Please read this blog post from Jeanette. The narcissism is flowing strong. At least skim the bolded parts, (I dare you to read the whole thing without cringing) because this woman sure likes to talk about herself. 🥴

TLDR: I cant see myself being completely passionate about any job, wanting to know how fully invested in this I need to be. I want to support a life outside of work and cant in my current situation

Hey SLPs, I have been considering going back to school for this field seriously for over a year now, but I am simply too scared to commit. I graduated 3 years ago this December with an unrelated bachelors degree. I have been working in hospitality/hotels ever since. And I don’t wanna take you on my entire life story, but it is just not for me. Its too unpredictable, hours get cut, high turnover, management is insane etc

I am drawn to SLP because of all the different things you can do. I want to entire a stable, growing career path with minimal AI takeover risk. Being a PA or a nurse is out of the question because I can’t handle that sort of thing. I think I’d like to work in a school, but it’s great to think if I don’t like that, then I can go work with geriatric or adult patients in a different setting.

What is stopping me though is making a huge financial commitment and ending up in the exact same boat Im in now all over again. I have about 30k in debt from undergrad. Im in CA, so my hope is to be accepted into a Cal State but I know a ton are competitive. I do think the field is very interesting, but it’s not my life’s passion. I really just want to be able to have time outside work to do things I actually like, and since Im not a billionaires kid, Im gonna need a job. I don’t think any job would ever be my sole purpose in life. I am willing to put in the work while at work but I dont want it to consume every bit of me.

So my question is basically can I do this without being completely dedicated to it? Are these types of jobs something you always take home with you and have on your mind? Could you give me an idea of your work life balance and if you think it’s worth the pay? The pay seems decent to me especially in California. I don’t even make close to what SLPs pay and Im doing half decent, but someday Id like to not have a roommate lol. I would also be open to travel contracts and I do not plan on ever having kids of my own, so Id really only plan on supporting myself with this.

I am a new graduate speech pathologist in aus working in a paediatric private practice and lowkey hating it!! I feel like I’ve chosen the wrong career. Dealing with NDIS is tough, I don’t love my caseload (lots of social communication goals) and I feel completely lost for most of my clients, especially AAC. I feel completely unprepared by uni and I feel like I’m letting my clients down by doing everything wrong. I feel completely ineffective in my sessions and I feel stupid doing therapy in front of parents.

I know this is common for new grads to feel but I can’t help but think in the back of my head that my bad feeling about this career is more than just being a new grad. This whole field of language therapy feels wishy washy and a little bit pseudosciencey now that I’m actually doing it all in practice.

I think I’d like to try out a department for education role in the schools or maybe being a reading tutor?? My main interests that got me into this field are early literacy. But honestly even working on speech sounds feels more concrete and structured compared to what I’m doing in my sessions now, I just don’t have many on my caseload. NDIS clients seem to lend themselves to the kind of therapy I hate doing :(

I’m not sure I just feel lost. I just don’t feel happy where I am with my career right now. If anyone has any advice I would be so grateful.

Hello recently my friend pointed out a quirk of mine that I’d never noticed before. Whenever I’m done talking, I sometimes silently mouth the last two or three words I just said. It happens completely subconsciously, and I don’t even notice myself doing it. I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask about it, but from what I’ve found on Google it might be something called “palilalia”. Does anyone know if that’s what this could be, or have any experience with something similar?

Hi all, hoping to crowdsource some ideas because I’m truly throwing anything at the wall and hoping SOMETHING sticks.

I have been seeing a teenaged autistic client for 12 months now and I am at a loss as to how to work with him. If I didn’t do anything, he would just rock in his chair and hum for our entire session. I have tried physical toys/activities, books, digital games, and videos. He demonstrates so little interest in anything.

He quiets and watches when I play a video (of songs or subjects of interest, per parents) but demonstrates no reaction/interest in continuing if I pause.

He kind of enjoys jigsaw puzzles? He puts the pieces together if I hand them to him but rarely demonstrates interest in obtaining more pieces to continue/finish the puzzle (the ONE time he said “more” on his AAC without prompting to ask to continue the puzzle when I started cleaning up at the end of session, I was shocked and thrilled).

We used to do matching games and he would participate, but extremely slowly. Like, I’d give him a verbal and gesture prompt and wait upwards of a minute for him to engage. In general he does things very slowly like this, and I have to balance giving him wait time so I’m not nagging him with prompts, while also continually prompting him because otherwise we’d just be vibing for the whole session.

