
Bottom line: Outpatient Pediatric Speech Therapy covers articulation, oral motor, feeding, receptive language, expressive language, pragmatic language, reading, and all of the pathways that fall between these broad categories. If you have a concern, reach out! We would be more than happy to help you determine your child’s current skills and if necessary, help you navigate and plan for growth.
