Due to recent events and advancements in technology, parents have been opting for online speech therapy for their kids. Children can continue with their education and get help with their speech and language issues from the comfort and safety of their homes. However, learning via web access has both positives and downsides. Here are some factors to consider.

Understanding Speech Therapy and How It Works

So what, exactly, is speech therapy? Provided by a speech and language pathologist (SLP), speech therapy evaluates and treats children, identifying communication struggles and helping them speak and listen with greater proficiency. Most schools have a trained therapist on their staff to help children dealing with articulation and verbal comprehension. These professionals also help with developing proper fluency, understanding instructions and social cues, and expressing themselves clearly. Children may perform exercises under the therapist’s direction to tone their facial and throat muscles to form words clearly.

Teletherapy Can Prove Beneficial

Now that kids are attending digital classrooms using tools like Zoom, Skype, and Google Meet, speech therapy is also offered online. Parents can sign up their kids for teletherapy sessions with trained SLPs.

Most virtual sessions proceed much like personal one-on-one sessions. Therapists use cue cards, images, books, reading classes, and verbal exercises such as poems and rhymes to help kids with their speech challenges. This method of teaching has several advantages.

Most importantly, therapists can continue to treat their patients without having to meet them personally. Children need not miss out just because of stay-at-home orders. Considering that the key to successful therapy is repetition and practice, kids can continue to make progress even if they are at home. Therapists can connect with kids in real-time, having interactive practice lessons via the web access using audio and video applications.

Another essential of speech therapy is group classes. Kids learn best when watching their friends speak words, recite poems, and perform actions and exercises. Teletherapy allows SLPs to conduct sessions with multiple students, each mimicking the motions other kids make and learning quickly. Interacting with their friends and having fun while they work is essential to maintain interest.

Children Can Access Learning Programs Using their Android Tablet or iPad.

Recent speech therapy programs are easy to access and use. You won’t have to invest in special apps or download and install them for video conferencing. The sessions are brought to you via live streaming. Parents only need to permit screen access to the therapist. Complete confidentiality is maintained as the SLP designs classes around the child’s specific deficits and works on correcting them. For instance:

• They may take over the screens to make small adjustments and adapt images, so the child understands them better.
• Words are added and removed according to the student’s advancing capabilities.
• Visual tools make the entire session fun and interesting. Kids can tap on an image to see an animation that reveals more about the bird or animal. Or, perhaps, the letter and words that start with the letter.
• SLPs can watch and evaluate the child to make recommendations for additional classes accordingly.
• Parents can be present in the room when the class is in progress to understand how to conduct reading lessons

Is Online Speech Therapy Right for Your Family?

While adopting technology to continue with speech therapy sessions is a great idea, it can have some downsides also. Here are some factors you will want to keep in mind.

• Children need web access with a high-speed internet connection and devices like laptops, PCs, tablets, or phones to connect with their therapists. Students with unreliable internet access or a bustling home where they can’t concentrate may find it hard to acquire these essentials.
• Getting kids to sit still and attend classes can be challenging. Parents may have to supervise to ensure that the child maintains focus.
• Effective speech therapy is also about picking by facial expressions and subtle body language cues. Children learn best when they watch how facial muscles work and coordinate sounds with lip movement. With the quality limitations of video, they could miss out on these intricacies and nuances of speech therapy. This could result in slower progress.
• Equipment failure and breaks in internet connection could hamper real-time classes. Both students and therapists have to learn to navigate applications. Often, small errors like keying in the wrong password or students being unable to log in could lead to unwanted delays in getting the classes going.
• Considering that many kids also rely on the internet to keep up with their regular studies and curriculum, speech therapy could add to the total digital time and fatigue.

Using technology and web access to ensure that kids keep up their education and speech therapy is a great idea whether they are taking virtual school classes or not. However, parents, kids, and therapists have to work their way around the challenges so that the program achieves the desired results.

