Happy National Speech-Language-Hearing Month! | Explore Support & Services for SLPs
Happy National Speech-Language-Hearing Month! | Explore Support & Services for SLPs
Welcome back to ableFamilies in Real Life, our series celebrating the families who make communication happen every single day. This time we are heading to Washington to meet Dana, her husband Dan, and their two sons, Jackson and Logan. Logan is eight years old, and for the last three years the QuickTalker Freestyle has been the voice he reaches for first.
Logan is the younger of Dana and Dan’s two boys, and he is a high energy kid who wants to be outside no matter what the sky is doing, hot, cold, and especially when it is raining. He loves being in the water all year long, the pool in the summer and the hot tub in the winter, and thanks to a deep love of Disney and Pixar movies he almost always has one or two action figures or CARS characters in hand. His big brother Jackson is a teenager who plays baseball and loves video games.
Logan started using the QuickTalker Freestyle at about five years old, at a point when he still had almost no words. The family had tried a number of low tech options first without much luck or progress. Logan took to the QuickTalker Freestyle very quickly, and Dana credits their ABA team as a huge part of those early successes, because they were very good about building it into his therapy from the very beginning.
The QuickTalker Freestyle has a permanent home in the living room, and there is one house rule everybody knows: no one takes the charger. (This, Dana notes, is a real challenge when there is also a teenage son in the house.) Beyond that, the device goes everywhere Logan goes. The family taught him that habit early, so now when Logan leaves the house he grabs it on the way out the door.
Everyone in Logan’s life knows to tell him to “use his talker or voice” when he needs something, and any family member who takes him somewhere knows to bring it along and keep it charged. Dana also does a little prep work of her own, looking up words ahead of an activity so she is not overwhelmed in the moment and Logan is not left waiting and frustrated while she finds or adds a word. At school, she made sure the QuickTalker Freestyle is written into all of his IEP goals where appropriate.
That consistency shows up in how Logan uses language. He communicates his needs and wants effectively, and he picks up new words and phrases every day. Dana loves watching him stretch the words he already has to reach the ones he does not yet have, like pressing “closet” when what he meant was the garage.
The moment Dana comes back to happened at the end of an outing. Logan picked up his QuickTalker Freestyle and told his family, “I want to truck.” They had driven the truck that day, and he was letting them know he was ready to go home.
It was the first time Logan was able to say he was finished with a place instead of simply leaving it. For a family who had spent years watching him have no way to tell them what he needed, that sentence was everything.
More recently, the habit of taking the device everywhere paid off in a way that made Dana laugh. On a quick stop to pick up a takeout order, she figured he would not need it for the two minutes they would be inside. Logan refused to leave the car without it.
Dana’s advice for families just getting started is to be gentle with themselves. “Cut yourself some slack,” she says. “People don’t learn to talk in a day, so don’t put pressure on yourself or your loved one to figure it out quickly. Language is a lifelong skill we are always refining. AAC is no different.”
Logan used the QuickTalker Freestyle for nearly two years before he began speaking even one or two words, and then spoke only a handful for almost another year. The summer between second and third grade, his verbal speech exploded. He is still very reliant on the QuickTalker Freestyle, and Dana is glad for it, because it taught him the words before he learned to say them. She holds onto a reminder that carries the whole family forward, that nothing is forever, and the things Logan lives with now are not necessarily the ones he will live with always.
Stay tuned for more real-life stories from ableFamilies across the country. Want to share your family’s journey or have a question? Our Parent Enthusiasts are here for you. You can also explore additional resources, guidance, and community connections on our Support Hub.