Every parent familiar with augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) knows that finding the right program or device for their child — not to mention learning to use it! — can be a long journey. During our live event, the dream team of parent Lelah Coppedge, RN, and speech-language pathologist Ali Steers gave us the ins and outs of living the AAC life.
Check out the highlights or watch the full recording below!
Video Transcript
Welcome all, to Undivided Unite and Conquer. Unite and Conquer brings together parents and professionals to work through issues they and many families we work with face. Our goal with these sessions is to learn together, to keep it real, and to figure out how to get stuff done for our kids. And anyone on this journey knows our best teachers are other parents. -- Lelah, we wanted to start out with, if you could tell us a little bit about Jack and why you started on this AAC journey. Well, Jack is 12. Super fun age. He has cerebral palsy, dyskinetic tetraplegic cerebral palsy, complicated with dystonia, so everything that goes with dystonia comes with that kind of. He is unable to use his hands reliably or really any kind of muscle group in his body, because when he goes to do something, everything in his body fires, so he's very like ‘weee’ all the time, but he's very smart. He's very engaged. He loves connecting with people. And he is just an awesome guy. In talking about starting an ACC journey, why? What was... what was the initial sort of catalyst? I think we were really just in the right place at the right time. We went to a clinic when he was early intervention. That's when he got out of the hospital. They gave us the name of a clinic that we were going to in Los Angeles called Can Do Kids, and I knew he was going to need all the therapies, so we started them and very early the PT was like, “Let me get you hooked up with our our SLP here. I think you guys should start speech with him,” and I was just kind of like, okay, great. He’s a year old or less. I think he was just a little over a year, actually, and the SLP happened to be Ali Steers, so we were really just lucky. We were lucky. I just was kind of going along thinking let's get all the therapies that we can get, and that's... like we all do, I think, in the beginning. It's just like PT, OT, speech, get it all. Let's go. So that's kind of how it started for us, and we just were lucky enough to be with Ali. I think you said to me, Lelah, or you said in the past that your journey could have been really different or a much... a much, much different start had you not found the right person, and you did. Absolutely just the right clinic in the right time. It was just very, very serendipitous because, yeah, I think a lot of us like, I don't know, I can only focus kind of sometimes on one thing at a time. Right? And in those early days, you're thinking let's get them sitting up, let's get head control, let's get this, and you start thinking about all the physical things really early on, but the speech stuff kind of gets held off, I think, for a lot of families, and I certainly wasn't really thinking about it then, and it just kind of got presented to me and we did it. So we were very lucky. So if you could start with the big picture so we can set the table for families who may be just kind of getting into this journey, what is AAC and what... what is it not? AAC, the acronym of AAC is Augmentative Alternative Communication. It's truly augmentative. I don't like to use the word alternative because it implies that a child really doesn't have a way to communicate, and we all know that every child, even those who live in very, very complex bodies, they're all communicating. They're smiling, they're using gestures, facial expression, things like that. But communication only goes so far with those things, as we all know, which is why we're here today, to talk about this augmentative piece of how do we bring language to someone who otherwise doesn't use words with their mouth. So it becomes sometimes a very complex question. Sometimes a less complex question, kind of depending on the complexity of the individual who's sitting in front of me as a clinician, but really, when it all kind of... we take away the complex body and we take away different access methods and we really boil it down to what AAC is, is it's language, and I think that this point is sometimes lost in this larger discussion of complex bodies, complex words, how do we present it, field size, what layout, what vocabulary. It's really... it's language. And one of the reasons why I'm so glad I got to meet Jack when he was so young was because we were really able to parallel typical language development. When I'm starting with a... with a child that's 18 months old or younger like I think Jack was when we began, he didn't lose out on a lot of that language exposure because we were able to get a system. That system’s changed a lot over the years, but the idea is getting that system and speaking that language to the child, so when I have a family contact me and say, “We want to do AAC,” my... my kind of first question is, are you ready to be a bilingual family? Or if you're already a bilingual family, are you ready to be a trilingual family? Because we need to think of this as a language, and for a child to learn it, it needs to be spoken to them at home and for a family and a child that already has really complex needs, that's a big ask, and we need to make sure I, as a practitioner, need to make sure that I'm kind of presenting this thing in the way that it really is truly meant to be, that this is a language. This will live with you and your child for many, many, many, many years and it's