Where does your child attend speech therapy?

[ChristusG]

DD7 began speech therapy at 20 months. She "tested out" right before turning 3 (so around 34 months) because she was now speaking (she was only saying like one or two words when she went in). However, she was not articulating well. The therapist said that if that still continued when she turned four, we should seek more therapy.

 

It did continue. So we went through the public school system. She attended speech at the local public school for her pre-K and kindergarten years. It wasn't working, and we began noticing things that pointed towards dyslexia, so we began seeing a speech language pathologist who was also trained in vision and auditory therapy. We've been seeing her for the past year. DD's dyslexia issues have improved, but her speech is still very difficult to understand.

 

I'm beginning to get worried that she will be talking like this forever. She'll reach an age where people will make fun of her. She cannot go into adulthood with people not understanding her. She's already been diagnosed with selective mutism and I believe that's because she doesn't want to talk because she's afraid that people will not understand her.

 

I really don't know where to go from here. We've done private therapy, public school therapy, and the speech/language pathologist. Where does your child attend therapy? Public? Private? We really don't have the money to pay for private therapy. This vision and auditory therapy have really cost us a lot of money over the past year.

[JessicaLady]

Where I live Healthsouth has a Pediatric therapy office. Several actually. This is the only place we've ever attended. I tried to schedule at one point w/ another facility but they turned me off right away. They just didn't seem like they cared about anything other than the payments.

 

There are def. nicer and more innovative, newer places but 1) they're much too far for me to drive even once a week and 2) I am pleased w/ the results where I am.

 

I know Healthsouth is nationwide but am not at all certain about their outpatient pedi. clincis.

 

J

[PeterPan]

Are you sure you have the right diagnosis? Given the things you're saying, I would read about apraxia. Apraxia is motor control, not a developmental delay, and it doesn't respond well to regular speech therapy. It can, as you say, present as a child who speaks but has intelligibility issues. And it's STRONGLY correlated to dyslexia.

 

The best therapy I know of for apraxia is PROMPT. http://www.promptinstitute.com They have a map there to look for PROMPT therapists. With PROMPT you do less therapy in the office and more follow-up at home, making it ideal for homeschoolers and better on the wallet. We started off going once a week, but now we go every other week, with me working with him inbetween.

[Dobela]

We use a private therapy center that has more than one SLP on staff. Each one has a different specialty focus which has been more important than I originally thought. As one area of my dd's difficulties would clear, another issue would emerge and we have changed therapists gradually as the issues changed. I found this center by asking the pediatrician for new referrals and by asking local families who they used.

 

If your insurance is not paying, have you considered applying for state insurance, such as medicaid? When our primary insurance was not paying for therapies, our children qualified for the state insurance as a secondary insurance. We pay a small premium each month based on our income and the medicaid covers everything our primary insurance doesn't. It was a hassle to apply, but the benefit has been more than worth it.

[merry gardens]

At home. My ds was hard to understand yet didn't qualify for speech therapy. I had him evaluated twice--at the public school's slp when he was nearly 5 and again by a private speech therapist when he was nearly 7. When he was eight, I ended up doing LiPS with him at home because he couldn't pass a certain part of the screening for Barton Reading and Spelling.

 

What went on with my son may not have anything to do with what's going on with you dd, but it seems that most of the difficulty with understanding my son related largely to vowel confusion, plus several consonants. He substituted similar sounds in some words--and the overall effect was that he was difficult to understand. LiPS helped alot. I also tried some other Lindamood Bell products and anothing thing that really helped was going through the most common words in English (via Seeing Stars flashcards) and correcting his pronunciation of those words.

 

Since two slp's told me my son didn't qualify for treatment, I took matters into my own hands. (In their defense, when he went for the evaluations, he spoke far clearer than he usually did at home.) Since that time, I've met another slp who is trained in LiPS and she would have worked with my son for his phonological awareness problems. I wish we'd seen her first. The school's therapist didn't even catch the phonological problems that relate to dyslexia and that later caused him great difficulties with learning to read. The second slp discovered it during her routine evaluation, but she didn't know how to remediate it. If you aren't happy with your present slp, maybe look for another--and based on my experience, I'd suggest a therapist trained in LiPS.

[Renee in NC]

In our house.

 

We have a speech therapist who comes here twice a week. This is very common around here.

[Dandelion]

DS had speech therapy through the local hospital's Pediatric Rehab Center. It was covered by our insurance (I think we had a $20 co-pay for each session - once a week).

[TeaCookiesBears]

DD5 goes to the Hearing and speech agency and was referred by her pediatrician and is paid by our insurance. When she was in school last year she received it through the school as well.

[i.love.lucy]

We go to the University of Texas. They have a Communication Science and Disorders department with a Speech and Hearing Center that has a specialty area in stuttering and do research and therapy. We were able to get into a school age group for therapy which was significantly less than private or one-on-one therapy. We pay $30/week. The therapists are grad students, there are 3 of them to 3 kids, and it's supervised by a PhD in SLP. We were referred to them through a local speech therapy practice when I discovered my insurance would not pay and they were outrageous in price to self-pay. We have seen good improvement through them. If you have a major university near you it would be worth a few phone calls to figure out if they do therapy for the public. I think they usually do as the pathologists in training need someone to do their internship on.

[homeschoolmom97]

I'll second checking out any nearby universities, if you have any. Not that we have used it - my dd has been in and out of speech therapy, through our local medical center and through a private practitioner now that used to be there, and it has been partially paid by insurance, the rest on our nickel (ugh). But that's because she has a specific diagnosis that these folks specialized in. That said, we have a private university in town that has a program that's very highly regarded, and they do great things. Early on, dd got services through the local school system, which I would rate as marginal at best - then when we sent her to private Christian school, that became too problematic.

 

I would also second looking at underlying issues. (Elizabeth mentioned apraxia; what do they say about her hearing and auditory processing?)

[Guest Austyn]

Speech therapy is very good for the children because they can understand each and every thing in a very initial stage about speeking and construction of sentences.....