Imagine: you are sharing your deepest wishes with a trusted friend. You are sharing a cup of coffee on the couch and you feel led to begin a conversation about your goals for the coming New Year. You share your regrets from the past year and your hopes and dreams about how you envision this …
Baskin Robbins: How Do I Decide?
Get the Backstory: Validating and Valuing Family Input
The Unspoken Realities of Child Abuse during a Pandemic
During the past year, our world has overturned with public health concerns, teleworking from home, social distancing, and childcare facility closures. As this shift has occurred, we as EI providers have naturally adjusted to our new reality. However, some of these exact safety measures meant to keep the public safe has created a daunting reality …
Successfully Engaging Caregivers in the Child Outcomes Summary Process Virtually
Despite not being able to meet in person, tele-intervention (telehealth) has brought new opportunities to think about how we are talking about the child outcome summary process. Let’s be completely honest. Tele-intervention forces us to use good teaming practices because there cannot be any side conversations among professionals and everyone is only able to see …
Temperament and Social Emotional Development
When talking to parents and caregivers, it can be helpful to ask them what they know about temperament and assess their understanding of how their temperament matches (or doesn’t match!) their child’s. Parents may be able to talk about their child’s response to different environments, sensory preferences or reaction to change and may not have …
3 Key Strategies for Building Relationships with Dads
Several years ago, I found that my EI caseload included a couple of families with stay-at-home dads. This was a first for me, and I found myself struggling to connect with family caregivers, which hadn’t happened to me since I was new to the field. Both men were quite nice, but I stumbled when I …
AAC in EI: Debunking Common Myths and Misconceptions
Amanda and I met while working at a special education charter school as an Assistive Technology specialist and special education teacher. Somehow, several years later, we have both ended up working in EI. Amanda currently works as a Speech-Language Pathologist providing EI services and AAC evaluations in DC and I am a Developmental Therapist in …
EI Tele-Assessment Video Chats & Strategies: You’ve Got This!
Here’s the question: Whoever, in a million years, thought we’d be doing developmental assessments using video conferencing??
Really, when you think about that, it’s equally unnerving and amazing. Unnerving because it can seem like a completely new way of gathering information about a child’s development without even being physically present with the child. Amazing because …
7 Technology Tips for Tele-Intervention
Technology is great when it works, right? It’s such an embedded part of most of our lives when we are not in the throws of a global pandemic that many of us hardly think about it. Now, though, when early interventionists are chin deep in trying to navigate tele-intervention, figuring out how to connect through …