not something that we're... it's not four pictures. It's not six pictures. It's not a single button that we hit that says something. True AAC is a language and the more we think of it as that, the kind of easier it becomes, because it looks really complex and scary when you're looking at all these icons and ‘aah,’ that there's a lot of people that could be really intimidated by that and switches and eye gaze and everything else, but if we just think of it as Russian or just think of it as French or just teaching your child French, which, yes, that's hard because you're learning French too, but if we can think of it that way, it just makes it so much, so much easier for them in the long run. When she first showed me his PODD, he was 18 months, and I thought she was out of her mind and... How is this little tiny person... How is he going to understand this? I don't understand how to even teach this to someone that age. So it really is looking at it as teaching language, and it's taken a long time, but yeah, in the beginning, I just thought she's crazy. What is she talking about? Ali, how did you... I mean, how do you first... when you first meet Jack, he’s so... he's so little and how do you determine what you're going to use? How did you determine with Jack what system you were going to use? Did you have an idea? Did you have to work with a bunch of things? How do you approach that before you scared Lelah to death? So, with Jack specifically, I had heard... and this was, gosh, Lelah, it's what? 11 years ago. I had heard murmurings of this system called PODD that was coming out of Australia, developed by an SLP named Gayle Porter, and that this was a system developed by and for people with cerebral palsy, and so that really kind of caught my attention. I was not PODD trained. I did not know PODD. I didn't know anything about PODD. And when I started looking at the website 11 years ago and I saw this, and you can see that this is this, I mean, so this is... This is not a minimal amount of words. This is one of the early PODD books. So this is actually kind of the starting point for language. I knew that we needed to get this very bright child language, not just four words, six words, eight words, 12 words. He needed a way to express a variety of functions. He needed a way to say, “Something's wrong,” “Do something,” “Let's go,” “I'm uncomfortable,” “Change my body.” He needed a way to talk about things that we didn't even know that he understood or know that he wanted to talk about and if I would have given him a clinician created system of four or six or eight or 12 words, then I'm really holding his language development hostage and I knew that that was not... that was not the right path to go, certainly not with this very bright little boy in front of me, so I also knew that PODD specifically as a language organization, exists in many, many, many different ways to access PODD. So there is PODD that is accessed with our hands. There's PODD that's accessed with eye gaze. These templates, of course, didn't exist when Jack was little. They only exist in Australia now. They're working on US versions of them, but there's so many differences. A scanning template for kids with CVI, but there's so many... That's his book now. He's on a visual scan. So there's so many different ways to access PODD, and Gayle Porter and her counterpart here in the United States, Linda Burkhart, she happens to be my mentor, which I was the luckiest person on the face of the earth to have that happen. They have developed all of these ways for kids to access language, and it's not reliant upon technology. So PODD does exist in high tech forms. It exists in a lot of no tech forms, which really just gets language going, and then we can work on access, because what I don't want is Jack's ability to access an eye gaze device with his eyes, to hold back his language development, because those two things are very different, and a lot of people get really stuck on this argument of how are they going to access language. We need to teach them how to access, but they're forgetting that we need to get the language going, too. And I knew going into it just that PODD was a system that allowed all of that to happen. And for Jack, I mean, I think it's a good thing that that's where we landed, because if we waited for his access to catch up, he still would have no language, because he's a kiddo that lives in such a complex body that access has been a really challenging thing for him. When we started with Noah on our journey, there was a myth, and I don't know, Lelah, if you ran into this when you were starting early on, or Lindsay, but, oh,if you start with AAC, your child won't talk. -- Right. Like, it's... And I don't know if that's still out there. It feels like it still is in some spaces, so, I guess, Ali going a little deeper on that, how... leveraging the language framework you just laid out, I think is helpful, but how would you... how would you help us address that for families who might be still hearing that out in the world? So, it's definitely a myth. So, there's a very large body of research, kind of a growing body of research that shows that AAC not only does not inhibit verbal speech, it actually supports verbal speech, so kids who are using an AAC system of some kind will actually try to talk more with their mouth, with their gestures, facial expressions, word approximations, however they can communicate. We'll see that communication happening more with the introduction of a robust language organization in an AAC system. So, really, if you're the parent of a child who someone along the way has said at some point in time that your child is going to struggle with spoken