We can better support children’s needs by adopting and actively practicing trauma informed care.

Trauma-informed care recognizes and responds to the signs, symptoms, and risks of trauma to better support the health needs of patients who have experienced negative consequences from dangerous situations. It's a commitment to avoid repeating traumatic experiences and to help people regain a sense of safety, power, and self-worth despite the toxic stress they have been exposed to.

Read more here:
https://www.healthcaretoolbox.org/d-e-f-framework-trauma-informed-care

“Healthy development in the early years provides the building blocks for educational achievement, economic productivity, responsible citizenship, lifelong health, strong communities, and successful parenting of the next generation.”

“This three-part video series from the Center and the National Scientific Council on the Developing Child depicts how advances in neuroscience, molecular biology, and genomics now give us a much better understanding of how early experiences are built into our bodies and brains” -Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University

Learn more here:
https://developingchild.harvard.edu/resources/three-core-concepts-in-early-development/

Did you know that exposure to trauma can have lifelong lasting impacts and even result in increased physical health risks as well shortened lifespan?

Former Surgeon General of California & Pediatrician, Nadine Burke Harris, expounds on the neurological impacts of trauma across the lifespan in the TEDTalk entitled “How childhood trauma affects health across a lifetime” 💔📈📊🧠

“High doses of adversity not only affect brain structure and function, they affect the developing immune system, developing hormonal systems, and even the way our DNA is read and transcribed.” -Nadine Burke Harris

Watch TED Talk in full here:
https://youtu.be/95ovIJ3dsNk?si=ETLaH0e73Lhbika8

Did you know that childhood is a crucial period for not only speech language development but for building cognitive development?

During times of today when screentime is at an all time high, social communication skills, motor planning, and attention difficulties are being experienced by children worldwide like never before.

This summer, monitor your child’s overexposure to screen time and encourage your child’s participation in routine physical activities.

Scientific studies show, children who are more physically active have increased chances of demonstrating improvement in the following areas:
-focusing capabilities which include joint attention- coordinating one’s attention with others, attuning to stimuli and structured tasks presented for uninterrupted durations of time
-memory recall- retrieving information and/or experiences from the past
-emotional regulation- contributes to one’s ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experiences and process a variety of emotions; monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions
-executive functions- contributes to one’s ability to select and monitor behaviors that can facilitate the accomplishment of one’s goals
-social communication skills- interacting with others whether it be verbal and/or nonverbal communication in addition to understanding why and how one communicates

Improvements in all the aforementioned areas can yield to higher academic performance.

In 2020 after the George Floyd murder, I created an IG post titled "5 Ways to Support Black and Brown Children in Clinical and Education Settings." I repurposed the post into a poster to help service providers and educators better service multicultural children. You can get it here: https://tinyurl.com/supportBIPOCkids

I have retired and have hundreds of stories, activities, photos, images, art for speech and language and also for early teaching for teachers. I have set up a site to share these materials with others at a discount - normally $25 but now $15 if you use the code honeybunny10 at https://www.slpstorytellers.com/register-2/ I hope others can use these downloadable stories and activities as I did over the years and some I have created recently.

I have retired and have hundreds of stories, activities, photos, images, art for speech and language and also for early teaching for teachers. I have set up a site to share these materials with others at a discount - normally $25 but now $15 if you use the code honeybunny10 at https://www.slpstorytellers.com/register-2/ I hope others can use these downloadable stories and activities as I did over the years and some I have created recently.

Our latest blog discusses using playful methods in speech therapy to boost communication skills. It emphasizes the effectiveness of wordplay, games, and puzzles for enhancing language learning and client engagement. Click here to read the blog:
https://content.liricare.com/games-in-speech-therapy/

Speech-language pathologists (SLPs) are always on the lookout for creative methods to boost engagement and enhance therapy results. Using humor in speech-language therapy sessions stands out as a powerful technique to meet these objectives. This blog delves into the importance of humor in speech therapy, highlighting how it can aid clients facing communication difficulties.

https://content.liricare.com/humor-in-speech-therapy/

Rare Disease Day !
Rare diseases pose special challenges which impact patients, the clinicians who care for them, and the investigators who study their conditions. Although rare diseases—defined as affecting < 200,000 US adults1—are individually uncommon, they are common in the aggregate, with nearly 7,000 such rare diseases affecting 25 to 30 million US adults, altogether 9% to 12% of the US population.1 Rare pulmonary diseases comprise an important subset and include, for example, alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency (AATD), primary ciliary dyskinesia, lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM), Hermansky-Pudlak syndrome, Birt-Hogg-Dube syndrome, pulmonary Langerhans cell histiocytosis, and hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia, among many others.

The challenge of these rare diseases is captured in the names of organizations charged with their oversight, that is; the branch of the Food and Drug Administration that oversees rare disease treatments is called the Office of Orphan Products Development, the designated group of the National Institutes of Health is called the Office of Rare Diseases, and the legislation that directs regulatory requirements for drugs and devices for these conditions is called the Orphan Disease Act. Orphan diseases may lack support and advocacy just as orphans lack parents.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chest.2017.12.018