Learn More About Your Child’s Health

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The greatest of greats have always emphasized the importance of art in society. In the words of Albert Einstein, “The greatest scientists are artists as well.” Children with an inclination towards the arts are, definitely, gifted. However, this talent must be nurtured for them to become the artist they dream to be.

Before digging deeper into the ways science can help children become the best artistic version of themselves, let’s throw light on the closest relationship that science and arts share!

Dave Featherstone, Professor of Biology and Neuroscience, believes that science and art are the same things. He wrote on Quora, “Both science and art are human attempts to understand and describe the world around us.”

While he granted that their traditions, approaches, and intended audience might differ, he also argued that the motivation and goals of both science and arts are fundamentally the same.

Once you understand this, it’s easy to see why opting to develop art with a scientific approach must is an ideal choice in parenting!

So let’s discuss how the study of science is essential in not just developing a growth mindset towards a better career, but also help your kids learn develop latent talents that might make them successful in sports, arts, or any vocation of their choosing. Here are five such “talents” that are nurtured as a result of studying science and technology.

Creativity

Both science and art observe, explore, and create. Science helps kids to ask questions, observe more, and therefore get better at their pursuits.

Encourage your child to make observations from any activity they engage in and then record them by writing them down, drawing a picture, taking a photo, or making an audio or video recording. Your children, via science, learn to compare and contrast things and use them better in other activities such as music, painting, and storytelling.

Science doesn’t follow one method to discover results. In fact, many discoveries have happened by accident. This effect falls out into other fields as well. For example, great novelists hardly ever have defined templates to write stories. They use their life experiences and knowledge to create masterpieces.

Another great example where art projects are based on science is activities such as crafts, woodworking, knitting, etc. where measurements are important. This is where the intersection of math and art also comes into play. Without the knowledge of machines and calculations, creating those pretty crafts can be quite a task.

Once they ingrain these concepts (even if you haven’t explicitly taught them), your children won’t shy away from trying out new methods of creation – and more importantly not quit after a few tries.

Planning

Science is a systematic subject that allows kids to learn organization, scheduling, and estimation like nothing else. For most goal-oriented activities that kids undertake – whether in the course of playing, or related to their school projects, or simply any classes our courses they might be enrolled in – planning is a core requirement.

Here’s a simple, graphic example of everyday activities that involve both fun and learning for children. You’ll notice that none of these actions are possible without some elements of a scientific approach.

Each of these activities requires a lot of preparation. From gathering resources and tools for your experiment to learning about new concepts, to collaborating with other curious minds, science is a journey of continuous planning.

With planning skills acquired through small activities, kids can develop their skills and aptitude in artistic pursuits.

Of course, creating art, irrespective of its form, still is a lot of hard work but taking a scientific approach and starting with a plan makes it easier.

Adaptability

Adaptability, as a life skill, might seem a bit too much for young children. However, it’s crucial to teach them to be flexible early on in life. Experiments help children cope with failures, making them a lot more adaptable adults later.

Children who develop the tendency to try on in the face of failure find it easier to adapt to difficult situations later in life. Science experiments expose kids to mistakes, and failure. But eventually, they learn where they went wrong and correct themselves, which makes them less rigid in turn.

Creating art requires adaptability at its best. In painting and sculpture, an endless amount of raw material is wasted. Not a single scene of a film is finalized without dozens of retakes.

With a scientific bent of mind, kids grow up to be patient adults who can handle challenges like creative blocks and go on creating the relevant art forms that appeal to different cultures and societies.

Curiosity

One thing that artists and scientists have in common is their curiosity: the eagerness to learn more and present their own concepts to the world. It follows that curiosity is one of the most important things a child needs to have.

Whatever we know about the world today is because someone was curious enough to ask a question. Children learn things by asking questions. Asking a question is the way to discoveries.

