With summer right around the corner, it’s time to start considering your child’s speech needs during that long, 10-week hiatus. I get asked all the time, is it ok if my child goes all summer without speech therapy? My answer—No!
While summer brings a necessary respite from intensive study, it is not a time to stop everything. All children, whether they have speech needs or not, regress to some degree during summer break. For children with speech needs, this can be particularly damaging—especially since school speech sessions typically do not begin again until the end of September.
Summer is actually the perfect time to focus a little more on speech goals and needs. For those children in need of speech/articulation therapy, constant drills, repetition and rehearsal are best practice, and allow for positive habits to form.
So, instead of doing nothing, or approaching summer as only a time for maintenance or regression prevention, let’s use summer as a time to excel and build confidence going into the next school year. Speech language communication needs never take a vacation, so let’s not take a vacation from them!
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