Speech and language delay: carrying the speech-language pathologist's targets into the day

The assessment, the targets, the method, the pace, and any alternative communication system the child uses: pictures, signs or a device. Speech and language therapy is a separately qualified profession. Nothing a special educator does replaces it, and a special educator who starts inventing targets is doing harm, however well meant.

Takes the current targets from the last session and puts them into ordinary moments: naming at the dining table, choices at play, the same picture book read the same way every evening. Uses the prescribed communication system consistently and everywhere, not only during a lesson. Models language without correcting. Waits. Records what the child said and did, so that the therapist's next session begins from real information rather than from the parent's summary of a busy week.

The special educator also teaches the rest of the household to do the same, because a target that only one adult works on is a target the child meets only when that adult is present.

A child finding words needs adults who wait for them. It sounds simple. In a busy home, with one adult who answers for the child, another who completes the sentence, and a school run that is already late, it is the hardest thing in the day. A trained special educator brings that pace and, over weeks, teaches the rest of the household to hold it too: the extra three seconds before anyone speaks.

Most of the families we work with are raising a child in two or three languages: English at school, Hindi or the city's regional language at home, sometimes a third elsewhere in the household. For a child with a speech delay the question of which language, and who speaks it, is a clinical one. Ask the speech-language pathologist what they recommend for your child, and make the home support match that recommendation. A special educator who can work in the family's languages can then carry the targets into the household's conversations as well as the school's.

For a two- or three-year-old, the need is not lessons. It is daily care with language woven through it: the bath, the meal, the walk to the park, each one a place the target lives. A special educator for a child this age works alongside the parent and the household rather than in a separate session, and much of the work is showing the adults what to do when the special educator is not there.

A short daily note: what the target was, where it was practised, what the child did, what was new. Not a report. A line or two, kept on the phone, shared with the speech-language pathologist before each session. Therapists tell us it is the single most useful thing a home professional provides, and the thing they almost never get.