Home Sweet Home for AAC Communicators

Family involvement is crucial to the success of AAC communicators. Not just involvement, but teaching families to implement strategies at home and across environments. Families should be a part of the TEAM, not just in theory or cursory requests once a year to state their priorities for their child, but a team member that provides valuable input. Their input should be used to drive individualized and family specific goals and expectations to work with their child. Including them as part of the TEAM will make them more motivated to support and help implement your recommendations for treatment.

When families are not involved it will likely result in the child making limited progress and have limited communication partners. If a child is only encouraged to use their AAC system at school or only during speech therapy, and only a few people are working with the child to use their device, it is going to take a long time to make progress. Additionally, this limits the child’s experience using their AAC system with multiple communication partners and number of environments. These situations may cause the child to not see the point or purpose of using the system, realize that the AAC system is their voice and they should use it to communicate, and could lead to abandonment of the AAC system. (Carter & Maxwell, 1998; Johnson, Inglebret, Jones, & Ray, 2006; McNaughton, Rackensperger, Benedek-Wood, Krezman, Williams, & Light, 2008)

Multiple surveys have been conducted that clearly document the fact that families of AAC communicators want to be involved. However, families state that they receive little support and training on how to use and implement their child’s AAC system. Families also convey that the suggestions they receive from their child’s SLP are general and non-specific, and therefore often don’t meet their family’s situation or needs for their child. (Bailey et al., 2006; Parette et al., 2000; Parette et al., 2004;Calculator & Black, 2010; Saito & Turnbull; 2007; Angelo, 2000; Angelo et al., 1995; Angelo et al., 1996

So what does this mean? SLPs need to ask for input and LISTEN to their families! Here are some questions you can ask your families of AAC Communicators to find out specific training needs:

• · Have you received any specific training on the basic operations of your child’s AAC system (e.g., programming, trouble shooting, how to navigate the system, doing software updates, etc.)

• · Do you know how to use your child’s AAC system? Ask them if they use their child’s device to talk to them, ask them questions, show them where symbols are.

• · Have you received any training on how to teach your child to communicate using their AAC system?

• · What are some of your biggest challenges with using the AAC system with your child?

• · Does your child experience any communication breakdowns at home? Think about times you or your

• child are frustrated when your child can’t tell you what they want or can’t tell you why they are upset.

• · What do you most want your child to be able to communicate?

• · When would be times during your daily schedule that would be conducive to spending some extra time using the AAC system with your child? Below is a “formula” for helping you decide some ideal times for AAC system implementation.

Formula for Choosing Activities for AAC Implementation

Asking families these questions will help you prioritize needs for training, goals for the AAC communicator, and specific and customized suggestions for the family on how and when to implement the AAC system at home. Yes, this will take time but it will be so WORTH it! Families will appreciate your support and when a person feels like their input is valuable, they are more likely to become invested in the process.

Check out B&B Boutique Teacher’s Pay Teacher’s store for some great handouts to help parents implement AAC at HOME SWEET HOME!