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When the school year ends and summer begins, many families take a break from structured routines, including therapy sessions. While summer is a great time for relaxation and fun, it’s also an important opportunity to maintain progress in speech and language development. Here’s why continuing speech therapy over the summer is essential for kids: Prevents Regression: Without consistent practice, children can lose the progress they’ve made during the school year. Speech and language skills require ongoing reinforcement, and a summer break could lead to setbacks that take additional time to regain. Supports Consistency and Routine: Many children thrive on structure, and maintaining therapy sessions provides a sense of continuity. This consistency helps reinforce learned skills and encourages continued growth. Advantage

Re-evaluations in speech therapy are often seen as just another formality, but they play a crucial role in tracking progress and adjusting therapy goals. Therapy isn’t a one-size-fits-all approach, and as clients grow and develop, their needs change. Re-evaluations provide an opportunity to assess how a client has progressed since the last assessment and adjust therapy to ensure it remains effective and aligned with their current goals. For example, a child may have made significant strides in articulation but still need work on social communication, or their expressive language skills may have improved, requiring a shift in focus to comprehension. Without re-evaluations, we’d be making assumptions instead of using data to guide decisions. A re-evaluation typically includes standardized testing, informal

  Cold and Flu season is right around the corner, leading to acute cases of laryngitis; temporary changes to your vocal tract. Viruses are one of the leading causes of acute laryngitis in both children and adults. When you get laryngitis, your vocal cords become  swollen and irritated often leading to a weakness in vocal production (hoarseness) or even loss of voice (aphonia). Treating the specific cause is most important. However, children who overuse or misuse their voice, can be more susceptible to losing their voice with upper respiratory infections. This season, you and your family may consider a number of helpful ways to protect, maintain, and improve your child’s vocal health.    Consider turning down or off the volume

Parents often wonder if giving their child a pacifier will negatively impact their speech and language development.  Overuse of pacifiers has been associated with conditions that are considered risk factors for speech and language issues, such as a higher incidence of ear infections and dental problems. Prolonged sucking on a pacifier beyond 24 months may cause the palate, gums, and teeth to develop atypically. Alterations in tongue and teeth positioning may change the way a child is able to make certain sounds, thereby delaying their speech development. However, use of a pacifier with newborns can help with calming, pain management and sleep.  Some studies have suggested that use of a pacifier during sleep reduces the chances of sudden infant death

Raising children in a bilingual home, parents often have questions around bilingualism such as: Will two languages confuse my child? Why is my toddler using words from both languages in the same sentence? Research supports that from infancy, bilingual infants begin to distinguish two separate languages by the language’s acoustic features without confusion. Bilingual infants have the capability to attend to perceptual language features between the two languages such as differences in rhythm, tone, and prosody.  Mixing two languages in the same sentence: Oftentimes, code switching can be mistaken for confusion in young bilingual children. Code switching is when children mix or “borrow” words from two languages in the same sentence or utterance. Research supports that code switching is a component