Frequently asked questions


​What can I expect from your service?

We are passionate about helping families find answers to their questions.  We aim to empower you with knowledge and information.  We conduct objective testing and support you to understand and consider the findings when making referral and intervention decisions for your child.  We set out to discover your child's communication strengths together so we have a map of where they are now, where they are ready to go next, and the way to get there.


I am worried about my child's communication - what should I do?

Parents are uniquely programmed with gut instinct
Parents instinctively know when something is not quite right with their child.  So we will always recommend that you follow what your parent-gut is telling you. 

​If you have concerns about your child's communication skills, the best thing to do is to organise for your child's hearing to be tested and then get a professional opinion from a registered (independent) Speech-Language Therapist - for peace of mind and early identification of problems. 

Speech-Language Therapists are uniquely qualified
Plunket Nurses, Kaiako, Teachers, GPs, Paediatricians, and others often take it upon themselves to say when they think a child's speech, language, and communication skills are fine.  We wish that they would tell concerned parents to talk to an independent, registered Speech-Language Therapist, and let the Speech-Language Therapist decide! 

Speech-Language Therapists are the only professionals uniquely qualified to assess, diagnose and treat Communication Disorders.  And even with their specialist training, it is still tricky enough for Speech-Language Therapists themselves to figure out if a child's level of communication reflects normal developmental variation, or if something has gone wrong with their communication development.


​Should I be worried about my child's communication?


​What if I'm not worried about communication but about something else?

If your child is having difficulty getting on with others, listening and paying attention, or learning and keeping up at school, they could be having neurodevelopmental difficulties.  Neurodevelopmental Disorders often happen together, for example a child might have ADHD as well as a Developmental Language Disorder, or a child could have one or both of these and also have Dyslexia.

If you have a more general concern about your child's functioning and don't know where to begin, we recommend  a $40 discovery appointment to talk about your concerns and a comprehensive communication screening to rule out a Communication Disorder in the first instance - because Communication Disorders are the most common as well as the most under-diagnosed disorder of childhood. 

We also offer a variety of other screenings in the neurodevelopmental space to help identify where the problem area(s) might be.  The results of these screenings can support referrals for further assessment, diagnosis, and additional support for your child. 


What if my child won't talk to the Speech-Language Therapist?

Parents often worry that their child might feel too shy or too embarrassed to talk to the Speech-Language Therapist.  This does happen sometimes in the beginning and is totally OK, because we have lots of creative ways of working together with families to get the assessment information we need. 

Next, we start building up children's confidence together by using talking tasks we know they _can_ do and by having fun together to show them that they can trust us to help them. 

And then it happens...

They start talking our ears off!  Sometimes their parents joke with us that we have created a ' talking monster' that does not stop talking.  This makes us feel happy because we know there is another confident communicator standing in the world!