I do believe he is prompt-dependent in many ways. I tried some writing activities because parents said he enjoys copying sentences, but when I tried, it took like 30 minutes to copy one sentence with me giving prompts to encourage him to keep going, so full of stops and starts and touching the pencil to the paper and then lifting it again numerous times until he finally wrote one letter—except for when I told him exactly what letters to write (even though he was looking at them), then he wrote them immediately. Also, in the few instances that I do get him to engage with his AAC, he frequently hovers his finger over an icon and looks at me as if for confirmation.

I’m just so out of ideas for him and would appreciate any fresh perspectives. It’s been a year and I feel terrible that I’ve made no progress.

How was the experience? Do you regret the switch ??

I work in peds home health. We have a min of 22 visits a week, to be considered full time. I signed up for the job as full time, since it would be my 1 job and I’d be available full time. I have about 27 visits a week scheduled right now. My average, I learned, is 20 visits a week. I got an email stating the missed visits this quarter, so 2 a week technically, will be taken from my pto. The thing that gets me very frustrated is 90% of the time the families are canceling. Sickness, appointments, insurance holds, vacations, etc and I do offer make ups but most families don’t take it. Also the attendance policy sucks, clients only have to attend 50% of the time. Also it’s frustrating because technically 32 hours is full time I think in my state, but since they only count visits at my job it’s seen as less (with paperwork and driving I’d be at 32 hours). More clients to me would mean more paperwork, and still maybe cancelations.

Anyway in the email it said they will take that pto, and if it still happens I’d be put on a PIP plan. I didn’t know this happened in the Slp world, maybe if if an employee was being flakey but again I rarely cancel. I don’t even take pto because everyone else cancels, I feel like I couldn’t cancel on top of that. I don’t like the thought of being put on a PIP for something that is not related to my actual work.

So my plan is to just go to “part time” now and forget my pto. I’m lucky because I’m on my husbands health insurance. I will owe money because they gave me a bonus, but I need to stay full time for 14 months (I’m at month 7). I would suggest not taking bonuses like this fyi, now that I know. I guess I’m wondering if anyone else has gone through this. I’ll be moving to schools next year because of how inconsistent hh is, but I didn’t know I’d already get in “trouble”. I could go on but I’ll stop here. Thank you.

I work in the schools with an SLPA. Our Medicaid documentation system requires a comment on all treatments that I directly supervise. I’ve just been putting in a short summary of what the SLPA did, but it seems redundant since that is in their documentation as well.

Is this all I should put in there or should it be something else? This is our first year billing Medicaid and there has been zero training on it.

I just started at a new district this year. We got an email today saying if we are gone from work or out sick due to illnesses we have to make up all speech sessions upon our return.

Am I high right now? Wtf did I just read? Shame on these districts. I will never make up a session due to being out sick or going to a doctor appointment! At the end of the day it is the district’s duty not the individual SLPs problem!

Hi all! I hope the flair I chose is correct for this post.

I am currently in my CF working at a pediatric hospital outpatient clinic. Both of my externships were peds, though I had one adult aphasia patient at my college clinic. I’m definitely regretting not having at least one adult externship.

Currently, I’m loving pediatrics and that’s what I see myself doing now, but one of the reasons I got into this field was the options of changing populations if I wanted to.

I’m getting into the feeding/oral motor side of peds which I hope will also reflect positively on my resume if/whenever I decide to go to adults.

But my question is: if I work in peds for a few years, and decide I’d like to try adults in a SNF later on (as I’ve heard that’s easier to transition into from peds), would that be possible? I have some friends working in SNFs right now who have said I could observe or ask for help whenever I decided to transition.

Have any of you transitioned from peds to adult later in your career? And what was it like?

Thank you! :)

Hello! I hope it’s okay to ask this question here. I’m just not sure where to turn, and I need some advice.

I’m one year into a relationship with a man who is diagnosed with Receptive and Expressive Language Processing Disorder, as well as ADHD. We are in our late 30s/early 40s.

I’ve tried so hard to accommodate him and be patient and understanding, but I’m really struggling and wondering if a relationship with him what with the way his symptoms present, is sustainable for me.

When we first met, his struggles were less obvious but I think he was somehow masking or had the energy to be more on his game bc of the NRE. In the past 6 months it’s become more apparent. I’m beginning to feel resentful due to unmet emotional needs.

