Child-Led Support: The Concept of Compromise Over Compliance

In our minds we just envision chaos and confusion and just Every toy out, you know, a big mess. And sometimes sessions may get a little bit chaotic. But that's not the basis of a child-led approach. We are centering the child's experience and their interests and what's meaningful for them and using that to direct our support. Maths speech language pathologist Nicole Casey. How might things change if we try to do that?

Instead of pushing milestones? And how can parents and professionals recognize growth that doesn't always show up on a chart? I'm Emily Kircher Morris, and a conversation with Nicole Casey is ahead on episode 305. Neurodiversity. If you're an educator like me who's hoarding ideas for later podcast episodes, articles, strategies. This is exactly need. You are not alone. Most of us have a whole mental filing cabinet of things that resonate.

And then Monday morning hits and somehow those ideas never quite turn into something usable in the classroom. That space between this makes sense and this actually works with my students is something I think about a lot. That's why we're opening the doors to the Educator Hub next week. A few times a year, we invite educators into a shared learning system.

With ongoing professional development, practical tools you can actually use, and conversations that let you revisit ideas instead of rushing past them. The doors open soon, so don't miss your chance to join us. Head on over to neurodiversity.university and click on the Educator Hub tab or just click the link in the to check out all the information. Nicole Casey is coming up. Previously on the Neurodiversity. It's not just the account of the Kids build self-esteem from being accountable and

when they do things independently. And I think sometimes when we swoop in to save them We steal their self esteem. A little bit. that I think is like a s can become a slow development of learned helplessness. the intention is negative from parents at all. It's like not malintended. It's meant to be Just like your physical muscles. have to let your children exercise those executive functioning muscles, even if it doesn't always work out. 222. Find it wherever you get your podcast.

Today, I'm talking with Nicole Casey. She's a speech language pathologist, educator, and founder of the Child-led SLP and the Child-led Therapy Center. Nicole's work is all about helping parents and professionals move away from compliance-based models of speech therapy and toward connection-first, neuro-affirming approaches that honor every child's voice. So Nicole, I'm so glad that you're here. Thank you for talking to me. Thank you so much for having me.

When people hear the phrase child-led support, it can sound a little abstract. uh maybe even be misunderstood. Some might picture total free play with no direction, while others think it means letting a child run the show, but there's a lot more nuance to it. Can you talk a little bit about what child led really means in practice?

And some of the common misconceptions that you see. Yes. And you are so right. This is probably the b biggest misconception out there when it comes to a child-led approach, a child-led philosophy. Um, I think in our minds we just envision chaos and confusion and just Every toy out, you know, a big mess, total kids running the show and doing as they please. And sometimes sessions may get a little bit chaotic, but that's not the basis of a child-led approach. A child-led approach is

an approach where we are centering the child's experience and their interests and what's meaningful for them and using that to direct our support. And I always tell people that it's not that there's no structure. It's not that You know, we have no plan, we have nothing, um, no considerations going into a session.

But we don't apply those arbitrary adult directed rules that we've been taught to apply with autistic kids. Instead, we focus on setting boundaries for safety, for, you know, making sure everybody feels welcome and safe. And so I like to tell people that a child that approach is an approach where we are

the partner to the child rather than the director. And we work together to engage and communicate. And that way The child has stake in the game where they feel that what they're working on in their sessions is actually valuable to them. Getting that buy in, like and having that that sense of agency is so important, not only just for the child to feel seen, but just for that relationship use, which is so foundational to making progress towards whatever those

Whatever those goals might be. It's so foundational and the traditional model for supporting autistic kids in the speech therapy world and beyond, you know, in most of our related professions, has been very compliance driven and adult directed and has really centered our convenience and our needs and has disregarded the experience of our autistic kids and students. And so by applying a child-led approach,

we're giving that freedom back to the child and reimagining how we support them that actually allows us to partner with them rather than just telling them what to do and when to do it. And it does create so much more buy-in and it also generalizes more because what you're working on is actually what the child wants to do. And they sh they start to open up and show you who they are and what's important to them.