Now children have an ingrained sense of wonder. Combined with curiosity, it can only turn into something expressive and creative. If kids who are inclined towards art have a curious mind, they’re sure to go places and discover themselves!

As a parent, you must encourage your child’s curiosity and self-understanding. You can do so by saying things like “I wonder why I’m happy to see yellow cars!” or “I wonder what Indian curry tastes like.”

Listen to kids’ questions carefully and guide them through self-discovery of the solution rather than spoon-feeding them with answers. Give them a description (or maybe a printout) when you see them unable to make or draw something from imagination, but don’t build it for them.

Critical Thinking and Decision-Making

We adults learn from our experiences – and so do kids. A STEM approach to learning helps children think and act rationally, and also exposes them to environments that test their decision-making skills.

Kids, however, tend to make impulsive decisions. Science teaches them that there is more than one solution to a problem and that the best decisions are those that are well-thought out.

This helps them develop critical thinking skills.

In fields like architecture, marketing, and film making, critical thinking is central to the outcome of every project as well as appealing to a target audience.

Needless to say, a child who develops the knack of seeking out and looking at different solutions objectively, and choosing the best one among them.

Final Thoughts

When you teach science to children, they learn life skills that play a crucial role in nurturing different types of talents within them.

The greatest actors, painters, musicians, and sportspeople swear by science, while scientists believe in the artist or player inside them. So, go on and instill a love for all vocations in your kids and let them choose their calling. With just the right amount of encouragement, your curious and hyperactive kid might just turn out to be the Leonardo da Vinci of the internet age.

Author bio:
 Shreiya Aggarwal-Gupta is the owner of the early education startup Kidpillar, which aims to provide developmental opportunities and resources for young children in the field of STEM (Science Technology Engineering Mathematics) via kid-friendly journals, practical DIY-kits, and simple project-based learnings and workshops. Shreiya is also a passionate blogger, computer science engineer, finance whiz, and “perfect mommy” to her son.

Cyberbullying is one of the most common causes of emotional stress not only among children but also teenagers and even adults. Children that are bullied online experience stress, anxiety, and even depression. They have low self-esteem, lower grades, and may even feel physical pain.

The mental bullying definition, according to officials, is the following: it is a form of bullying which takes place via smartphones, tablets, and computers. It happens through text messages, social media accounts, forums, and video games where youngsters share information and communicate. Cyberbullying means sharing harmful and negative information about a person, including data that may cause embarrassment.

In this article, we will discuss the signs of online harassment, its consequences, as well as apps that prevent cyberbullying and other effective measures.

Signs that your child is being bullied online

Most children don’t tell their parents about being bullied, so it is important for adults to understand what signs may indicate the problem.

A child may be cyberbullied if:

• They stop using a smartphone or computer, while before they used it all the time;
• They avoid using computers where anyone else can see them;
• Every time you walk by, the screen or monitor goes black;
• They are withdrawn;
• They neglect friends and avoid other people;
• They don’t want to attend school;
• They say something like ‘I don’t have friends’ or ‘there’s a lot of stress in the class.’
• They are nervous when getting a message or email.

How this may impact a child’s psyche

You already know what cyberbullying is and what signs to look for. But what can cyberbullying cause? Is it a minor problem or a serious issue that requires our attention? Below we are going to discuss the emotions that cyberbullied children experience. And some of them are extremely dangerous.

1. Confusion

It may be overwhelming, especially if a child is bullied by several kids at the same time. A bullied kid may think that everyone knows about the situation and supports it. They think that the world is against them, and there is no one they can turn to. Very often, they think that the situation is too heavy and difficult to handle.

2. Humiliation

Cyberbullying takes place on the Internet, so if something is published online, it stays there for ages. That is why children feel exposed and can’t get rid of the feelings of being humiliated.

When the bullying takes place, messages and posts can be shared by others, and the more people know about the situation, the more difficult it is for a child to cope with the situation.

