@mtiffers: Part 4: Communication. There was a time when I was the person who understood her best because I could fill in all the gaps. She didn’t initially qualify for speech at school because she could name things and answer certain questions — but I knew communication was still hard for her. We started working with a private SLP, and around that same season I started paying much closer attention to what I was giving her and how I was supporting her overall. Then her language just started opening up. More words. More phrases. More memory. More of what was going on inside of her finally making its way OUT. It wasn’t instant perfect speech, and we still worked with speech therapy for years. She’s a gestalt language processor, so even now we’re still working through things like sentence structure and those little words that can get skipped. But watching her go from needing me to translate so much of her world…to being able to tell me more and more herself? That part will never stop being huge to me. ❤️ This is one of the reasons I’m so intentional about the tools we use alongside the actual therapies and support doing the heavy lifting. #autism #languagedevelopment #neurodivergent #zeolite #slp @JoySpring
