Speech & Language Help for Kids: Expert SLP Tips for Parents and Teachers

Dinalynn Rosenbush, certified speech-language pathologist and host of the Language of Play podcast, shares research-backed approaches for supporting children's communication skills through play when speech therapy services are delayed or unavailable.

• Nearly 8% of children ages 3-17 have communication disorders with speech problems being most common
• Children need to hear a word approximately 400 times before they begin using it themselves
• Understanding the difference between speech (sound production) and language (meaning, vocabulary, sentences)
• Simple strategies include having sensory-rich conversations about everyday activities
• Expand vocabulary by providing multiple words for common concepts (hot, warm, heated)
• Screen time impacts pragmatic language development, with 40% of children ages 3-10 struggling with social communication
• Create intentional tech-free time for family conversations and connection
• Stay curious about children's behavior, remembering that all behavior is communication
• Providing correction when children use incorrect grammar helps build their reading foundation

You can find Dinalynn's podcast "The Language of Play" on any player, contact her at hello@thelanguageofplay.com, or access free resources through her newsletter.

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Chapters

• 0:38 Speech Therapy Barriers & Challenges
• 3:46 The Language of Play Approach
• 9:01 Speech vs. Language Explained
• 12:57 Strategies Parents and Teachers Can Use
• 17:22 How Speech Affects Reading Development
• 21:30 Screen Time's Impact on Communication
• 26:24 Closing Thoughts & Finding Resources

Transcript

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 0:19

Are you waiting for speech therapy or wondering if your child even needs it? Are you worried that the window for impactful help might be narrowing? Well, today we're talking about what you can do right now to support speech and language development, no matter what your role or resources. Welcome to the brighter side of education, research, innovation and resources. I'm your host, dr Lisa Hassler, here to enlighten and brighten the classrooms in America through focused conversation on important topics in education. In each episode, I discuss problems we as teachers and parents are facing and what people are doing in their communities to fix it. What are the variables and how can we duplicate it to maximize student outcomes?

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 1:10

If you've ever been told to wait and see while your child struggles to communicate, you're not alone. For many families and teachers, the most frustrating part of navigating speech therapy is simply getting started. Speech therapy is simply getting started. Long wait lists and delayed intervention have become widespread barriers, especially during the early years, when children are not only learning how to talk but learning how to read, and, according to the CDC, nearly 8% of children ages 3 to 17 have a communication disorder, with speech problems being the most common. Children with speech sound disorders are at a higher risk for reading difficulties due to the challenges with phonological awareness, an essential skill for decoding and fluency. A 2020 study in the Journal of Speech, language and Hearing Research found that persistent speech issues in early childhood strongly predict later literacy struggles. And, while early intervention has proven benefits, many families are forced to wait, sometimes for months or years, and educators are left trying to support students without adequate tools or resources. So what can we do when the system can't keep up?

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 2:17

Well, today's guest brings us an empowering, research-backed approach to supporting communication skills through something every child understands play. Dina Lynn Rosenbusch is a certified speech-language pathologist and the host of the Language of Play podcast. With years of experience in schools and private practice, she saw a growing need to help families bridge the gap when services were delayed or even unavailable. Through her podcast and workshops, she equips adults with tools that they can use to nurture communication, naturally through plain connection. Her work is research-informed, practical and full of heart. Welcome, dina Lynn. I am so excited that you are here. I look forward to this exciting conversation we're about to have.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 2:59

Thank you, Dr Lisa. It's a joy to be here and a privilege and an honor. The Brighter Side of Education is a fantastic podcast. I'm glad you're doing it.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 3:08

So I'm really glad to be here, and you too which we're going to dive right into the heart of your work. It is your podcast Language of Play. Can you talk about like? What is this concept? What does it mean, and how did it come to shape the approach that you now share with parents and educators?

