r/Earlyintervention • u/Ok-Opportunity-714 • 1d ago
Utah’s early intervention experience?
My boy is two and five months. He’s been in Utah’s early intervention for Speach Therapy for two or three months now. He has an extreme delay. He is where he should be or above average in every other way. And he understands probably 1000 words. But he says consistently three or so. The pediatrician mentioned early intervention. But we also wasn’t worried about our son and told us he’s probably gonna catch up on his own, but I was very concerned and started him in early intervention.
My experience so far has been to feel like the program is worthless. This isn’t anything against the gal that comes to my house. But she comes in and watches me playing/interacting with my boy. And that seems to be it. She will talk to him and interact with him. But nothing different than what I’m doing. And I just think what am I paying for? Maybe it’s because I’m already speaking to him in the ways I should be to help him pick up words? Maybe I need to request a different therapist? I do feel like it is worthless.
When you’ve had Speach Therapy from early intervention come into your house, what has been your experience? Have they actually worked with your child? Have they used charts? Have they given you printouts? Have they given you a lot of guidance? Because I feel like I’ve received nothing.
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u/Remote-Ad2120 1d ago
I can't speak for my own personal experience. But I know my brother had kids in the program. The speech therapist did work with them directly during the sessions.
How many times have they gone out to your house? (feel free not to answer). It's possible right now it's still in the evaluation phase, observing your son and your interactions to see exactly how extensive his sessions needs to be before a detailed plan is put in place.
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u/Ok-Opportunity-714 1d ago
I don’t remember exactly. But she’s probably come about six times. I did kind of let her know my concerns about how things were going. And since then, nothing’s really changed.
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u/Ok-Opportunity-714 1d ago
My boy I think is perfectly normal in every other way. I’m sometimes impressed when he can see things in a book and point them out in life. we read books all the time. He always wants us to be reading to him. In a way I’m not worried about him. But he truly has three to five words. And I’m very concerned.
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u/DimensionWeekly7939 1d ago
My daughter is currently doing Kids on the move program. I feel the same way. Our gal comes once a month and does the same. She’s given me tips on how to work with her and it’s helped. My daughter was diagnosed with ASD early this year and also has a speech delay. She’s improved drastically but I think it’s because of her older bros(10, 8). She starts an intro into preschool playgroup that KOTM sponsors next week. They can also help your child with a IEP and get them into preschool through your district if they qualify and they attend for free. That’s why I agreed to doing it. My oldest has Autism as well and did KOTM briefly with him years ago but stopped because I too felt the same way you did and he still qualified for preschool through the district. My personal opinion, it has its pros and cons for sure. I don’t love paying 40$ for a 45 minute visit but she will age out of the program in December.
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u/Bubbly-Bee162 1d ago
My daughter is currently in early intervention for speech therapy and I feel the same way lol. She is 21/2. They also only come out 1x a month
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u/eternal-saudade 4h ago
Many early intervention programs use the parent coaching model. This can look a lot of different ways depending on the therapist, but a common structure would be for the therapist to be observing your interactions and routines, then coming in and modeling a strategy, explaining what they're doing, and then encouraging you to practice the strategy. If she is mostly observing and not actually offering advice/suggestions, then you may want to start by asking her for more guidance and if that doesn't work, you can ask your case manager/service coordinator if there's another therapist available that may be a better fit.
That said, at that age with only a few words, I would definitely look into AAC - it sounds like he would be a great candidate.
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u/SevereAspect4499 1d ago
There are two models in early intervention: one is the direct therapy model for the therapist will interact directly with your child. The other model is the parent coaching model where it's a blend of observing your interactions and demonstrating other strategies. The parent coaching model is not for everyone because it requires a lot of effort on the parents part! What I've noticed is when this model is not actually explained to parents, they don't understand their role and therefore they tend to get less out of the program. But studies have shown time and time again that this model is more effective for the early intervention crowd than the direct therapy model.
What I would do is ask your SLP explicitly what you should be working on. If she tells you things that you are already doing, let her know that you're already doing these and you're not seeing much change. You should also be able to ask about typical speech/language development and what to expect next.
Honestly though if your child can genuinely understand thousands of words but is only saying three, this is a huge red flag for me! Typically what happens is a child gets their receptive language burst where they go from understanding maybe one or two words of what you're saying to understanding most of the words in the sentence or the whole sentence. You notice this increase in receptive language because the child will start bringing you objects that you're talking about or they'll be able to follow more complex directions or understand more language such as indirect language. At the same time, there should be an increase of looking at your mouths, increase in imitation, and an increase in jargon. All of those signify that the expressive language burst is about to happen. The other thing that I come across a lot is parents don't always count proto words or they have difficulty picking words out from the jargon. Anytime your child says something consistently in context, that may be a word even if it does not sound like the adult form. For example, cat may come out as "taa" because of the order that children pick up speech sounds. Most parents would not recognize that their child is saying cat because it sounds so different! But this is something that commonly happens. Finally, I would consider how your child is communicating nonverbally. Do they act as if you don't exist? Do they take your hand and throw it towards things that they want? Do they bring you things that they want for you to open? Are they pointing at interesting things to draw your attention to it? Are they pointing and looking at you for you to label objects or images? Are they pointing to their mouth when they are hungry or pointing to their knee when they fell and hit it? Is your child communicating with you in nonverbal ways that you can understand? There's a lot more to expressive language then just the number of words that they know and so realistically your SLP should be looking at all of this.