Mindfulness For Kids: A Guide For Parents

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In today’s world, we all have a lot to juggle that requires our attention including school, extracurricular activities, technology, friendships, and relationships. It can be easy to get through our day feeling as if we moved from task to task without a break! How can we slow down, increase attention, promote self-esteem, and reduce overall stress and anxiety for our children?

By incorporating mindfulness and meditation into our everyday routines, we can build our attentional skills and prepare our children for coping with a variety of feelings, emotions, and situations!

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Echolalia, Echolalia… What Do You Mean?

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Like most things, the views on echolalia lie on a continuum. They range from considering its use non-functional, to tolerating it, to really accepting and celebrating it. We, as parents, caregivers, clinicians, and professionals, can facilitate further acceptance by understanding language learning differences, embracing echolalia, and educating others! 

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Crawling, Can My Child Skip It?

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Why is crawling such a big deal? What if my child doesn’t seem interested in crawling? These are all common questions that are brought up by parents. Crawling is much more than just a means of mobility. It provides a child with some important strengthening, coordination, and cognitive benefits that will help them much later than the baby and toddler years.  

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The Development of Play and How to Promote Play-Based Experiences for Your Young Child

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What is Play?

  1. Play is enjoyable and valued by the player.
  2. Play is intrinsically motivating.
  3. Play is spontaneous and voluntary. 
  4. Play involves some active engagement on the part of the player.
  5. Play is linked with creativity, problem-solving, language learning, and the development of social roles, and a number of other cognitive and social phenomena.

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Supporting Emergent Literacy

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Did you know that before your child can even pick up a book they are already practicing emergent literacy skills? Read on to learn how to support your child as they begin to explore reading!

What is emergent literacy?

Emergent literacy skills are foundational language based skills that support future literacy, academic success, and social communication. Emergent literacy is a stage of development beginning at birth in which children explore and learn skills that lead them to reading and writing in the future (Roth et al., 2006). This is vital for early language and literacy development and can be supported daily! 
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Criss Cross Your Midline!

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The crowd goes wild! Your child has just swung and hit their first home run! They run around the bases and go to touch home plate. Your child is showered with high-fives from teammates on the left and right. Among other things, in order for your child to have successfully swung and hit a home run, run around the bases, and give high-fives to his teammates, your child would have to have done one really important thing… cross midline! The ability to cross midline and interact with all areas of our environment is an important skill for all of us to learn. Let’s explore!

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Little Yogis: Benefits of Yoga for Children

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These past 2 years have been a whirlwind. With the transition from in-person to virtual and back to in-person school, less opportunity for socialization, along with the uncertainty of what life will look like each day; it’s no surprise that we are seeing an increase in childhood stress and anxiety. So, what strategies can we provide to ease the stress our kids are facing today?

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Favorite Books for Young Readers

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Importance of Reading to Young Children

Reading to children helps build their vocabulary, helps them learn early literacy skills (like print concepts, letters and their sounds, etc.), and build a love for reading. Not only does reading improve your child’s academic skills, research shows that reading also strengthens children’s social and emotional development. According to this research, reading to young children is linked to decreased levels of aggression, hyperactivity, and attention problems (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2017). Aside from all the wonderful things reading to your child helps teach them, it is also a great way to spend quality time together (Van Amburg, 2021)!

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Starting with AAC? Here are Some Tips!

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Now that some Augmentative and Alternative Communication (AAC) myths have been busted (see the previous blog post), it’s time to introduce, support, and use AAC with your child! Your speech-language pathologist and therapy team can help determine which systems and modalities are most appropriate to trial. Once you have these trial systems in place, here are some considerations, strategies, and tips to think about when supporting your child on his or her AAC journey.

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