3. Strengthless

Cyberbullying victims feel powerless and unsafe. This happens because online bullying reaches them anywhere they are: at home, at school, or even in a supermarket. They are reached via a smartphone or a computer 24/7. That is why the child doesn’t have a place to hide, and it feels that the bullying will never end.

Unfortunately, rather often, online bullies are anonymous, so children may experience additional stress and fear. And they don’t know how to cope with the feeling of powerlessness.

4. Uselessness

As a rule, bullies attack the most vulnerable ones, so the victims already feel that they are not worth the love and attention. Most bullies trigger others by saying that they worth nothing and don’t have any value.

Unfortunately, these feelings may lead to disastrous consequences. For example, if a kid is called fat, they might use harsh diets and harm their health. Or try and change their appearance to look more attractive. Some children refuse to go to school or even to leave their homes because they feel useless and don’t see a point in communicating, studying, or even living.

5. Isolation

Many children and teenagers that are bullied feel excluded at schools and colleges. They often feel alone and not knowing who to turn to. At this age, friends are extremely important, and their absence leads to even more bullying and stress.

When cyberbullying happens, children are usually advised to close their social media accounts and turn off computers at least for a while. However, this leads to even more isolation because, for children, it is extremely important to communicate with their friends and stay updated on the things happening around them.  In this way, the effects of cyberbullying on social media become much more broad in the damage caused.

6. Vengefulness

In some cases, cyberbullying makes children very angry, and they start searching for a way to harm the bully in return. This emotion is one of the most harmful consequences of bullying because the child is locked in negative emotions, which can do significant harm. It’s best to forgive another person than to be angry all the time.

7. Physical illness

Psychosomatics proves that emotional state may influence your physical health. Cyberbullied children often complain of headaches and other physical symptoms. Stress can also lead to problems with the stomach, skin, and whatnot.

A common impact of cyberbullying is troubled with sleep and nutrition. Children have nightmares and insomnia. They may also skip meals or even stop eating at all. These conditions are extremely harmful and can lead to negative consequences in the long run.

That is why it is so important for parents to be attentive to their children and notice any changes in sleeping and eating habits, as well as other physicals signs of mental problems. This can especially be difficult for a single parent who has a child being cyberbullied.

8. Absence of interest

Cyberbullied children look at the world differently, and they lose meaning in the things that support them. They no longer enjoy their hobbies and spend less time with their friends and relatives. This only contributes to depression and leads to irreversible consequences.

Bullying victims are disinterested during classes; they are not motivated to get high grades and perform well. They skip school not to dace bullies or because they feel embarrassed and think that everyone in the school knows about the situation.

Stress and worries cause a lack of concentration, which results in poor grades. In the long run, this may lead to dropping out of school or even losing interest in entering college. As you see, such a ‘minor’ problem may impact a child’s future.

9. Depression

One of the most dangerous and harmful conditions that a bullied child experience is depression. They lose confidence and no longer have healthy self-esteem, which leads to stress and anxiety. They, in turn, make a child unhappy. If the episodes of cyberbullying happen on a regular basis, the above emotions lead to depression. And in most cases, it is impossible to cope with depression without side help.

It should be noticed that many children mask their depression and, on the inside, seem happy and cheerful.

10. Suicide

According to research, cyberbullying may be a cause of suicide, especially among youngsters. Children who are regularly bullied by their classmates or neighbors, or even unknown people on the internet, often lose hope and think that they can’t do anything about the situation.

They might think that the only way to change the situation is to commit suicide. As you understand, this condition is the most threatening one and requires your full attention.

Depression

Does bullying cause depression and suicidal thoughts? Now you know the answer. It is a very dangerous problem that causes stress and anxiety in thousands or even millions of children. It becomes difficult to lead a happy life, which in the long-run harms both physical and mental health.

