Author: Natasha Gigliotti MA CCC SLP

  Does your child have a hard time planning and implementing a project? Sometimes even we, adults, have a hard time knowing how to plan, get started, and execute in an efficient way. From smaller projects, like completing a craft, a school essay, an oral presentation, or even cleaning one’s room — there is so much executive functioning that goes into being able to envision what you want the end result to look like, what the steps are to get there (and predicting how much time each step will take!), and what materials and resources you will need before you even get started! That is why Sarah Ward, a wonderful speech-language pathologist, based in New Jersey, created a great strategy for

In today’s fast-paced world, it is more important than ever to create a little space for mindful communication. Our ability to communicate the best way we can depends on how present we are at any given moment. We can bring more  groundedness, calm, and a sense of safety into our daily lives and routines  through a multitude of simple actions. These actions can help us parents, as well as our children be the best communicators we can be. Here is a few ideas for the whole family: – begin each family meal by taking 5 transition (or “bubble”) breaths (breathing in through your nose and slowly breathing out through pursed lips (as though blowing a big bubble) – during bed-time

  “Wait and see” was the standard advice for parents of preschoolers with emerging stuttering for many decades. Although we now understand so much more about stuttering and its complexity, echos of this (very much outdated) advice are still too common.  The truth is, fluency development plays out very differently from one child to the next. While one child may go through a brief period of disfluency and spontaneously recover, another child may not. Timing of intervention is important — the longer a child stutters, the more likely the stuttering is to persist. In an evaluation, speech-language pathologists examine a wide range of risk factors (based on the most current research) to determine an individual child’s likelihood to continue to stutter