When parents start embracing a child led approach at home, it can feel like a really big shift, especially if they've been told. four years that progress should look like hitting certain milestones or following specific programs. I'm wondering how you help parents Begin to redefine what growth really looks like for their child. Like, what are some of the signs of meaningful progress?

that might not show up on a chart. Oh my gosh, Emily, I am so happy that you asked me this because I have a story that I think will make you laugh a little bit. So I run a a private practice right outside of Philadelphia and Um, for the longest time, the name of my clinic was Connections Speech Pathology. And I chose that name because Connection is one of our core values, and I thought that it it really kind of captured our essence.

But over the years of having my clinic, number one, I didn't like the word pathology. And I thought that that was not affirming. And I kind of wanted to get away from that. The idea that we are trying to fix kids was never aligned with my values. But instead of just taking that word off, I said, you know what, we're just gonna name our center the child led therapy center because I want the parents to know before they ever even step foot into our office what we're about.

And I want it to be so clear to everybody that we support. What our values are and what our approach is gonna look like. And I have found that ever since we changed the name to that, we are finding that. it opens the door for that conversation with families so much quicker. Whereas before, maybe a parent would bring it up after a couple of sessions, but we weren't explicitly going into our model ahead of time like we probably should have.

So we would kind of wait and bring it up casually throughout our sessions. But now it's the first thing we tell families when they get here. We say, We take a child led approach and that's what, you know, we find to be the most successful. And here's what that means and here's what that looks like. But the other thing that we talk about a lot in my clinic, and I I talk about this probably on a weekly basis with my therapists, is the idea that.

Parents in almost all cases have been told the complete opposite. And so we can't expect them to bring their child to us. just meet us for the first time and just accept what we're telling them as the truth. And some parents might go, oh, okay, that makes sense and I I'm on board with that. But most parents are gonna wanna kind of feel it out first and see because they have been taught and told so many times over the years that for their child to be making progress.

They need to be sitting at a table. They need to be working, right? Speech therapy should look like doing their work and they can play after or they can do what they want afterwards. So we've kind of flipped that on its head and said, no, the play and what your child wants to do is the work. And we try to reframe that for families. But we don't, we don't pressure families to accept it right away. We

Our goal is always to let them see the process and let them see what we're doing. So that way they can try to take what works for them at home and apply it. And, you know, for any parents listening, I also say that I'm a parent. I have two toddlers. And I would not describe my household as a hundred percent child led. And so I would never expect.

my clients' parents to be a hundred percent child led either. And so I tell families this all the time. I say, you have to find your boundaries and know what those are for your family, your dynamic, your child. And you can let them lead in some capacities, but they don't have to be in charge of everything. And and frankly, that's not realistic. And I don't even know that that would be

ideal for anybody. And so I try to remind them that so that there's not that guilt of thinking, oh wait, I never let them, you know, do decide these things and those those sorts of self-doubts and guilt that come up so much for families. So I always say take what works and leave what doesn't work because we're not in the business of telling you how to raise your child and we are hoping to bring value to you, not

give you something else to do at home. I feel like that definitely normalizes it for families and helps them recognize there's this balancing act that goes into it. You can try to integrate some of these principles and bring them into your family life and and Try some new things that maybe weren't the way that we were all raised, you know, and and helping them have that connection and again see that progress.

Even if that progress looks a little different. And that progress that you're talking about is something I'm so passionate about educating on and advocating for because In my training as a speech therapist, we were taught to teach kids to talk, right? Like that was most of our training was about speech. But we were given very little training for supporting communication in other modalities.

And autistic kids are multimodal communicators, meaning they might use speech. Some kids may not use speech. They might use gestures or actions. Pictures, AAC, right? Augmentative communication. And so many of us have been taught to view communication as a hierarchy where Yeah, all those other modalities are are fine and good, but speech is, you know, the the pinnacle. Like speech is what we're working toward. And so I find that I I spend a lot of time kind of

talking through this with families and professionals, trying to remind them that communication is way more important than speech. And we are going to support your child. with their communication because That's the most important thing for them to be able to express themselves in whatever way is accessible. And so when it comes to progress, sometimes families will come in and they'll say, I just want my child to communicate. And I'll say to them, Okay, how are they communicating?

