When people hear about speech therapy, they most likely think of it as a branch of health care that helps individuals living with conditions that affect their speech and language skills. While this is absolutely true, what many people don’t realize is that speech therapy can offer individuals and their loved ones so much more!

According to the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA), speech therapy aims to “prevent, assess, diagnose, and treat speech, language, social communication, cognitive-communication, and swallowing disorders in children and adults.” People who provide speech therapy are known as speech-language pathologists (SLPs), or simply speech therapists.

If your loved one has been referred to speech therapy by a health care provider or educator, it could be because your loved one needs help with things like:

Expressing themselves and communicating, interacting, and playing with others using verbal and non-verbal language
Speaking and making sounds clearly
Improving their ability to hear sounds using their ears or make sense of (process) sounds using their brains
Nourishing and feeding themselves safely
Developing their “executive functioning skills,” which includes things like regulating their emotions, making decisions, solving problems, paying attention, and remembering things
To us, speech therapy means helping people nourish themselves—through safe swallowing and feeding, effective communication, and improved learning and self-care skills—and helping people nourish others by improving their interpersonal interactions!