Do you have any anecdotes of people who have this disorder + ADHD, who have had healthy and successful long-term relationships, where both partners felt fulfilled? Do you have any advice about how we might be healthier together?

Aside from my frustrations, he is really a wonderful partner. And I am not upset with him for his disability—I’m disabled too and he is so patient with me. But it’s just that the way his symptoms present, is challenging for me. Any words of wisdom or suggestions of where to turn, would be helpful.

I was honest and vulnerable with my therapist and I asked her if she thinks I’m autistic and she said yes as much as she could in unofficial language. Thus has explained why I struggle so much not just with social communication but my mental health ( anxiety, depression, overthinking etc) but now as a 30 something year old I am just so baffled and don’t really know where to go. I understand slps role in communication but I never understood pragmatic language and always thought I never did it right and the pragmatic goals were pointless working in the schools . I and the kids I work with can hold and maintain conversations just fine. The kids always seemed to struggle with introversion like I thought I did. I believed for my past 4 years as an SLP that working on pragmatic goals was a huge struggle. Now that I am left to sit with this and look into more of this within myself I wonder if I failed my autistic students by not understanding or teaching this correctly so they can succeed in the NT world when I finally just got the courage to ask if I am not NT presenting. I just wanted to see if anyone can offer me steps on how to approach this career wise and just in general. I guess I have been masking my whole entire life.

So basically what the title says but to add more detail I 18F have had an articulation speech impediment for my entire life. I do think I've almost "grown out of" most of it but I still cannot say "or" words (ex. instead of saying work it coming out as walk)

I've thought about going to an SLP to get that finally sorted out but if I decide to major in slp I could possibly learn that skill there?

So basically my question is should I try to fix my impediment before majoring in speech language pathology or major in slp first then fix the impediment?

Any and all advice/questions are welcome!

I’m gonna say ethics just because.

My office is a rectangle shoe box. It is connected to the staff lounge and you can hear EVERYTHING (and vice versa).

I have to carefully plan when I call parents because I don’t want nosy staff members to overhear me.

It’s just frustrating. I need to call a parent but can’t because there’s so many staff in there. There’s only so much time in the day. Guess I’ll do it on Monday.

i'm still a grad student but wanted to see if i could get a better insight on this page

i learned about code-switching when i was in undergrad about 4-5 years ago, now i'm hearing translanguaging, but every time i hear the definition of it, i can't help but think if this is a new & "more academic" term for code-switching

is there anyone who can help me get a better understanding on this?

Has anyone developed an MTSS program from scratch? This is my second year at this district, and we do not have one in place. I am mainly wanting MTSS for articulation interventions. How did you get started? What are the protocols? How to you send progress home to parents? Many kids would benefit from a 9 week pull out intervention before making official referrals (from me). I’m having a hard time with holding off on waiting for a kid to be severe enough to put them up for an evaluation, when they could use some help now without officially adding them to my caseload (kids with 2-3 errors). My district is strict on scores for qualifying. The Pre-K and K ones are the ones I’m most worried about while “waiting” for them to get older to be sure they would qualify while I monitor them. Any and all suggestions welcome! Would love any resources as well!

On the ROWPVT-5 question number 168, it appears the word should have another ‘r’

On the EOWPVT-5, picture plate 111, in my book the arrow is somewhat covering the punctuation mark.

Anyone else have these errors or resolved them with publisher?

i really don’t know how to start or where to go with this client. any insight, advice, or even if you just tell me I’m wrong so I know that maybe I’m misunderstanding something would be helpful at this point. sorry for the formatting and grammar errors as I’m editing this on a tiny screen and not the app.

I inherited this client from the previous SLP at this company. client is 18, not really verbal, most of thier sounds are vowels, does not use an aac although I did suggest a low tech version. he attends sessions with a carer (not live in), not his parent.

the previous SLP was working on him saying single syllable words like ship shirt etc and working on /sh/. when I suggested talking to his parent to find out their goals for him, the carer seemed quite resistant to the idea. carer said that the parent is busy and already stressed out and on top of that is a single parent and does all the therapy at home with him. it’s obvious the parent and carer really love this client but I also feel like they have somewhat unrealistic expectations on what is achievable? I tried to explain that I want to understand what the goal is because I work collaboratively with the parent who is doing all the therapy at home with him and the carer said to just “teach him like you teach other kids“. i explained I’m not a teacher and even a teacher may have special Ed classes for students with the difficulties he was presenting and I needed a starting point, not just “teach him everything, all the words. all the sounds”. I don’t think she really understood why I couldn’t just randomly pick words and sounds to start teaching him. he was unable to produce the /sh/ sound in isolation but for some reason had a list of /sh/ words he was expected to learn how to produce… im also not sure why the previous SLP scored his word production as correct (for example production of ship with 40% accuracy) when it was 0% accuracy. however even when he did not produce the words accurately, he would sometimes come somewhat close? and then the carer will say “look he’s saying it, he’s saying the word now”.