And a lot of times what will happen is the the mom or the dad or the family member will say, they're really not communicating. And I'll say, Okay. And I know that that's not true because everybody communicates in some way, right? So I know that's not true. So I try to ask a few follow up questions and I'll say to them, Well, how do you know if You know, your child wants something to eat.

And they'll say, Well, she'll grab my hand and she'll take me to the fridge. She'll use my hand to open the fridge door and she'll put my hand on what she wants to eat. And I say, Okay, that's communication. And sometimes just Showing them and pointing out the ways that their child is making progress, is communicating, is like a major epiphany because it gives them a new lens

through which to see their child. And from there, they can start to actually notice the progress themselves. And that's one of the best parts of this job, I think, is when families come to me and go, oh my gosh. Miss Nicole, you're never gonna guess what my daughter did this week. Like she grabbed my hand and took me to, you know, the door'cause she wanted me to take her to whatever.

And before that, they would have maybe not even realized that that was a valid form of communication. But once we talk about how all communication is valid and accepted. they have a total reframe on the situation and they're able to now see the progress that happens in those more micro moments. So I think that's really important for everybody to understand that communication is not a one size fits all thing and speech isn't necessarily

Better, it's just more conventional. So we kind of equate that with better, but we have to encourage and support that multimodal communication.

That kind of brings me to another topic I wanted to ask you about. And so we've talked about gestalt language processing on the podcast before, um, but it's a really important topic. So I did want to revisit it a little bit, especially through a neuroaffirming child led lens. So for parents or professionals who are listening who are still learning about it, can you give a quick overview of what gestalt language processing is?

And what it looks like when we support these communicators in a way that truly honors that communication style. Absolutely. So gestalt language processing is a natural way that some people acquire and develop language. And they start with these chunks of language that are tied to usually an emotional or otherwise meaningful context. Um, sometimes people will refer to this as scripting, but it goes a little deeper. A gestalt is

um kind of simply defined a chunk of words that is richly intonated. So they have um, that up and down really animated intonation. And it's tied to some meaning that may not be clear on the surface to us. And so for example, I had a student who would say, We'll run away forever every time he didn't want to do something. And we had to figure that out. We're like, where you can't run away at first because we were taking it at the surface level. But once we realized like

Okay, he's saying that every time we get out a craft and he does not like crafts, this obviously for him holds deeper meaning. That's how gestalt language processors start to communicate. And A lot of times when they're really little, you might hear them speaking with this rich intonation, but you can't make out what they're saying. So it might sound like target.

Like and they're repeating the whole target commercial, but you can't make it out. But to them, it's all one unit of communication. So they start with that echolalia or repeating language that they've picked up from a show, a conversation, a family member. And then they start to go through this developmental process where they break that down into smaller units and eventually get to

self-generated communication in whatever that might look like for them. But they s instead of starting with single words like we've traditionally viewed for communication development, they start with these gestalts or these chunks of delayed echolalia. I think it's also important to recognize that most of us use echolalia in some way, shape or form in our lives. Like

Everyone has certain movie quotes, right, that you use, like uh we're gonna need a bigger boat, right? Which may not have anything to do with that conversation, but but people know what that means, right? And so we use that almost as this little shorthand to express an emotion or an experience. How does that gestalt language processing develop beyond that? Like what are the next Typical ways that that might be change over time as kids get older, as they build more language.

So it really starts with having communication partners that number one recognize that a child is a GLP, which is what we what we shorten that to. Um it starts with us.

recognizing it because we need to do a little bit of detective work in a lot of cases to figure out what they're trying to communicate through these scripts or these gestalts. And so That right there I think is the key step that you can't skip because when the child is scripting or they're repeating lines from a show and it has meaning for them, but we don't understand.

They might be saying it and never have somebody validate it or respond to it. And so when you do, when you stop and you go, Yeah, let's run away. It's like you get this moment of clarity that um I know Alex Zakos from Meaningful Speech, she always calls it the bingo eye contact, where they kind of pause and look at you like, uh, you heard that?

