What makes Hanen a much more successful program?
Hanen Programs are focused on parent education, training and empowerment according to their child’s unique needs, stage of communication and style of Communication. Parents learn to interact with their child in more naturalistic ways in everyday life situations. On the contrary, traditional speech therapy only focuses on working with the child, not the entire family. Some parent direction is given, but therapy is provided directly by the SLP.
Traditional speech therapy is usually provided in a clinical setup. A lot more efforts are required to create environments to ensure generalization and maintenance. On the other hand, Hanen Programs uses strategies and activities that occur in daily activities and routines such as cooking or bedtime to incorporate focus on maximizing natural communication of events.
Consistency! Consistency! Consistency!
Traditional Speech Therapy has more of a variable session frequency and duration. Most children meet their Speech therapists only once or twice a week and times can vary from 45 minutes to 1 hour. But Hanen approaches help parents to incorporate strategies in daily routines and in fun ways using People’s games, toys, music, books etc. Depending on what your child needs, this could make an enormous difference in their development!
More Family, Less Therapists
At PlayStreet, we club Hanen approaches with other interventions like Sensory Integration, Alternative and Augmentative communication and Oral Placement Therapy etc. One of the amazing things about Hanen is that it may be done in conjunction with traditional speech therapy to have a bigger effect on progress. When putting the two together, you can maximize your progress as well as home practice.
We teach parents on how to bring voice to their children either through speech or AAC, to use their voice for their opinions and sharing experiences, follow directions and receptively process the verbal and non-verbal language in an interaction with their communication partner. The communication is embedded in family’s daily activities instead of being dedicated to ONLY “speech therapy session time”.
Isn’t that an incredible way to develop your child’s interaction, communication and language?