April 24th, 2009 
My Health 
I have asked myself the same question when it came to OT, PT, SLP, Music therapy, Psychological Services… I have children who have needed intensive language services for years also. Some years/ summers we have been to the SLP up to 6 hrs a week with 2 kids because they needed it. But we all benefited from taking a break last summer and had no therapy at all.
I was noticing a plateau and we were all burned out from working at language development, and other therapies, for so long. Even the therapists I think ( no offense intended to anyone here at all ) can benefit from taking a step back from a long term client and having the opportunity to see them later with new eyes.
If you take an extended break, I found it helpful to finalize a period of intense services with appropriate testing or probes and then repeat it when you go back. My lay observation is that therapists should not begin again after a period of no therapy with the assumption that they know the client and know what to do. And again – no offense – but since testing could be time consuming and expensive – I have seen in some therapists that they would have skipped it unless I insisted I wanted to have it done. Not specifically talking about SLP’s here – just human nature. That happened particularly with school based SLP/OT.
Also, this may not be true or necessary for all parents, but I am a researcher and I got so interested in the fields of language development, occupational therapy and neurological development that I discovered programs that I was interested in trying with my kids, and I moved on to new things that were unavailable with my present therapists.
During last summer when they were on swim team I determined that we had had enough formal OT for a while and have not gone back. This school yr my kids have/do belong to
4-H archery and sewing clubs, Scouts, Tai Shin Do Karate, cartooning classes, rec basketball. I’ m not advocating substituting life experience for therapy, in our case the years we put into formal therapy were necessary for them to get to this point. We tried sports teams and other activities in the early years and their functional skills were so poor that it was hard to participate and they were ostracized to be honest.
In one child’s case we didn’t return to private SLP therapy because of schedules, we went thru a lot of meetings with the public school and increased his speech time there so he could have more available time for sports and other “normal” kid activities with friends after school. Even tho I’ve always felt our private SLP is a better therapist for language development, now that we’ve finally gotten into the swing of it, he is doing just fine for now. His receptive language has finally really exploded. He is now getting 160 mins of SLP time at school/week, which I admit is unusual. His expressive language, apraxia and APD are still an issue but is clearly partly neurological and its going to take a long time of continued work. The most important input right at this point in time is the other children he is around – this is a huge stimulus and motivation for him and far more impacting to him in my opinion than going to evermore hours of
language therapy. But we had a long road to get him to that point. He is a young teen and friends are very important to him.
The other one was having some personality issues with our therapist, who is ultra-creative and intelligent, but maybe her strengths weren’t playing to an autism spectrum child’s need for ultra-consistency. So, we turned my dau over to a younger therapist in the practice and we are doing more drills but the work is defined and repeated and she seems to be working at her capability level. She is homeschooled and really needs structure, consistency and familiarity.
In retrospect I think that if we stop and think about what all these therapies do, you can distill them down to some form of neurological stimulation. Language has to originate in your brain, so do motor skills, etc. So my personal quest has turned to how do you stimulate the brain as a whole? Its not part of this list but the most effective therapies we have found have been nutrition, vitamin supplementation, and Zengar neurofeedback. Both my kids expressive language as well as self regulation have rocketed since we started NFB. From my observation, neurofeedback has helped my children’s neurological systems funtion better, faster and more efficiently and now the explicit therapies that address language, cognition, motor skills etc can be learned, imprinted, grooved in and retained. Another way to think about it is before we were trying to cut with a dull knife, now the knife is sharper and we are getting more precision in our work. It is not a
cure-all but it has clearly helped. On purpose I did the entire TLP program this past year alongside neurofeedback.. So its impossible for me to separate them or even to say that TLP helped, but it didn’t hurt. ( The Listening Program for auditory training)
What will be interesting over time is to see if we can measure how neurofeedback affects APD. Both my children are severely impacted in this realm and as you all know, it is not only hard on them, its also hard on parents. What I’m hoping is that all our efforts as a whole will improve working and short term memory, auditory memory, visual memory, etc. I thinkkkkkk that memory will be a key to helping functionality in APD. It is very hard for me to distinguish in the moment what part of …. I didn’t hear / I don’t understand.. . is APD, auditory memory, normal child stuff, Attention Deficit, whatever. Both my kids have good periods and bad periods with APD, its not really consistent.
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