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 3:30

So in my years of working as a speech language pathologist just, and my years as a parent, I found that a lot of times we would just get a little bit short with our kids or teachers, with students, and you know, I wonder what is going on underneath that. And so often I would find that we think that the kids should think like we think, and they don't. Children just kids should think like we think, and they don't. Children just don't think like we think. Their minds are in an entirely different space. So what is that space? Over the years I started to play around with learning Well, where is a child's mind? Start to really probe, like them, to express what they're thinking. And what I find is that children are perpetually in this state of curiosity. They're always looking at the world as discovery. And when you're talking about young kids, sometimes what you tell them in one room they don't know if it's the same in the next room. You know they really have to test everything to see where are the boundaries, what really works, what doesn't work. And I can give you an example of this One of my friend's children.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 4:25

He was outside and he had taken patio blocks and he was crashing the patio blocks. So he literally broke every single block with a hammer that that dad was going to use on a patio. And he went out there and he's like what are you doing? So the dad saw it as he's destroying stuff. But, knowing this about kids, I went to him and I had to say I bet it was interesting, wasn't it? It was pretty cool smashing him, wasn't it? And then he softened up. Yeah, and then, once he softened up, I started asking what was it like for you? And what he said was they make different sounds. So he had just been in music class where they were hitting mallets and blocks and he would find that different size blocks had different sounds. He saw these patio blocks so he went and got a hammer and he hit it to see if they would be different sounds. And indeed, when he broke the patio block, he would hit the smaller block and he'd hit the bigger block because it's now broken. So there's two different sizes and they were different sounds. So then he just kept on hitting them, listening to the sound that they'd make.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 5:30

Now, this child was not being destructive intentionally. This child was exploring. This child was curious, but the outcome was a problem. And so the language of play really has to do with parents and educators learning how we can communicate with children in the ways they think about the world. So if we can validate this idea that they are coming from curiosity and then ask them about their experience, we might find things to be a lot different than what it looks like on the surface, and then when we do that, we can come up with language that will help them know what they can do next.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 6:05

But now you're saying that play is often just seen as fun, and then you just shown how powerful it can be for language development. So why is play so essential, especially in the early years, and how can adults make the most of it?

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 6:17

I think that we do tend to see play as fun, and indeed that is one part of it. But when we realize that play is so essential for us in fact every mammal on the planet plays, every mammal we find that birds play, we see fish play, you know, there is a real experience of play that is essential for the development of species, because it is the learning process and the language that we use is going to fortify the experience of play. And I think that the language we use with our children is going to be often reflective of the language that we use with ourselves or what our parents used with us. And as we learn to use gentler language, exploratory type of language, what was that about? What might that be like for you? What do you think will happen after? But when kids are little, we need two statements I see one that's blue To give the language around. What they're playing and doing will fortify that experience of being able to also use language.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 7:18

A lot of times people think about speech and language as the same thing or refer to it interchangeably. Can you explain the difference between the two and why is it important to understand that when supporting child's communication growth?

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 7:32

I'd be happy to. So when we think of speech we're going to talk about, how is it that a sound is formed in your mouth? So you've got your tongue and your lips, you've got your airway, you've got your voice, and how do these things work together to be able to produce coherent speech? So, if you think about it, you need to inhale, you need to turn on and off your voice in the middle of a word for sounds that have a voice or don't have a voice. For example, b like a, b has a voice but p does not.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 8:03

So, right in the middle of a word, you're turning on and off your voice. There is a coordination of your air coming out, your voice turning on and off, your tongue, lips moving around in order to be able to produce the right sounds in the right order. All of that is speech, so that there's a lot of areas where it can break down for people. Maybe it's fluency, maybe it's sounds, maybe it's breathing, maybe it's we call it phonation. It'd be the voice turning on and off Any of those areas or the coordination of those areas we can have some hiccups in All of that is the speech component.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 8:43

Now let's talk about language as something different. Language, so after we say those sounds, then we put them into words and maybe the words are going to be sign language words. So even if we're not using our speech, but it's words, and so we can take words and put words together to make sentences, and then those sentences are going to change meaning by changing a word, and words change meaning even by just changing a sound. So if I say the word cat and I add an S at the end, it changes the meaning, doesn't it? So the image you have in your mind if I say cat is different than cats. So language is the nuanced difference that happens for meaning and expression and understanding. That happens with all your words coming together. It's also how we interact with each other.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 9:27

So now, when you're supporting a child's communication growth, why is that important to know the difference?