words, with developing mouth words, verbal speech, then there is absolutely no harm in introducing an AAC system, and I've worked with some families where the child uses the AAC system for one or two or three years, and then their speech picks up and then they don't need it anymore, but in those one or two or three years, we're able to cut down on frustration. That child is still able to develop their language skills, so that when they do start talking, it's... we're not... we're not playing catch up from such a long game, so it's really... it's never too early. It's never too late. Now I don't want parents to hear this and say, “Oh, Jack started when he was a baby. My kid's 12. They still don't have AAC.” It is never too late. It's always going to... For a child who struggles to communicate, it's always going to be appropriate to give them another way to do it regardless of their age. A lot of families have specific programs pushed pretty hard on them from specialists, and it's not necessarily because it's a good fit for your particular child, but because the therapist knows it. It's widely available. PECS is a common example, another thing that was really pushed hard on us, but when parents are starting and they don't even know the possibilities of what's out there beyond maybe, oh, people can use iPads, but I mean, how do we know if we're starting in the right place? I think the best thing to do with any recommended system is, as the parent, use that system to talk. Use that system to sit down and have a conversation at the dinner table, or use it to talk to your child or use it in a functional way, and if you are able to express yourself, and keeping in mind that Jack's first PODD book, that book was developed for a very young child, so we're not going to take that PODD book and go have coffee with my friends, but what I am going to do is take that book and talk to him with it, and see if I can use this book to express a variety of messages for a variety of functions, in a variety of contexts, and if it's a system that does that, then you're on the right track. So if you, as the parent, can talk with it, to say more or less what you're wanting to say, then that's a good sign. If you're not able to do that, then that presents a problem, and really, I would say PECS kind of falls into that category of maybe some red lights going off, because I can't use PECS to tell you my leg hurts and I can't use PECS to tell you that I want to go to the beach and I can't use PECS to tell you that I'm having a really fun time, so PECS has some really strong marketing behind it and there's a lot of professionals out there that are trained in PECS. It is a system. I think it's important as parents to know that it is one of many, and if you have a professional who's recommending PECS to you, then my question is always, okay, so this is where we're at, but where do we go ten years down the line? What is the long term outlook of this child's language look like? What symbol set are you using? What language organization are we using? That clinician should be able to project out what that child’s system looks like in ten years, and if they can't, then maybe you need to go find someone who does. It's amazing. And Lelah, I have to ask for... when you were starting and even as you're going along, I mean, for a lot of kids, it's not an immediate, hey, this is working. This is great. But from your perspective, did you feel like Jack was connecting? Did you have doubts? Did you just keep going through? How did it feel in the beginning? Because I know a lot of families might think this isn't working, let's move on, or... How do you balance that? Well, yeah, I mean, I had a ton of doubts because it was so complex for such a little kid, but that was also the beauty of it was realizing that he could do it. And, I mean, it brought a lot of amazing realizations about Jack in general. I didn't know he could read, and we realized he was reading at that age and of course, not everyone's going to have a big boom moment with it like I did, but... And then there's been lots of setbacks and lots of frustrations and tears, and I feel like he's not making any progress, and how long are we going to do this before we move on to something else? And then it's been... it's all of that. It's like this all the time, but when I look from where he started and I look to where he is now, it blows me away, but yeah, I mean, it's been frustrating. It's been long. It's been a long.... You’re playing the long game. Yeah, and speaking to that long game, it's something you said earlier, Ali, the bilingual... Yes. -- This idea that, Lelah, you had the book and you were talking to Jack at 18 months. That was... I imagine a lot of... It took a lot of practice and work. Yeah, it did, but also it wasn't like we were always doing it at home. I mean we've all got tons of other stuff we're dealing with all the time with our kids and for me to learn it at times felt super overwhelming and I was guilty of not doing it with him all the time and leaving it for school to kind of do with him, leaving it for sessions with Ali. So like Ali said, I mean, we have to be willing to learn that language ourselves and to use it all the time. And he... I would pull out the book and he would start crying, and it's so up and down, but we just... we have to be willing to push ourselves with it too, if we're going to push them with it, so... And now you pull it out and he laughs. Yeah. Now I pull it out, he gets super excited. He can’t wait for me to do it. That’s great. But that wasn't always the way it was. And if I could follow up to that, Lelah, I think that as a clinician, if I have a kid who is getting upset every