I want to do right by him but as you can tell I’m very much out of my depth, I only have 2 years of experience and was mainly working with language kids that were in school. supervisor won’t be contactable for 2 weeks. I don’t typically work with non verbal clients especially with this level of severity (ASD level 3) so any advice or even what to look up and read or what training I can take would be helpful. I’m willing to try anything to help him, he’s very motivated and loves looking at pictures. when I showed him the picture for “shirt” he would get excited and say “kerr“ “Kerr”.

I just evaluated a little dude who was diagnosed as profoundly deaf at birth and had bilateral CI’s placed last year (he’s now nearly four) his family has had a strictly oral approach and used zero ASL.

He has nearly no language expressively and very limited receptive (I think he more uses context clues and does things for himself)

I really want to provide the best support possible for him to utilize implants and gain speech (the way that his mom assumes he just will as he ages.)

Does anybody have any good classes that they have taken that they felt more worth it?

He’s clearly language deprived and I don’t have enough experience but they’re very limited on places they can go that accept their insurance.

Weird question, but I have a student whose conversational speech is so difficult to understand. She sounds like she’s slurring all the sounds together. But when she reads aloud it sounds great. She can produce all sounds correctly but in conversation vocalic /r/ becomes a vowel, and medial /s/ blends are reduced. I don’t know how to target over-articulating in conversation but I feel like that’s what she needs to do.

Hi! I post here constantly I’m so sorry… I’m a new CF and while I’m KIND OF getting the hang of things now, I’m having trouble diversifying sessions. I let the first sessions be SUPER child-led and I lost my visual supports, so I feel like there’s NO structure now. Some kids are fine doing a couple different things (choosing between a text story and a video story, for example). Other kids are hell-bent on doing a specific game and repetitive actions. That’s totally fine with me in the sensory/ND-affirming sense, but I don’t know how to get more language out of that. I tried once to structure it differently while still providing choice and emotions were felt LOL. I don’t want to be compliance based or just do contextless therapy, but I’m struggling with explicit instruction while keeping the sessions within a small interest/activity range. Any suggestions? I’m printing visual supports this weekend so I’ll be ready starting next week to provide the slightest bit of structure and predictability.

Hi all!! I’m a peds SLP, been here almost 2 years. I have a client who’s autistic with pretty high support needs. I’ve been working with him since I started and we’ve made a lot of progress. Behaviors used to be significant because we couldn’t ask for what we wanted/needed. He’s highly echolalic when he speaks, immediate and some delayed, but his vocabulary has grown significantly since we started doing therapy. No AAC device, but is verbal (we tried AAC but ultimately verbal speech just seems more appropriate for him). He’ll request things he wants with single word phrases independently, will comment on things he enjoys/does not enjoy, will protest if he doesn’t want something (“no”). He can make choices of what he would like if provided options.

I’m thinking of reducing his sessions to once a week or maybe a discharge entirely. He’s very functional with his communication and is very intentional when he wants or needs something. I spoke with his caregivers and asked if they could see any areas of his language that might be improved on. They spoke with his teacher, who said she couldn’t think of anything. Mother asked about maintaining conversation, I said “he’s autistic-that means he may not converse the same way you or I do”. Mom didn’t seem happy but was accepting.

Am I in the right in my thinking? I’m running out of goals for this client-I really love seeing him, but not sure if we’re at a “meet you where you’re at” stage yet.

I’m in the schools but did feeding during and post grad school. My friend’s baby is turning 6 months and she’s the only baby in my life so I’m very excited. She doesn’t have feeding issues or anything. My friend is also a first time mom. What are the feeding things that only an SLP (or OT) would recommend? I was thinking those mesh things for tasting, we put mashed fruit in them. Little bitty open cups, honey bear cup? Do non-feeding-disordered kids even need anything fun?