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 9:33

Oh yeah, so when children are struggling to be able to communicate, we sometimes say that they can't talk, and then at least that's what parents say to me, and I work with parents most of the time and so then it's a matter of figuring out what do you mean when you say your child can't talk. Is it speech, so you can't understand them? Or is it that they can't form words into sentences? Maybe they need more vocabulary? When we figure out whether it's speech or if it's language, then we know how to help them better. And then how well are they listening?

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 10:04

So if we were to break language apart, we could break it apart into expressive and receptive. Expressive language would be all that comes out of you to express your thoughts and ideas. Receptive language would be comprehension, listening skills, all that that is coming to you. So if we're going to break down language, where is our child struggling to talk, as parents say? And so that's something that you often, as a parent, will get into a conversation with a speech pathologist or some other educator to tease apart in order to figure out what do we do to help our kiddos along.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 10:39

And this is where you do a lot of support. You received specialized training for speech therapy, yet you emphasize that everyday adults can be part of the solution. So what are some simple ways that parents and teachers can support speech and language development? This is if they're at home or in the classroom, if they don't have a lot of resources.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 10:58

Yeah, so you're right, this is the heart of what I do at the Language of Play. So when a parent comes to me and they or sometimes an educator too and they are saying to me you know, the speech therapist says they probably won't qualify. But what do I do? Because I want to help my child and there is a big, big gap in the amount of kiddos that get help and the kids that need help. And so as parents we can do a lot and as educators we can too.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 11:24

Going back to my example I was just talking about with vocabulary, if our children are saying that thing, that thing, you know, get it, get it, that thing.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 11:32

They're using nonspecific pronouns, so we don't know what it and that and thing is.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 11:38

When we see expressions like that, we know the child needs vocabulary. If the child is just using short sentences, we know we need to give examples of how can we expand their language. If the child is having some speech sounds, then we know that we can help moms and dads to be able to help them along the way, giving them just a little bit at a time, because of course that is highly specialized, but that's not to say parents can't do it as long as they get small pieces at a time that they're to implement. And I think that the everyday solution is really to understand how a lot of our interactions happen in ways that we are going to be able to fortify our kiddos. We do a lot of things that we don't really notice that we do, and when we become more aware of how we're talking and what examples we're giving, then we're able to shift them and then our children will get those different models, those different examples, so that they can make those shifts in their home.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 12:33

What about audio books or something even to be able to like expose to the intonation or additional vocabulary like you were talking about? Would that work?

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 12:42

Yeah, oh yeah. So real, specific ideas of what parents and educators can do If a child is saying to you that they want to go outside. Have a conversation about what will I see when I go outside, what will it feel like when I go outside, who is going to be with us? How are we going to play? What games do you think we might play, you know? In other words, have a full conversation of what is going to happen from all the senses, a full conversation of what is going to happen from all the senses.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 13:10

You know, think through what will the, and not from your senses, but from the child's senses, so they can build their language. So talk through what they see, what they feel, what they taste, what they will touch. Maybe you're going to cook in the kitchen. You can talk about the cookie dough as granular, you know. Build that vocabulary and then give them more than one word for hot Words like that that are expanding their vocabulary. So we've got warm and we've got hot and we've got heated. So we are like pouring vocabulary into them. Now we wouldn't expect our children to speak it all back. I've heard, before a child says any word, they need to hear it about 400 times.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 13:44

I didn't realize it was that much.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 13:45

It is per word. That's a lot. I didn't realize it was that much.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 13:48

It is per word. That's a lot. I had a son who needed pragmatics and you know, knowing how nuanced communication can be. Pragmatics is just this one little piece of it. Can you help us understand what pragmatics includes and then share maybe a strategy that can be used to support that?