And so I think it starts with us understanding that a child may be processing language this way or maybe developing communication this way. And then we have to recognize that. Because repeating is their strong point, right? Their strength is is with that echolalia. Even though so most of us were taught that echolalia is a deficit to be extinguished, it's not. And that's actually the opposite of what we want to do. We are really mindful of how we present language to early GLPs because

they're gonna repeat us. So if I go to an early GLP and I say, Are you okay after they fall down? Well, they're gonna say back to me, Are you okay? But then they might take that freeze. And that might be their way of telling you the next time they fall down that they're hurt because that's what they heard in that moment, right? And so rather than saying something to them in question form, like saying to them, Are you okay? or what do you want to eat?

I will model language for them from their perspective. So I will say, I fell, I'm hurt, or something like that. Because I know they're gonna repeat me in most cases. And and maybe not all cases, because not every GLP is a speaker. But if the child is using that immediate echolalia, I want to model language for them from their perspective. And we model for them in ways that are more um

easily able to be applied to a variety of contexts. So I'm hurt doesn't just apply to that situation. They could use that in other ways. We might say things like, If they're reaching for a toy, we might say, Let's get the bubbles instead of do you want bubbles? Because what will happen is if you say, Do you want bubbles? Well, now when they want bubbles next time, they're gonna say to me, Do you want bubbles? But they're not asking me if I want bubbles. They're telling me they want bubbles.

So we try to model for them in that way. And what you see happen then is that they pick up on that language. And it sounds natural coming from them because it's been modeled from their perspective. And from there they they ultimately start to recognize and break down those phrases into single words and then start putting those single words back together in their own way. And so not every kid will go through the process the the same way.

But that's generally what you'd expect to see in terms of how they're acquiring language and what we can do, especially early on, to support them. I want to talk a little bit about

how we measure progress. I work so much with educators, right? And we're so familiar with IEP goals and how, you know, like four out of five times this, that, or the other. But when kids are receiving support, Those types of phrases like things like with eighty percent accuracy or f they're gonna develop five new words, like I don't know that that information is telling us what we think it's telling us, perhaps.

And so a lot of the growth that really matters in a neuro affirming approach just can't be captured that way. How do you help parents recognize and celebrate the kinds of progress that just don't always show up on paper? Okay, so this is probably my Current favorite topic to talk about. Oh, good. Which is so funny because for probably the first five to six years of my career, I

told myself, like I had this story in my head that I was just a really bad goal writer. Like I could not write a goal to save my life and it would take me Forever to come up with a goal for the reason that you just described. Because I am such a overthinker, a deep thinker. And so I would sit down to write a goal and I'm like, That doesn't matter. Like this 80% accuracy goal, I I don't care about that. I want to know, is the child feeling

successful with their communication? Are they feeling connected? Are they able to advocate for themselves? Are they able to tell us to stop and leave them alone? Right. And so those 80% accuracy in four out of five opportunities goals.

I just never understood them. And so I had this this thought in my mind that I just didn't understand goals and I was just always gonna be a bad goal writer. But it came to like a breaking point for me when I was spending So long trying to write a goal for one of my autistic students. And I I went to one of our mentors at the time and I said, I can't do this for every IEP. Like I can't be spending hours. And I'm like scouring Google, you know, this is before

Everybody was sharing things on Instagram and social media. Like this is We're using Chat GPT. What we didn't have Chat GPT. We had none of that. So we had good old fashioned mentors. So I I went to my mentor and I said, I Can't do this anymore. And she said, Have you ever thought about writing your goals in rubric format? And I'm like,

Tell me more, Renee,'cause I don't know what that means. So she grabbed a whiteboard and she drew a table, right? She put five columns, four rows, and she drew this table for me, a rubric and She said, down the first column, you're gonna put the skills you wanna measure in your sessions, and then you're gonna put a rating scale from one to four. for the other columns. And you're gonna define in each of those scores what that would look like for that skill. And

The reason this is going to be helpful for you is because you're going to find more flexibility in what you're showing up and supporting in your sessions. You're not going to feel so tied to whether the child requests something an eight out of ten times because you've got a variety of skills that you're looking for.

