Clients and families receiving services at My Therapy House® often provide us with positive feedback about our services, family support and progress clients make. We are humbled and honoured to receive such feedback. Due to Speech Pathology Australia’s strict guidelines and rules around publications of testimonials, we are not able to publish these on our website.
We respect Speech Pathology Australia’s guidelines, and although we do not publish testimonials, we enjoy receiving any type of feedback to help us better meet client and family needs as well as help us know what is working well and why it is working. Please feel free to use our suggestion box at My Therapy House®, tell us verbally or email us at hello@mytherapyhouse.com.au
We use an evidence-based collaborative team approach based on child development occurring within the context of family. Therefore, it is important that the family and professionals work together as a collaborative and integrated team around the child, communicating and sharing information, knowledge and skills. A key worker from the team liaises with the family to facilitate rapport building, trust and communication.
“We now understand that the lines of early development are interrelated. Rather than assessing language skills, motor skills, and social-emotional skills separately, we should look at how well these abilities are integrated, how they work together as a whole.”
-Greenspan, Stanley I, and Serena Wieder. Engaging Autism. Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Lifelong Books, 2006. Print.
My Therapy House® is an ICDL and Profectum verified DIRFloortime®provider.
Building healthy relationships and social interactions is the cornerstone of My Therapy House® programs. Each client and family have individualised therapeutic programs that integrates their own natural interests, developmental level, and therapeutic goals. Developmental experiences support sensory-motor, auditory and visual spatial skill development in addition to social-emotional, comprehension and communication development and learning.
The Developmental Relationship-Based Approach, DIRFloortime® was developed over 20 years ago by Doctor Stanley Greenspan, M.D. and Doctor Serena Wieder, PhD and is best understood as this:
Developmental refers to a sequence of social-emotional developmental milestones that a person moves through as they develop the ability to remain calm, attentive, focused and engaged for relating, communicating, problem solving, thinking and learning.
Individual differences describe how each person understands, takes in, processes and relays information in their environment, through their body, actions, thought processes and interactions as they move through their day and life.
Relationship with self, family members, loved ones, peers and adults is the foundation for creating self-esteem, confidence, purpose, interaction, development and lifelong learning.
At My Therapy House®:
- Our Speech Pathologist: helps you to understand and support your child’s communication profile and how this impacts on your child’s emotional wellbeing, comprehension, relationships, intentions, interactions, ideas and participation in social and academic experiences.
- Our Occupational Therapist: supports your child’s sensory-motor and processing profile and how these impact on the ability to interact, learn, play, develop and make friends.
- Our Early Childhood Educator: assists understanding your child’s learning styles, individual profile and supports your child’s learning through movement, music, stories, drama and play in the child’s naturalistic and education settings.
- Our Music Therapist: assists understanding your child’s tempo, rhythms, sound awareness and preferences and how this impacts on their regulation, listening, attention, daily interactions, play, ability to perform activities of daily living and learn.
- Our My Therapy House® Team assists you to understand your family patterns, attachment style and behavioural and emotional profile, and how this impacts on your child’s ability to feel safe and secure in their relationships and world.
The child learns to communicate, play and relate through various stages of social-emotional development from being able to share attention with another, to being able to understand their emotions, other’s emotions and to know that although people may think differently, they are still able to relate to each other by means of reciprocated respectful and caring interactions and relationships.
For more detailed information, please go to Profectum or The Interdisciplinary Council on Development and Learning.
Related Information
BEST PRACTICE
“Health is not simply the absence of sickness.”
– Hannah Green
A child’s health and wellbeing is the foundation for a child’s development. Healthy eating, sleeping, waking and toileting patterns are crucial for the child to feel regulated and ready for learning and development. Our visiting medical health practitioners work with our therapeutic team to support and foster the child’s health and wellbeing, as well as the family’s health and wellbeing to enable the child’s healthy development and learning.
“Calm mind brings inner strength and self-confidence, so that’s very important for good health.”
– Dalai Lama
Emotional regulation is the basis for all development. Children learn best when they feel calm and alert. If children feel stressed, over-excited, angry, anxious, they may become dysregulated. This leads to ‘fight, flight or freeze’ reactions, which can cause their brains and bodies to shut down to development and learning. Children might experience these feelings because they are overwhelmed by too much stimulation, unable to understand what is happening to them or around them, or unable to make themselves understood by others. At My Therapy House® we work on supporting children to feel “just right” in their emotional wellbeing (i.e. calm and alert) which is essential for learning and development. We help the child and parents understand behaviour and how to manage it. We support children by facilitating a safe, calm, fun and stimulating environment to suit children’s individual profiles, as well as educating their parents and others in their life how to best support their children’s nervous systems to optimise development and learning.
“We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
– William James
The My Therapy House® team uses the latest approaches and best practices to support children’s understanding of social situations and how they can best communicate with people they love and who create meaning for them in their life. We help children to learn to be aware of their own social cues and communication attempts as well as read other’s social cues and intentions. Communication is a reciprocal two-way social interaction that requires the listener to able to understand what the child is communicating and what the child’s behaviours may mean in terms of their communication attempts.
