Waiting for Speech Therapy? Start Here... Dr. Inyang Takon Interviews Jeaneen Tang

ingrain the language, which I think really helps the way.

That's fantastic.

So really pleased to hear that.

Thank you so much, Janine, for sharing that.

And I can imagine how difficult that period must have been.

And sometimes as a professional, when this things, it sometimes is even more worrying as well, when you have an idea of what could be going on.

But it's just great to hear that his language, his verbal communication has improved so much.

And How much do you think, obviously you're a speech and language therapist and pathologist, how much do you think that information helped you with stimulating his early language development? And how do you think it shaped his recovery? So what were the things that, when that happened, you saw the delivery, how much did that help in just driving things, that background knowledge?

You know, my background in speech therapy is probably the most instrumental thing that helps his language along because by interacting with him, every interaction is a speech therapy session early on, right? Even now, a lot of people will say, do you ever do speech therapy with your son? And I say I do it all the time, whether he realizes it or not.

Right.

So I'm either working on sequencing or I'm working on narrative recall, whatever it is.

So early on, everything was about making sure he could see my mouth and what my mouth was doing, holding up things near my mouth so he could see what my mouth was doing for the sound of the certain toy or the animal or something.

the food right so he sees what i'm doing i'm offering him choices giving him vocabulary i'm giving him super short sequences of first we're going to do this then we're going to do that and then we can do like we're going to do this first the next the last and we're doing all kinds of things every day to work on his language on his reception singing music reading books, clapping out syllables, tapping out syllables on him, having him dance and move.

So he gets that multimodality of what the words and sounds, what they look like, what they feel like, what they sound like.

And all those things happen.

And I think that it's incorporating everything that I learned before, what I had already had in practice.

And then now I'm working with this little child.

on speech therapy whenever I'm with him, 24-7 or whatever it is, right? And because I was so knowledgeable in early intervention, I knew what kind of therapies he needed once he went home.

So we had all of those in place, right? We spent three months in the hospital.

And in the hospital, he had a lot of therapy.

But as soon as we went home, I made sure that the occupational therapist, the physical therapist, the infant stimulation therapist, The speech therapist, we're all set up so they could evaluate him and provide the therapies right away because I needed to go back to work as well.

And even though I'm a speech therapist and people are like, well, why don't you just provide speech therapy? I'm like, I do whenever I'm with him.

But when I'm at work, I need somebody else there to do that for him.

So I think being the speech therapist and working, especially in early intervention at the time, gave me the knowledge and the experience to really just lay the groundwork for him and then help him be as productive and successful as possible.

As you're saying that,