House of Krause

Labels are just labels. Why does it matter if it’s called speech delay or Apraxia? Top two reasons. Number one, getting your child in the right type of speech therapy is crucial.  Speech therapy for Apraxia is different.  Think of it as “training your brain”. It involves visual cues and prompting over and over again. Some one once told me with Apraxia you might have to repeat a word a hundred times to get your child to say it once. I think it’s more like a thousand! Seeking treatment with a therapist that is not familiar with speech Apraxia is a bad choice. Why take the side streets, when you can jump on the freeway! I’m sure there are techniques that  work for a child with Apraxia, but there is one method that is tried and proven -The Kaufman speech praxis treatment approach.(Nancy Kaufman)

The Kaufman speech praxis treatment approach helps the child produce words with their best approximations through shaping, cueing, fading, and reinforcement techniques, employing the principles of operant conditioning/shaping (Skinner, 1959)-there’s that brain training. True Apraxia does not go away, it is life long. If left untreated it will not resolve on it’s own.

And number two, so you can be reassured you are not losing your mind! It can be very confusing and frustrating journey to discovering Apraxia in your child.  We were told speech delay (he will talk when he’s ready) several times.  I would just leave appointments scratching my head because that just didn’t add up.  It left to many questions unanswered.   We thought maybe Luke was Autistic, some parts fit, but then still that didn’t really add up either. We finally heard the word Apraxia from a wonderful Occupational therapist. She went back and reviewed with us Luke’s language from the very beginning.  After researching and learning about it, all the pieces  fit. It finally made sense!

Tags: Childhood Apraxia of Speech, Lucid Speech and Language, Nancy Kaufman, speech therapy

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 8:03 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.