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 14:05

So when we break down language, if we're going to get into some of the jargon of it, pragmatics is one of the words. That means a social language. We talked about how cat become cats. That would be something called morphology. It's a way we study words and how words change, and then we have semantics and that would be more like vocabulary and the meanings of words.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 14:23

The jargon pragmatics refers to the social interaction between people, the skills of social action. Social interaction between people is something like you and I are looking at each other. Even though we're not in the same room, we're on a screen, I'm still looking you right in the face. We are making eye contact, even if you don't feel it. Here's me looking at the camera and here's me looking at you, and so the human piece of it comes with, for example, then the eye contact and we're looking at each other. Another piece of the social interaction is when I start to smile, you will naturally start to smile. These are mirror neurons in our brain. Our body language is also part of pragmatics. So you will know, if I'm sitting up like this, that you know I'm engaged and I'm interested, and if I was just kind of back like this, you would know, I'm probably a little bit more tired or less interested. So to be able to read those social cues would be pragmatics. Another part of pragmatics would be staying on the same topic, and this is one.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 15:24

The example I'm about to give you is one that could be considered language as a problem or pragmatic problem, you know. So it could be social and it could be just the mechanics of language. And that would be if I said to you so what did you have for breakfast today? But your answer might be well, I was actually at my mom's house this morning and I'm sitting here waiting for the rest of the story because I'm waiting for the answer to breakfast. Right, but you stop at. I was at grandma's house and in your mind it's like it might be that grandma's house I always have oatmeal.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 15:55

It could be a language issue when somebody doesn't fully comprehend receptive language or express what they mean expressive language to be able to piece with. I expect you know what I'm thinking If I tell you I'm at grandma's house. You know we always have oatmeal, so why'd you ask If there's that piece of it? And that would be fairly common among our kids with autism. You know where they think that we know what they think and our brains are exactly in the same spot as them and they need to learn that I have a different mind, I have a different knowledge base and that they didn't actually answer the question. What we would do is, again, awareness. A lot of times, we just let our kids know here was the question I asked and this is what you answered. Go back to this and answer this.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 16:44

You've also shared how speech and language skills support overall communication and when I was teaching in first grade, I saw a strong correlation between speech challenges and reading difficulties. Can you talk about how speech sound disorders may impact literacy development and the early support that can make a difference? Absolutely.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 17:05

And I'm glad you brought that up, because a lot of times people don't give as much credit to speech or language as impacting reading. But truly it is your foundation. It is the foundation for comprehension. When you're reading, you're saying words in your mind. You're making connections to those words on the page, to what you already know from hearing it. So if you've never learned a vocabulary word and now you're reading it, it's not going to compute for you. So we've got speech and we've got language. Here's another area where knowing the difference kind of matters. So I'll zoom out to speech first, the basic building blocks of sound we would call phonemic awareness.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 17:45

A lot of parents tend to start with phonological awareness, which would be pairing a symbol, such as a letter, with a sound. But prior to that you have a sound system that is being developed in your mind. You're starting to hear sounds, you're starting to hear nuance, you're starting to hear tone changes. You're starting to hear the s at the end of cats and get a different picture in your mind. You're doing Dr Seuss and creating words that are nonsense, and you're learning that words can be manipulated and play with those words. You're doing Dr Seuss, and creating words that are nonsense and you're learning that words can be manipulated and play with those words, you're experimenting with sound. Kids don't necessarily know the difference between as a sound and a letter sound. It's all just sounds. So all of that foundation of sound play comes before a child's ability to connect the sound to a letter. Now, for some kiddos they've missed some of those pieces and so the letters might help them fill in gaps. But as a whole we want a good foundation in sound play and then when they jump up to having letters to have sounds for them, then the reading tends to come much. To having letters to have sounds for them, then the reading tends to come much, much, much easier. So that's where sound is.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 19:00

