Picture courtesy of: Amazon.com(click on picture to take you to the link)

Through a FB thread several months ago, it was recommended to me to look into James MacDonald and Barabara Mitchell’s work in the SLP field.  I didn’t know much about them so I went to my favorite source when searching for books…Amazon!  There I found a book called Communication With Your Child: 15 Ways to become a better communicator.  This is not a new book, however I have found that great therapy techniques NEVER go out of style so I thought I’d take a chance and see if this book had some great therapy techniques to add to my arsenal.

Within the first 8 pages of this book, I knew I was going to enjoy it!  The 5 stages of communication, according to the ECO program, were described by explaining the child’s goals versus the parents goals at each stage:

As I don’t have permission to go into to detail from the authors regarding these stages I will not do so here.  What I will say is that I love how each stage of communication was explained with the different expectations we should have for our children and for ourselves.  It’s easy to think about what we want our clients or children to do to communicate but sometimes we forget that we TOO need to keep the expectations of ourselves in mind during interactions.  We must change the way we communicate with our kids.  The best part about all of these stages, in my opinion?  It’s all about following a child’s lead!

In general so far, this book is not full of life changing information from my therapist stand point but I could see it being a good resource for those unfamiliar with early development.  I also find it is a slightly different perspective on things I have learned previously.  I’m am a big fan of the saying “knowledge is power” so I believe the more I read, old and new material, the better therapist I will become.  I am not a one size fits all kind of therapist so the more tricks I have in my bag the better!

This was just a sneak peak at this book, an oldie but goodie in my opinion so far.  There are so many other great things within this SLP treasure: checklists, rating scales, real-life examples, supporting research, etc. If you want to check it out click the link above!

Enjoy and as always, happy talking!