Early therapy gets child’s speech skills back on track
Mallory Dugan knew her son’s language skills weren’t coming along as they should.
“Chet wasn’t speaking or saying as many words as his peers at daycare or when we would be at social gatherings,” Mallory said. “So we reached out to our pediatrician, and he suggested that we start some speech therapy.”
The family looked at a few places for speech therapy, and friends recommended Kassandra Knapp, the speech pathologist at Howard County Medical Center.
“Chet was totally relaxed. He was comfortable,” Mallory said of their first meeting with Kassandra. “We decided to come here for therapy just because that seemed like the best fit for Chet.”
“Chet was a very quiet child,” Kassandra said. “His mom’s biggest concerns were he wasn't communicating, maybe some increased tantrums because he wasn’t able to get his points across verbally.”
Chet was only speaking two or three words when he began therapy.
“Mom, Dad, Bubba, which is for his brother,” his mom said. “He would get so frustrated when he would go to try to explain something or what he wanted.”
Assessments showed that Chet understood what was being said to him, but verbalizing those things himself was a different matter.
“We’ve really just been working on that expressive language, getting him to understand that verbalizing is a lot easier per se than the gestures and the pointing and that he was using,” Kassandra said.
To the average person, Chet’s speech sessions probably look like play, but a lot of thought and expertise are behind everything the speech pathologist does.
“He’s going to be the most motivated when it’s a task that he enjoys,” Kassandra said, “building the towers, knocking them down, just really infusing that language into those tasks that he enjoys.”
“We come in, and he’s ready to go,” Mallory said. “That’s just really cool to see that relationship as they build and the way he communicates with her.”
“It’s been great to build that relationship with Chet,” Kassandra said. “He’s really just taken off and now beginning to combine those words together and generate those phrases.”
Mallory was initially concerned that Chet would be behind when he started preschool, but starting early on speech therapy got him back on track.
“I didn’t want to see him struggle. I didn’t want to see him be frustrated in communication,” Mallory said. “We felt like starting early was the best fit for us, and obviously, it’s worked great. Now he’s just verbally explaining to us what he wants to do or what he needs.”
Chet’s family lives 35 miles north of St. Paul, so having speech therapy services in the area has been a great fit for them.
“In a small community, in rural areas, we need access to high-quality health care therapists,” Mallory said. “We need people that can give us the care we need versus going to Grand Island, Omaha or Kearney, and we have that here.”
Kassandra pointed out that speech pathology is a broad form of therapy. It includes children needing help with those first communication skills, as well as adults who may have had a stroke and need to relearn to swallow or speak.
“We really take a lot of pride in providing these quality services in our small community,” she said. “I think it’s nice just to step out in the community and to teach them that we do have this. We take pride in being able to serve our patients because, chances are, they're a friend or a loved one.”