Now, when we come to language, I started talking about vocabulary. If a child doesn't have the vocabulary then it's hard to start reading it. If you're reading sentences but you're not knowing how to order your words and how a change of word order changes the meaning in a sentence, then they can get confused in their reading or they'll start to look down and just read what they know to be true in their mind, because that's the only way they've ever said something, and that might be her do it instead of she does it. And so if they read she does it, but they only really say her do it, she does it doesn't make sense and they've only got a sentence with comprehension with the word it and they move on to the next sentence. The way we know this is we can ask them a question who poured the milk? And they'll say I don't know.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 19:40

And if you replace the sentence with what they speak, heard, do it they'll know the meaning because it's all they got so far in their development. So we want to give them all of the different structures in our language development and then, when reading happens, all those pieces fall into place much better. A mistake that I often hear parents make is thinking it's so cute, her do it, her do it, you know. Or they say certain words wrong and you know, it's just fun, it's cute and indeed it is. But you're not doing a service for your child if you're not giving the correction for that, so that they do have the variety of ways to say everything, because the world gives us a variety of ways to say everything and English has multiple meaning words all over the place.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 20:21

So if they're not corrected and they don't ever hear it the other way, then they're not going to bring those two ideas together so that they understand it when they read it. That makes sense, yeah.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 20:34

And we often think that they just of course they heard it, but that doesn't mean that they got it receptively, so they didn't effectively hear it so many kids are getting these screens in their hands at such a young age and I know that there's a lot of exciting technology and learning games and apps and things that are on there and, of course, there's a widespread concern as to how this is impacting development in our children, especially when they're getting them at, you know, two years old and they're touching the screen for various reasons. What kind of communication challenges are you seeing emerge from this and how can parents and educators work to keep that real connection and language growth front and center?

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 21:10

That's a beautiful question and it is conversation that I get into repeatedly, and every time I get into this conversation I seem to learn something new. That is a problem, and I know what you're saying about the apps to learn. There are great learning apps. The part that is missing, and the part where we really see a significant problem, is the human experience. So you know, we just talked about pragmatic language and looking at each other, making the eye contact. One of the things that we commonly see among kiddos who have had a lot of phone time is that they don't know to look at you, to talk with you, wait till the conversation is done, have the back and forth back and forth it's called reciprocity in our jargon and then have the social skills to know the end. So pragmatic language, like we talked about earlier, and all of the different conversational skill there's a lot of issues with that these days. In fact, the CDC has said up to 40% of our kids are considered struggling, and this is the ages three to 10. Particularly, I see it in communication, in the area of pragmatic skills. That's huge. So we do know that phones are causing some issues.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 22:21

Another thing that I'm seeing is that with a little bit older kids that are actually typing on the keyboard. They're using images to express a thought. And, yes, a picture paints a thousand words, doesn't it? Yes, which is fine to sometimes use an image to express a thought. And, yes, a picture paints a thousand words, doesn't it? Yes, which is fine to sometimes use an image to express a thought, but when they regularly use an image to express a thought, they're not developing. How do I use my language skills? How do I switch up those words in the varieties of ways that we can say things? How do I understand somebody else that's talking to me when they haven't used an image to express it? If somebody else uses an image differently than I use the image, what are they really saying to me? Because they're not using actual words. So let's move on from images. Now to kiddos that are using the text and they're texting each other.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 23:07