The My Therapy House® team provides children and their parents supported therapeutic opportunities to practise communicating with each other, which includes practicing different ways of interacting with each other, experiencing ruptures and breakdowns in their communication, and how to best repair them to keep their interactions going. We also provide different ways of working on the child’s individual profile to help them learn the foundations for communication and language development. This includes being able to generate, plan, sequence, execute and adapt an idea. It also helps them find ways to express their intentions around their ideas. Social communication is the basis for interaction, problem-solving and conversing with others, as well as being able to participate in meaningful relationships and play.
“To effectively communicate, we must realize that we are all different in the way we perceive the world and use this understanding as a guide to our communication with others.”
– Tony Robbins
Comprehension is the foundation for all communication. It is a complex process and does not occur in a vacuum. In order to be able to understand non-verbal cues (i.e. facial expressions, gestures, tone) and verbal information (spoken word) children need to be able to register, discriminate and interpret what they are seeing and hearing as meaningful messages. Children find it easier to understand language within well-established routines with people they are familiar with. At My Therapy House®, we assist families to understand their child’s language profile (i.e. what they understand and what they do not, what modes of communication are easiest for them to understand and how to support their child’s development in verbal and non-verbal language and comprehension). Comprehension is the essence of all communication and play. The child’s individual profile – body awareness, ability to come up with ideas, sensory challenges, visual processing, auditory processing, understanding their space and how objects and people fit into their space – can all influence the child’s language comprehension development. The My Therapy House® team works with parents and caregivers to assist them in assisting their child to develop comprehension and help them understand why it is a cornerstone in child development.
“Children need freedom and time to play. Play is not a luxury. Play is a necessity.”
– Redfield Jamison
Play is the work of a child. Children learn so much through play. They learn about themselves and other people. They learn how things work, understand about routines and distinguish right from wrong. They practise ways of communicating and behaving. At My Therapy House® we use play as the primary means of working with children and their families. We support different stages of play development, including exploratory, sensory-motor, pretend, symbolic, role and peer play. We help parents learn about the importance of play and play development, as well as providing a safe and nurturing environment to practise and develop play skills for the whole family.
“The path of development is a journey of discovery that is clear only in retrospect, and it’s rarely a straight line.”
– Eileen Kennedy-Moore
The My Therapy House® team works through play and parenting support to help children develop their routines around toileting, bathing, eating, sleeping and dressing. Parents are informed about the readiness skills needed for these areas of development. We also work with children and their families around transition into adolescence and puberty.
“The language of Friendship is not thoughts but meanings.”
– Henry David Thoreau
The My Therapy House® team offers children with individual and small group support in naturalistic settings. Our homelike environment and beautiful child and family friendly garden setting supports impromptu play and interaction experiences between siblings and peers. We can also support the people who work with the child in other environments (e.g. childcare centres, preschools and schools) to help foster peer relationships. This often involves visiting the children’s environments and facilitating meetings (with the help of parents) to discuss development and individual profiles. We support the child to understand another’s intentions, ideas and feelings, and to communicate clearly their own intentions, ideas and feelings. My Therapy House® team members work on the child’s social and play capacities in their natural environments.
“Don’t walk behind me; I may not lead. Don’t walk in front of me; I may not follow. Just walk beside me and be my friend.”
– Albert Camus
The My Therapy House® team provide peer dyads (two children with two staff) and small group sessions with peers. Children are often expected to integrate into larger groups without knowing how to regulate themselves, understand the social cues of others or how to communicate their intentions and feelings. In these overwhelming and confusing environments, our staff act as interpreters and support workers for the children, helping them make meaning around what peers are doing, communicating, thinking and feeling. Staff also help children communicate their ideas, intentions and feelings more clearly to others.
“I sustain myself with the love of my family.”
– Maya Angelou
Siblings are encouraged to attend sessions, as they are a significant part of the child’s life. Siblings often cannot read their brother’s or sister’s intentions and may feel overwhelmed, fearful or jealous by the attention generated by the sibling with special needs. We offer individual or small group sessions for siblings to help them express their feelings, understand who their brother or sister is, and learn how to interact successfully with them.
“If we continually try to force a child to do what he is afraid to do, he will become more timid, and will use his brains and energy, not to explore the unknown, but to find ways to avoid the pressures we put on him. If, however, we are careful not to push a child beyond the limit of his courage, he is almost sure to get braver.”
– John Holt
The My Therapy House® team provides family support, information and education. All the My Therapy House® Team members work in partnership and collaboration with parents and families to support, inform and educate them about the child’s individual differences and how these may be affecting the child’s social emotional, communication, play, sensory-motor and learning development and behaviour. We work to help parents with parenting and living with a child with special needs, and being able to understand and coordinate the services available to them, as well as funding options and supports. We work on helping families understand their child’s behaviours, relationship with each other, attachment styles and how they could best support their child’s development. We do this individually and through parent information sessions.
The My Therapy House® team also provides information about accessing funding options, including the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) and Medicare.
Have a chat to learn more about how we can help.
Children and relationships are our passion.