And a variety of ways to describe progress that's not about accuracy. Because I hate to break it to us, but communication can't be accurate or not accurate in this capacity. It simply does not make sense because Who am I to say if your communication is accurate? Your communication comes from you. So I don't get to decide whether that's accurate or not, and it it doesn't make sense. So I went home and I'm like, okay, th she's on to something here. And I spent the past five, six years since then

really refining this rubric goal writing process. And now I actually teach other people to write rubric goals because it is the only way that makes sense to me. And it's the only way that I have found to actually be able to capture progress in our sessions and still be able to have a child-led approach. And it's the easiest way to explain to parents what you're working on and teams. And As the speech therapist, I'm with the the child maybe what, thirty minutes to an hour a week.

I need the power professionals to understand the goal. I need the one-to-one aids. I need families. I need grandmom to know what we're working on. So having a rubric where I'm laying out in the first column You know, maybe four or five communication functions. So maybe it's asking for help, maybe it's telling somebody to stop. Maybe it's um advocating for a sensory need. It's too loud. I I need a break or I need to move. Things like that.

by putting that all into a grid where everybody can see the things that we're just looking for, it gives us space to just observe the child and see what they're doing rather than going into a session with this contrived adult directed plan. And truly to me, like it was a pivotal moment in my career when I learned this. But since then I've built it out to the point where I can sit down and write a rubric in

five seconds for a kid, whereas goal writing used to take me, I'm not exaggerating, at least an hour, if not more than that, for each child. And the progress on a rubric. It's not only just easy to understand because you know what skills you're looking for and you've got multiple. It's also visual. Like you can take those numbers and literally graph them or you can show the family.

Hey, when we started, he was at a four out of twenty and that meant that I was doing most of the modeling and he was, you know, he wasn't really doing X, Y, and Z thing, and now he's got a twelve out of twenty. And that means that He's sometimes doing this spontaneously. We're not talking about accuracy, but we're moving toward autonomy, whatever that looks like for the child. So

I don't do 80% goals anymore, accuracy, or in 80% of opportunities. And I have found that it's it's so liberating. And I will tell you that um I coached an SLP on this recently and Just so happened in some twist of fate that her the student she was asking for coaching on was a former student of mine. Oh. And I knew we lived in the same area, but I'm like, okay, that's so funny. Well the the student's mom texted me and said

R SLP just wrote the best goal I've ever seen for my child in, you know, in years. And she said, I openly wept during the IEP because I never felt like a goal actually captured what what I valued and what I knew my daughter needed until I saw this rubric. And she's like, I feel like Finally the team understands her. And that tech Like I will keep that screenshot forever.

That's what all this is about, right? Well what I love about what you're doing there is first of all, you're shifting it from quantitative data to qualitative data, although you can assign some numbers to it if that's necessary. But I can also imagine like through this rubric process.

You're then also tracking like, what does that progression actually look like? Because sometimes I'll see families and they'll go into IEP meetings and they're like, Yep, we met that goal, met that goal, met that goal. Okay, they're gonna be graduated, you know, whatever. And it's like, hang on a second, like Where have we been? Where are we going? I find that sometimes what ends up happening is educators will like if they're looking for that eighty percent.

It's not necessarily happening in natural settings, whatever that goal might be. And so sure, like I don't know, I can I have so many clients that I work with at my office and we're working on, I don't know, emotional regulation skills. And they know the answer, but does that actually mean that they're able to use those skills like in a realistic setting? It's very explicit. It describes it when you're looking at it in that framework.

I think that's a really great way for communication between educators or clinicians and parents and families and really to get that full scope of Where are we now? Where are we going? How is this progress occurring? You bring up such a good point too. That's exactly why I love this process because for example, in speech we often work on requesting, like right, the child asking for things that they want or need.