We're seeing kids are using telegraphic language, so they're just using a few words at a time, little punctuation, no capitalizations. Drop things like a and the. Just give the main bullet points. That would be telegraphic. So they're communicating with the main points only, but not in full sentence structure when they put down the phone and they start to talk to their peers, they're still talking in the way that they text. So we're getting issues with that too, where our kids again, they don't know how to develop the full sentence structure. They don't know the varieties of ways that we can put words together to create eight sentences. Because they've been practicing telegraphic, they've been practicing with an image.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 23:49

I'm not saying that that doesn't have a place, it can, as long as when they're not using that phone they're getting an abundance of exposure to good communication. Real life is that mom and dad are on their phone too, and so they have their work on their phone. They have their own communication, things that they need to do on their phone, and so then, when they get off their phone, mom and dad are less likely to want to feel like communicating because they've just done a whole lot of it. But that kid needs some chatterbox time where he practices and he listens, because, again, we do need the 400 exposures, we need the words in different sentence formats, and the kiddos need to be able to hear it enough to be able to start communicating. So those are some of the issues that I am seeing and hearing about because of over screen use.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 24:40

And then all the like, the little acronyms that they again, in and of itself, all of these, things are fine, there's nothing wrong with them, but we can't forfeit the abundance of language exposure in order to use them.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 25:00

So it reminds me of like, when people refer to like. There's a time and place for everything. You know how we dress, how we speak to each other, our actions and context being able to go. Oh, I have to shift. I use it here, but I don't use it there. Those environments require different ways that we express ourselves.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 25:19

Yeah, a powerful shift that parents can do in this can be to say okay, so now the next 10 minutes, 30 minutes, whatever it is, depending on the age and stage of your child this is going to be phone time. But to actually verbalize, I'm not going to talk to you, I'm going to be on my phone and then set a timer so that everybody gets their phone time kind of all at the same time, and then we're going to have a time that we are talking to each other and we're all turning off our phone. For the next one hour we're going to have dinner, we're going to clean up together, whatever we're going to do, but we're not on the phone. We are together. And so this is like a new era we're coming into, where we have to actually make the decision, tell each other what the decision is, follow through with this new way of being.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 26:05

The next question was going to be a small but powerful shift a parent or teacher can make to help a child feel more confident and supported in their communication. And I think you just said it. It was perfect. Do you have anything to add to it?

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 26:18

I think that if I was to add something for confidence and supportedness, I would add to stay curious. And if curiosity has gotten away from you in the stresses of life, return. Become curious and use it for yourself and your kids. If we remember to be curious, we can also remember that all behavior is actually communication, and it's up to us then to help our kids to find the words Well thank you for your time, all of your expertise in this area.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 26:47

I really like the way that you use play and that connection to help us understand how we can be noticing more and helping our children grow in these areas and the power that we have as adults in their lives to be able to impact their communication process so positively. So very grateful that you're here and for your insight.

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 27:10

Thank you very much, Really really glad to be here.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 27:13

What is a way that listeners can get a hold of you after they listen to this or be able to tune into your podcast?

Dinalynn Rosenbush: 27:20

Thank you. Yes, my podcast is the Language of Play on any player, and then my email is hello at thelanguageofplaycom and I have all kinds of things coming up and so getting on my newsletter, any of those things and I've got free gifts and all that the people can access. There's over 210 episodes now, so there's a lot of help for parents, all right, well, thank you.

Dr. Lisa Hassler: 27:45

If today's episode gave you something to think about or try, I encourage you to share it with a fellow parent or teacher. The earlier we can support children's speech and language development, the more confident and connected they become. And if you're on a wait list, know that you can still make a difference today. If you have a story about what's working in your schools that you'd like to share, you can email me at lisa at drlisahasslercom, or visit my website at wwwdrlisahasslercom and send me a message. If you like this podcast, subscribe and tell a friend. The more people that know, the bigger impact it will have. And if you find value to the content in this podcast, consider becoming a supporter by clicking on the supporter link in the show notes. It is the mission of this podcast to shine light on the good in education so that it spreads, affecting positive change. So let's keep working together to find solutions that focus on our children's success.