My 8 Year Old Just “Graduated” From Speech Therapy! High Five!

She started speech therapy at 18 months old. Today she is 8 years old.

My daughter was a 3lb, tiny bundle of joy. NICU graduation was just the first process she had to overcome. We knew there were going to be many other graduations and milestones in the coming years. One of them was speech.

At 18 months, she was doing Occupational Therapy, Nutrition Therapy, Physical Therapy, and Speech Therapy. All the other services continued to drop as she got older and stronger, but I continued to advocate her need for speech therapy. I didn’t care what people would think. I didn’t care that she was going to Kindergarten with an IEP. I didn’t care about anything besides her growing into a voice that could confidently stand up for herself, make friends, lead, and read.

Speech is more than just talking. It’s a comprehensive understanding of language. Around the age of 4, she almost didn’t qualify for speech. She just barely made the cut and I was so relieved. Speech is about comprehension, understanding, making sense of language, following directions, and story telling. My daughter scored beyond expectations for all parts of speech besides articulation. The words expressed spoken out loud is one part of speech. And that’s what she has been working on for the last 7 years. I wanted my daughter to go to kindergarten and be able to articulate for her needs and advocate for herself when I wouldn’t be there. So, Early Intervention in PA worked with us and we were able to secure speech therapy for her.

I’m so glad I did. Because she went to Kindergarten with confidence. In preschool we could barely understand her and by Kindergarten, she could be understood 60% of the time. She had and IEP and had articulation goals. She has worked hard on the following sounds: Ch, Ph, l, f, Sm, Sn, G, b, and many more. The S blends were particularly hard for her. When she started to read and write in Kindergarten, I remember her writing about a “vroom” around Halloween. There was another aspect of speech that I had not considered: literacy. She wrote sounds based on what she said out loud. She said “vroom” rather than broom. She has had to memorize more words than other kids since she knows that some times she doesn’t say a sound correctly.

Having introduced her to speech therapy early on also allowed for this to be a positive experience. She has always known what her speech goals are and her therapists continue to describe her as a hard worker and self-corrector. We don’t hush around the topic and we don’t hide it. We boast her strengths openly. And we address areas that need work openly as well. We never have masked that her articulation wasn’t okay. We know it. And now we can say, we knew it. Because today, at her reevaluation, she has met her goals 100% and her articulation is at grade level. She is reading and writing with confidence and her teacher today said “she knows how to work a room and can lead her friends”. And that is why I kept an IEP in speech even when we could have gone without one. I kept her confidence and success in the forefront.

So, if you are a parent and have thoughts if your kid might benefit from extra work with speech, go ahead and do it. There’s nothing to lose. There is a whole lot of confidence to gain.