What is Speech Therapy?
Many people don’t know that speech therapy can help in so many more ways than just working on how someone’s speech sounds!
In my opinion, ‘speech therapy’ doesn’t accurately represent all the ways that this service can actually help people, and it has a tendency to be associated primarily with young kids needing help with speech sounds. If it were up to me, speech therapy would be called communication therapy, because speech therapists are highly skilled professionals trained in all things communication!
The technical name for a speech therapist is ‘speech-language pathologist’. We study, evaluate, diagnose, and treat speech, language, social communication, cognitive-communication, swallowing, and voice disorders in children and adults. In short, we are communication experts!
Each of these areas can surely have its own blog post, but for now we’ll just scratch the surface with brief overviews so that you can have a better understanding of how speech therapy can help people of all ages.
What ages do speech therapists work with?
The really simple answer is 0 to 100+...bet you didn’t expect that!
It’s a wide age range with an even wider scope of areas that we can help with at each age. Let’s break down the areas that a speech therapist might work on within each age group.
1. Newborns
Speech therapists who specialize in working with this age group primarily focus on lactation support with newborns. Part of our training as speech therapists is to have an expert level of understanding of the swallowing mechanism.
2. Infants & Toddlers
Sometimes a child may have very few words by the time they turn 2 or 3 years old. They may not be meeting their language development milestones. This is when you might seek the help of a speech therapist; to help your child achieve language milestones by building vocabulary, putting words together to create sentences, communicate wants and needs, and to be able to start having conversations!
Sometimes a toddler might be difficult to understand because they are leaving out or switching sounds in words. If a child has a solid vocabulary and is communicating in sentences, they may be ready to focus more on the actual speech sounds used to make up those words in order to speak clearly enough for others to understand what they are saying.
The above mentioned explanations are just brief summaries of the differences between speech and language. You can learn more in-depth information about the differences between the two in a later blog post.
3. Kids & Teens
Between the ages of 3 and 18, kids and teens may require the services of a speech therapist to help with speech sounds, language (including understanding and using vocabulary to improve comprehension and communication skills), stuttering, and social skills.
4. Adults (ages 18+)
Adults may seek to work with a speech therapist if they feel they have lingering speech sound difficulties (i.e., lisp, difficulties with ‘r’, etc.), stuttering, are in need of social skills coaching, have experienced a stroke or traumatic brain injury and as a result have to improve speech clarity or word retrieval, or perhaps are seeking accent modification to master certain sounds if English is their second language.
After many years of explaining what I do to people, I’ve come to realize that there is one group of individuals that often gets glossed over when people think about who a speech therapist can help.
Young adults who are out of high school, perhaps in college or even in their 30’s, who may be struggling to make friends, have conversations with others, or who may even be having difficulty finding or keeping a job because they struggle to communicate with others. Communication barriers may include difficulties with knowing what to say, how to interact with others, social anxiety, or a combination of all these things.
Here’s the thing, social skills are communication skills, and speech therapy helps with improving…you guessed it: communication skills!
We need communication skills to live full, connected lives, where we can connect with other people and develop relationships, whether that’s with family members, friends, coworkers, or romantic partners.
There you have it, a very abbreviated version of how speech therapists can help.
Future posts will dive a little deeper into various aspects of our field, specifically areas that are in my area of specialty and topics/questions that are frequently asked by my clients.
If you know anyone that might benefit from learning more about the services a speech therapist can provide, share this post! If you or someone you know has questions and would like to connect with me directly, you can fill out our contact form or schedule a free consultation call so we can chat!