time their book comes out, then I'm looking at, well, how is this being used, because often there's a misconception that an AAC system... the purpose of an AAC system is for the kid to say what we want them to say or to answer our questions, so really an AAC system is the child's voice, and they can use it to say whatever they want to say to whomever they want to say it, however they want to say it. That this is not a scenario by which we are using it for school work to answer questions. So with Jack, when I think that was happening, I think that there were some lovely, fabulous, well-meaning people maybe in his school life who were getting it out for him to answer questions at school, and that is not what it's about. It's about him being able to express himself and tell them, “I don't like this. I don't want to do it,” or, “Go away,” or, “Leave me alone,” but when the school team is not kind of on board with that, when the individuals in the child's life are not kind of properly informed as to this being a method for true genuine autonomous communication, then sometimes you have some use problems that come into play and we need to backpedal and say, “Okay, what's happening and why is this happening?” and we need to push out more training. I think, Lindsay, this gets to the question we had around using it at home and with friends. I mean it... Maybe Lelah, you could talk about how it's used today in the home environment, so that it is that autonomous enabler for him to communicate and connect and... Yeah, I mean, we've been fortunate that we have school friends who are willing to learn how to use it. He has friends that know how to ask him questions in a way that he can communicate with them, not just with his PODD, but just yes and no. All of his friends have learned how to communicate with him, which I think is really important, and he also vocalizes, and Ali’s been really, really strong about saying, “Oh, you have something to say. Do you have something to say?” and then he says, “Yes,” and then you get the book out. So it's really giving him those opportunities and making sure we're consistently giving him opportunities. Do you have something to say? What's wrong? What is it? What do you want to say? Do you want to do this? Do you want to do this? Tell me what you want. And getting that book out and doing it. Where I don't know if we were doing it as much before as we are now, so I don't know what the answer is to why we weren’t except it's just hard. It's hard and physically they're busy and it's easier for me to give them a yes and no question than to get out a book and scan through all these things with him, but now it's so second nature because we practiced so much, and, yeah, I don't know. It’s just practice. And I think he's ready. We've kind of talked about that a little, Lelah, too. With age, it's kind of like, all right, this is hard. This is hard, but guess what. Like I do, I have a lot to say, and I have friends, and I have a world around me, and I... I'm going to push through it. I mean, it's got to be... Yeah, and I mean, letting him get to that frustration point too where you're like, I don't know how to help you if you don't tell me what you need. And sometimes that's hard for us to let them get to, right? I don't want to listen to him cry all the time, just yes or no. Tell me what you want. But I think it's important to really push them to be like, I cannot help you if you do not tell me, if they have a method like he does that he can use. Obviously don't torture your kid, but he has a way to tell me now, and I have to push him to do it because it is easy for me to say, “Do you want to go in this chair? Do you want to go in this chair? Is it your arm? Is it your leg? Is it... what's hurting?” and go through, but it's... he has to push himself to use this and answer those questions himself now, and it's letting me get to that area where I'm uncomfortable. I'm uncomfortable letting him get upset, and I have to push through it and make him do it. And if he doesn't want to do it, that's okay too. Yes. So there's that part of you are an autonomous communicator. If you are choosing to make the choice you're choosing right now, then that's... I cannot make yo talk. Yes, and he does. Oh, he makes that choice a lot. He says, “No,” a lot. Or he says, “Boring.” Difficult. He goes to difficult is his favorite one. Yeah. Difficult. So, yeah. I mean it's not always going to be the answer you want, but he does say no a lot. I've been definitely somebody who's done all those things you describe, Lelah, and defaulting to yes and no. It can happen. For sure it does happen. But to come back to language and communication and thinking about, okay, what do we... what are we trying to enable here, what are we trying to help our kids do, is so critical to not lose sight of that. And I mean, modeling for them, I think, is so huge. Like Ali said, if you can't use that system, then they can't either. For me to be able to get out his book and be, “I am upset right now,” and show him like, I don't like that. I want this. And then for him to be able to understand like, oh, okay, we're using this. This is what we’re doing. That, to me, Lelah, just evens the playing field. Yeah, it makes it so that we're all speaking a language that everyone can speak. It's kind of like walking in a room full of deaf individuals and everyone signing because so that everyone can participate in the conversation. This is a necessity. This is what you have to do, and if all of us are running our mouths then we're leaving people out of the conversation, so evening the playing field and making sure that we're speaking a language that's accessible to everyone is, I think, a