Instead of remaining indifferent, we should seek to solve the problem of cyberbullying and become active listeners, mediators, and voices of wisdom. We should also treat our children with respect and participate in their lives so that they won’t want to bully others or would have enough stamina to resist bullies. Fortunately, parental have the power to protect our children from any type of bullying. There are consulting session options and apps which will be of great help.

How to prevent cyberbullying

As you see, cyberbullying and depression are interlinked. This may influence a child’s future and even lead to irreversible consequences. That is why it is so important to know the most effective prevention measures.

First of all, you should try apps for parental controls that monitor the social activity of your child and record the time and the medium that was used for bullying. Then you can report to the school or academic institution if the child is bullied by a classmate. It is also important to try and talk to a child about the situation. Another effective instrument is to post positive messages if you see a dialog with bullies.

However, the methods above might not help if your child is withdrawn or too sensitive. In such a case, you can try out applications that may help to reduce and even prevent cyberbullying.

Is Online Therapy for Teens a Viable Solution?

The phone, a device once used solely for the purpose of calling one another, has quickly become capable of just about everything.  The birth of mobile phones has brought the world to our finger tips, both good and bad.  And who would have believed a decade ago that these smart portable computers would be in the hands of most kids.

With such a powerful device now available to just about everyone, it becomes more and more of a challenge to limit your child’s usage of their phone. Activities available on a smartphone seem endless; playing games, making music, watching videos, and even browsing the internet. Unfortunately, as with many things in life, without moderation and protections put in place, there can be consequences.

Should I Allow My Child to Get a Phone?

Before asking whether how to limit your child’s phone usage, it is probably worth discussing whether your child should be allowed to have a phone in the first place. A phone is an extremely useful tool for your child to have in order to gain a sense of independence, allowing them to attend after-school clubs or extracurricular activities while staying in contact with you.

While your child may claim that all of their friends have a phone and try to use this as a reason that they should have one, it is up to you to decide at what age it is appropriate and not their friend’s parents. By allowing your child to have a phone at a young age, you are essentially granting them access to an unfiltered and unsafe world that they are not be ready for.

Limiting my Child’s Phone Usage

Luckily, when you decide that it is the right time for your child to have a phone, there are still parental control filters that can be installed to ensure that they aren’t visiting unsafe sites, as well as any site that isn’t age-appropriate. It is also possible to install parental control filters to actually limit the amount of time that they spend online each day. While you may think that installing these filters is all you need to do, it is important that the limits that you set are fair and that you also set a good example for your children with your own phone usage. When necessary, you may want to track your child’s phone.

A Digital Family Alliance

Although parental filters can definitely help, sometimes setting strict limits on your children’s devices while you continue to use yours to your heart’s content can create tension in your household. Creating a digital family alliance is a great way to adopt healthy digital habits together. By being honest with your children, it opens up a dialogue where everyone can contribute, letting each family member explain the difficulties they have when it comes to limiting the amount of time they spend on their phone. After all, how can you expect your children to get away from their phones if you can’t get away from yours?

Is all Phone Usage bad for your Children?

Although we have been talking about limiting our children’s phone usage, it would be wrong to say that all phone usage is bad for them. Having a phone does give your child a sense of independence as well as allowing them to stay in contact with friends and even participate in productive activities.

Today, children can use their phones to learn digital art, how to make music, and even get into photography, the potential is limitless. The point here is that it is important to understand how much time should be spent on non-productive activities such as scrolling through social media or watching endless YouTube videos to name a few. Monitoring the amount of time that they are using their phone for these different activities is crucial to allowing them to enjoy any creative hobbies that they may need their phone for while cutting out the junk food of their digital diet.

Conclusion

So we can agree that our phones are incredibly useful devices when in the right hands. By working together as a family we can create rules that are easy enough for everyone to sustainably adhere to. If you are thinking of limiting your child’s phone usage, make sure to ask them how long they think is an acceptable amount of time to spend on their phones and create an open space where you can discuss your digital week. After all, families can get through anything when they work together.