My name is Stacy Levy, and I’m here to talk with you about how you as a parent or caregiver can help your child achieve success in their therapy program.
Our Goal Is to Create a Plan of Care for Your Child
First of all, let’s go over some words that I might be talking about that you may be unfamiliar with. When your child gets an evaluation at DTS, we’ll talk about the plan of care. A plan of care is what the therapist is going to create based off of assessment findings and observational findings in addition to parent concerns and feedback.
This plan is going to outline both short-term and long-term goals and objectives for your child. These are the things that our therapists are going to be working on directly (and indirectly) during the therapy session.
Our Evaluation Aligns Parent Concerns with Therapist Observations and Professional Judgment
The key to your child’s success in therapy is parent involvement and parent contribution. We start that at DTS by having the parent complete a pretty intensive intake form. In that intake form, there are questionnaires and pre-assessments that help us direct where we want our assessment energy to go.
The parent feedback in those intake papers is very, very important; it offers you an opportunity to give us your child’s past history as well as your present concerns and observations. Then, when your child comes for their evaluation, we have an idea of what we want to target throughout that evaluation process based on what you said in the intake forms, meaning what your concerns are and what is bringing you in to seek intervention.
It’s not uncommon that the therapist will approach your child with a different lens. They’re able to observe some additional things that we might want to consider in the plan of care. Once the evaluation process is completed, the therapist will use professional judgment and weigh the parent concerns that were provided in the intake process with what was observed in the evaluation process. Our goal is to marry those two parts so that the plan of care provides the intervention that the family wants as well as what the clinician judges as the best starting point for ultimate success.
Parent Support for the Recommended Treatment Plan Increases the Child’s Success
In that plan of care, there are goals and objectives that are short-term and long-term. In order for us to achieve successful mastery of our goals, we require consistent attendance to therapy. The therapist might prescribe a specific frequency of attendance as part of your child’s plan of care, meaning they might recommend a specific number of times your child should come to therapy per week. Maybe it’s one time a week, maybe it’s three or four times a week. It all depends on what the evaluation process reveals.
The frequency of intervention is very important for us to know in order to achieve those short-term goals in a period of time, traditionally three months. That’s why attendance is so important. If the child is sick, we really want that child to make up the missed session so that we can stay on track for the prescribed plan of care.
If there is a break from school, we want that child to come into the clinic if they’re being seen at school, and we really encourage the parents to participate in the intervention. It could be 1:1 traditional intervention or it can be the intensive therapy options at DTS which I talk about in a different article. Nevertheless, what we want to do is to stay consistent because that is what is going to help us achieve the outcomes on the plan of care.
Kids Get More Motivated When They See Parents and Therapists Working Together
Another thing that parents and caregivers can do that will set us up for success is coming and sitting in our therapy sessions. We have an open-door policy at DTS. We encourage parents and caregivers to come and participate in the session. It’s a great opportunity for you to hear how the therapist is talking about what they’re doing. You can see and you can experience how they are prompting or how they are encouraging success toward their goals.
Sitting in on a session or multiple sessions provides an opportunity for you to communicate with a therapist and get more information about situations that come up in the moment that possibly you don’t have the opportunity to bring up another time.
It’s also a fact that when the child sees you participate, or sees you communicate with a therapist, your child is going to know that you’re on the same page, and that is going to drive their internal motivation. Parent involvement, internal motivation, and consistent attendance are going to set your child up for success.
Reach Out to DTS to Get Started Today
We all want your child to succeed and to meet their goals. There’s nothing better than to achieve those objectives and to plan graduation from therapy. So, to summarize, how you can set your child up for success and achieve pediatric outcomes is to:
- Provide as much information as possible in the intake process,
- Be aware of the plan of care,
- Stick to the frequency of therapy sessions that’s prescribed in the plan of care
- Participate in (or at least attend) the therapy sessions
If you are a DTS family and you have questions about your plan of care, I would encourage you to reach out to your therapy team or therapist. Otherwise, if you are interested in becoming a DTS family, then I would encourage you to reach out to us online, or you can call us directly at (225) 767-5032. If you’re not really sure if intervention is appropriate for your family, then I would encourage you to take our free developmental screener that will help you determine whether or not this is the time to initiate the intervention process for your child.