really crucial part. Although doing eye gaze, I mean, I don't know, Jason, have you tried eye gaze yourself? It is hard. So hard. I wanted to cry when I tried to use it myself. So, I mean, what do you do in those instances when you have a kid on an eye gaze device, Ali, and you're trying to use the same language there? At what? How would you do that? So I would say, what's their... what's their no tech system? Because everyone should have both. Everyone should have a system that they're accessing when they're seated in a chair, and they're optimally positioned particularly for eye gaze, because we really do need positioning to be good. Often eye gaze is nonfunctional in environments outside with glare, but how does that individual communicate outside? How do they communicate when they're lying in bed? How do they communicate when they're on their couch or in their pea pod or in another piece of positioning where we can't have that eye gaze device accessible to them? So everyone, whatever system they're using, really does need to have a high tech and a no tech way to communicate, because we have to accommodate for all of these different environments and settings. To speak to that point, particularly if we have an eye gaze user, how are we making sure that they're included in the conversation? That's... I mean, I would go pick up their book or their... their no tech system and talk to them there. There's some... a lot of individuals who are using iPads. IPads have revolutionized the field of AAC, and it really is very important to make sure that we're... we're including everyone. There's a lot of trial and error. And so for Lelah, when you start with PODDs... You're still using PODDs, it sounds like. Have you tried other options? How did that go? What was the... what was the error part of this conversation? We started with PODD, obviously, very young, and then we've tried Unity. We've tried little card systems with just letters where he could pull off and try to spell words or pull off and just a small communication system. This is when we weren't working with Ali for a little while. We've done the tobii with different systems on it. Right, Allie? What else did we have on the tobii? I'm trying to... We tried a lot of different things. Yeah. I mean, it's been not just PODD straight through the whole time. We've tried a lot. But I think what's important is that PODD was kind of always there. That was always kind of his language foundation, and then there were a lot... so he knew he had a way to communicate, and then as we were trying all these other million different things, if he had something to say, he could always go back to what he knew. That was always... that was... that didn't go away. Yeah. I think too, very early on, we really worked on establishing a yes and no, because he's... because his body is so involved, he has to use a yes and no to confirm for everything, so working on that was very, very important early on, was figuring out that yes and no. So from there on, then you can go to multiple different systems figuring out... once you figure that out, right? You talked about language and PODDs as sort of the foundation of his language. Were some of the experimentations about accessibility and being able to access that language? Is that how to think about it? Like, that's... Okay. Like I kind of alluded to earlier, this idea of language and then access are really two very different things, and if we try to do them at the same time... So if, as a clinician, I'm trying to teach a child this new language organization and they've never used eye gaze before, that's like me putting a pencil into the hand of a two year old saying, “Write a sentence.” Yeah. -- Like it... Just like if we think about access as a pencil, and if you think about all the opportunities that typically developing children have to writing utensils, pencils, holding them orienting them, using two hands, scribbling, drawing different shapes, letters, and kind of this hierarchy of learning to write with a pencil, we have a child that has five or six years before we ask them to actually sit down and write a sentence with their pencil, and yet we're taking kids who live in complex bodies, they have trouble with positioning, they have trouble with stability, their bodies often aren't at midline, and we're putting them in front of an eye gaze device, and we're saying, “Now write a sentence,” and they've had a week with that device, that's going to fail 100% of the time, and then we're going to end up with a really frustrated kid, which is why I lean so heavily into no tech communication just to get language going, because then if I have a kid like Jack in front of me, he can give me feedback on this eye gaze thing that we're trialing with his book. He can tell me it's too close, it's too far, it needs to be... I need fewer icons. I need larger icons. And then we can have a dialog about it, and it really changes the whole scenario. With all the experimentation that you all have done, trying different things, I'd love to know sort of what is... what are the long term communication goals for Jack? What are you... what are you trying to get to for him? What's the long goal? The long goal is for him to be able to initiate independently, to say anything he wants independently without... on a high tech device. That is my goal for him, is to eventually move to high tech instead of the no tech and partner assisted, which is what we're doing now. So I want to take a partner out of it and just let him be able to say and do whatever he wants with friends. Whenever, whoever, however. Yeah, absolutely. So that's a good way... That's a good way to remember it, Ali. It is. I mean, that's