Communication with professionals

Every child has a need, and that includes children with special needs too (I personally prefer using the term “different needs”). In the area of intervention, different children might need different intervention needs; some might need more intrusive help in developing certain motor skills, some might not need it at all, and some might have significant allergic reactions towards certain food, while some may not have many problems with food. Hence as the parent for a child that needs early intervention, you might need to meet and work with more than one professional to provide your child with his/her developmental needs.

Every professional has their approach and their recommendations to help their client. When you are working with more than one, there will be differences in opinion and the kind of approach used that may sometimes cause unwanted confusion for parents. The victim of the situation always ends up being the child. Everybody in the team wants to do their best to help the child and so would insist on their own approach. For example, a child that receives different consequences for an unexpected behaviour in two different therapy settings will be confused with what is right or wrong. This child might take longer, with more frustrating attempts to learn the appropriate behaviour.

Communication between professionals is essential to ensure that the child benefits from the intervention that he or she is receiving. Parents are an important catalyst in making this happen. It is beneficial for the professionals to meet each other at least once. Parents can initiate a meeting with both (or more) professionals, or to invite one of them to come along for one of the visits, and of course to ask for their consent before hand. Please initiate and insist!

This meeting is very useful for us professionals and parents for the following reasons:

• ·    To communicate and understand the target that each of us has for the child, INCLUDING the goals that parents want. This meeting is the best time to set common realistic goals for the child, for the next 6 months or a year time.
• ·    To communicate and understand reason behind the approach that each of us is using, and try to liaise with each other so that there’s no overlapping or contradicting methods. We do not want to confuse the child or the parents.
• ·    To delegate areas of concentration, so that everybody has a clear role to focus on. For example, if we at EAP focus on building language, then the speech therapist can focus on articulation.
• ·   To learn from each other, and to incorporate each other’s exercise into therapy, if possible. For example, therapists learn methods of oral desensitization exercises from the Speech Pathologist, and we are currently incorporating it into therapy for one of our children so that she gets more out of the exercises. This actually helped her to start chewing her food, within a month!
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And last but not least, parents please continue to communicate your goals, opinions, feedbacks, and ideas to every professional that you are working with regularly, to ensure that your child is learning in a well balanced and happy environment!