So the old way would be, okay, I'm gonna bring bubbles into the session and I'm gonna blow one singular bubble when you asked for bubbles and then I'm gonna put the lid on and I'm gonna hold it back and you're gonna ask for it again. And I'm gonna do that ten times and see how many times you can do that. Well, okay, that's not helpful, right? Number one.

Would you wanna talk to somebody who did that? If I invited you to my house and I said, Here's a drop of of water, here's a drop of coffee, now I ask for a little bit more, you would be like, I'm never going there again. And yet we we make autistic kids do this every single day for their

Whole academic career. And you and then we wonder why they're frustrated. And we wonder why we're not building these relationships. Because we've we've completely lost the plot, I think. And so with rubric, I can say to the team, hey this week. Anytime you see this child asking for something, maybe it'll happen at snack or circle time.

jot that down on the rubric. I leave a binder with rubrics in every classroom so that anybody at any point can go over and fill out a rubric if they saw something. That's what I need to know. I don't need to know if I hold all of the items in my hand, can the child ask for them? That's not real life. And also that's not communication. You're just asking them to perform, right? So by having a rubric where everybody understands and everybody can

observe and capture that qualitative information and then be able to assign some quantitative value to it, it just makes sense. And I think it's just a much better way. to then be able to, when we're in those IEP meetings, actually be able to be like, oh my gosh, this is what happened. And so and so saw it. And his one to one told me at the playground, he asked to be pushed on the swing. Right. So it just gives a much more

comprehensive picture of what's actually going on. Authentic. Authentic. Nicole, I am really grateful for your time today. I've got one last question before we wrap up. So

For parents or professionals who are just starting to move toward a more child-led, neuro-affirming way of supporting kids, and maybe they're a little unsure of where to even start. What would you want them to remember? What's the small shift or mindset change that you would encourage them to start with? I would say that the first mindset shift that that really has made an impact for me was pausing when I'm about to assert my control in a situation with a child.

pause and think to myself, does this quote unquote rule have to be a rule? Does this rule actually serve me or my student, my child, right? Is this rule something that I that uh is aligned with my values or can I be flexible in this moment? And start to look for little opportunities to let kids show you what they want or need and allow those little moments to accumulate over time to the point where you don't feel like you're completely

Uprooting your entire relationship and approach to supporting your child or student, but you're looking for little moments. Like, for example, if you're going to work with the child and they want to stand up at circle time. And you're gonna say to them, nope, sit down, sit down. Before you do that, just pause for a second and think, does it actually matter? And what if moving actually helps them to process and pay attention? Right. So pausing in those moments and thinking,

quote unquote rule is not really a rule that aligns with my values or what I think this child needs right now. So I can be flexible here and starting to share control with kids and trust that That's an okay thing to do. And it's actually a really, really helpful thing to do. Nicole Casey, host of the Let's podcast. Thanks so much for talking to me today. Thank you, Emily. Thanks for having me.

One thing that really stuck with me from this conversation is how deeply many of us have been trained to look for the right response, the right answer, the right behavior, the right action. And when you step back from that, you realize how often that mindset shows up not just in therapy, but in parenting and teaching. Everyday interactions. Child-led support asks us to let go of that reflex and stay with what's actually happening instead of steering toward what we think should happen.

Especially for adults who care deeply. that opens the door to more honest, responsive, and meaningful connection. I'm Emily Kircher Morris. I'll see you next time on the Neurodiversity Podcast. Thank you to Nicole Casey. It was an interesting conversation. And if you'd like to learn more about Nicole and child led support, we have links in the show notes.

We are opening the doors to the Educator Hub next week, the week of february sixteenth, We open it to new members a few times a year so educators can enter our shared learning space where we offer Ongoing professional development, practical tools and ideas, and great conversations with fellow educators and other experts in our hub. Watch our social media pages for the portal to open or better yet, click the link in the show notes for details.

Our host is Emily Kirchham Morris. Corey Oric is our office manager and production assistant. I'm the executive producer Dave Morris. For all of us, thanks for listening, and we'll see you next time. This is a service of the Neurodiversity Alliance.