autonomy, right? Is we can all roll into a birthday party and strike up a conversation and just be autonomous, say whatever we feel like saying, and that's really... that's really the... that's the goal for Jack, that's the goal for any AAC user, and it's never a one journey, one path journey to get there certainly, but for any user, I think just keeping that in mind that whenever, whoever, however. How does that come to life where other people are engaged in this bilingual conversation? That's what inclusion does so well... Inclusion does well, builds that culture of the barista at the coffee shop is not at all surprised when Noah rolls in with his power chair and his eye gaze device and orders himself a latte, and she's like, “Yeah, do you want whip?” and he is like, “Nah.” She's like, “Cool, here you go.” That to me is... that's being around other people with disabilities, and that's why inclusion is so valuable for not just the parents of the children on this call, but for all children. All children. Lelah. like you said, the journey’s like this and did you, through all of it, and you've had this great... look, Jack has this amazing partner with Ali to help bring this to life. He's at arguably one of the best schools in the country for inclusion, right? One of... The model at CHIME. Yet you know how difficult that still is, and a lot of parents watching this and really relating to that heavily, and did you ever... Did you ever feel with all the support even around you, did you ever feel like giving up? Absolutely, yes. I have... I've left many sessions with Ali in tears, thinking that we're not getting anywhere. Just... I think all of us go to that ten years in the future sometimes, and we think, what... What is going to happen? What are we going to do? And yeah, it can be really overwhelming sometimes, and absolutely, I felt like it just was going nowhere many times, and then the next session he would do something and prove me totally wrong, so it just... I don't know, for me, I have to kind of contain looking that ten years in the future because it can be so overwhelming, and I have to really just look at just almost week to week with him and then look back at the progress he's made because otherwise it's just too overwhelming. It's too overwhelming because it is such a slow process, and maybe it's not for every kid. I don't know, maybe some kids just take it and run with it and it's like, boom! And they explode. And I've talked to moms who are like, “Oh, around 15, it just clicked and they just started doing it,” and so I'm like, okay, well, maybe when he gets to be a teenager, it's just all of a sudden going to go, but I don't know. I don't know. It can be super depressing and overwhelming and then rewarding and amazing, and he... just last week he initiated 14 times. He wanted to say something and that's crazy mind blowing for him. So with something like PT, we have this goal when you see them do this whatever... sit up or take a step or anything like that. It's just such a concrete thing. Whereas I feel like with AAC, it's just... it's such a slow thing that you don't even realize how much they've gained, you know? So it's just different than any of the other therapies also. It's a totally different mindset. How you would sum up what you would say to parents who might be struggling to find hope right now? I would say the first thing is patience. It's like the three P’s. It's really like patience, practice, and perseverance, because I mean this... Like I said before, this is a long game and it's going to tear your heart out and make you frustrated and then reward you and then break your heart again, and then you'll have a breakthrough. It's the craziest thing ever. So patience, the first... the first thing with it. And then practice. Like we said, you have to be willing to go the distance with them yourself. You have to learn this language with them. You have to practice it yourself and be willing to push. And then perseverance. You have to keep with it. You have to persevere. If you think it's... You have a bad month where they're not doing it, it doesn't... You have to push through. You just have to keep pushing. If I had a message for all the parents out there, it's just believe in your kid, and if you're working with a professional who does not believe in your kid, go find another professional who does, because communication is for every one. No child, no child is too anything to communicate, and I've seen that. I see it on a daily basis where kids just surprise the heck out of someone they're sitting next to, and they're like, “I didn't know you could say that. I didn't know you were thinking that. I didn't know,” but work with someone who sets the bar high and they will rise to meet it. Kids... they can learn to communicate and they want to communicate, and you just have to keep believing in your child and knowing that it's possible. Yes. Find a person who wants to work with them that is setting, like Ali said, sets the bar high. The therapist should be like the goals... like I was... When I was like, “She's insane. She's crazy if she thinks you can use this...” You need to find that person. You have to. Just a couple quick notes for our community. Our goal with these conversations is to bring some undivided attention to topics that matter to our Undivided families, and more broadly, our mission is to provide guidance and support to families as you navigate the various systems to support your child. We want to be able to help you bring essential things to life, like access to language and communication, like we've talked to you today, for every child.
Save your favorite resources and access a custom Roadmap.
Get Started
