What Does a Speech & Language Pathologist Do?

Video Transcript

"Our week starts. Their schedule is usually set. Especially with my, with the children that I see on a regular basis who have been evaluated, who have a treatment plan. A lot of children, we go to them. It's part of the natural environment and part of the birth to three early intervention program that we participate with. It is a lot of play. But we bring the appropriate therapy materials that are toys that help, that are big and little and wet or become an object ones. Or the books, a lot of children, one of the red flags out there is if the child can't point in a book by, definitely by 24 months. If you can't say "where's the ball?" and the child is looking at you and pointing to the cat or they're just pointing? A pointer finger is a big, a big communicator first for children. We do, we go into the home, talk to the parents. If there's anything new or if at the previous session I think like "you know what, that's a good idea. Bring this to the family." I'll try to find it. There's some different places that we can go on line or if the parent's really a computer person I can certainly share with them the resources and they go look it up. Because you do, you want to empower the family. It's not necessarily about me coming in and working with your child for 30 to 45 minutes. It's about teaching the parents to say, all day long when this happens or when this happens, "I want you to do this." And your child is going to get it. You've got to do it all day. It's part of their life. So that's usually, I usually have a couple of those children. And those are a little more involved because you are, you're with parents as well and you've got your consulting with them as well as playing with the child, and teaching parents. Then there's always the paper work. And you do, you just need to make a note "yes I saw the child. I saw him for this long. He was able to do this. And also I left this for the parents or I told them to go to this web site to further help them understand what it is that we were doing or what we were trying to accomplish". Return some phone calls. If it's a new referral, call the parents and kind of find out what it is that they're concerned with versus what it is that the doctor noticed. You like to kind of see if the parent's concerned at all or were they the ones that said "I am concerned." Just to kind of see what it is that we're looking at. Then we'll schedule those appointments. Go back out. A lot of times in the afternoons you see some older children who many do get services in the school but a lot of times with the school there's so many children and such a need that they may need some extra one on one. One on one with either their speech or their language or both. And we see a lot of the older children in the afternoon."