Early Intervention
Early Intervention
Although children develop at their own pace, most children will achieve certain milestones such as crawling, walking, or producing their first words at around the same age. If children are not reaching these expected milestones, some parents may start to worry. Some may suspect a "delay" which is scary, but there may not always be a problem.
After careful assessment and diagnosis, if a problem is found, Early Intervention (EI) Services will be available to help a child who may have trouble reaching certain milestones.
Some early signs to consider are if your child is not:
-Crawling by 10 months
- Waving, pointing, or imitating gestures by 12 months
- Walking by 18 months
- Manipulating ring stacks, form boards, and nesting cups by 18 months
-Saying and understanding at least 50 words by 24 months
If your child has not achieved these milestones around those age ranges, an evaluation should be conducted. KidsCare Speech therapy can perform this evaluation to assess your child's expressive, receptive, pragmatic language skills, and play skills.
There are three main goals in Early Intervention:
1) Prevention: Before an official speech disorder diagnosis is made, at risk-children are provided services to prevent any further communication problems.
2) Remediation: Children who have already been diagnosed with a communication disorder or delay will receive therapy to decrease the long term occurrence or adverse impact that the communication disorder could possibly have on children later in life.
3) Compensation: to provide effective and functional communication strategies or intervention to children with disabilities or impairment that is irreversible to increase the children’s quality of life.
Therapy for Early Intervention at KidsCare Speech Therapy focuses on:
1) All Modern: With the most up to date technology, we use research proven methods only to help your child achieve their milestones! If the research methods are not proven to work, then we do not use that method.
2) Natural Environment: One of the most important aspects of therapy for Early Intervention is ensuring that the therapy is provided in the most naturalistic environment, which is the setting in which the child is most comfortable in.
3) Family Interactions: Families are at the center of early intervention because they provide the necessary models on a daily basis that children need to communicate more effectively. Incorporating the parent's into therapy is one of the most effective goals for generalization of therapy into the home.
KidsCare Therapy follows a language-based play intervention for your child. At such a young age, children have a short attention span and KidsCare wants to ensure the appropriate therapy. During play therapy, the child's attention is maintained as the child remains motivated and interactive when playing. Target of goals are incorporated into each play session by the speech- language pathologist , while the child believes that they are playing. The play episodes become more memorable and the child is more likely to remember what had occurred during those sessions.