Hanen Program’s It Takes Two To Talk has earned world wide recognition for its family focused early intervention programs. The Hanen Centre’s mission is: “To provide the important people in a young child’s life with the knowledge and training they need to help the child develop the best possible language, social and literacy skills”.
Chatterboxes is proud to be a certified provider of the Hanen Centre’s programs and conducts regular training for families during our early intervention sessions.
It Takes Two to Talk® is a model of family-focused early language intervention for young children with expressive and/or receptive language delays. The program’s goal is to enable parents to become their child’s primary language facilitator, thereby maximizing the child’s opportunities for communication development in everyday situations. Three core program objectives:
1. Parent Education: Parents learn basic concepts about communication and language that are essential in helping their child’s communication develop. They learn about:
- Development of communication (with an emphasis on nonverbal communication.
- Differences between expressive and receptive language
- Importance of a child’s active participation in frequent, extended turn-taking interactions in order to set the stage for language learning
- How and why their child communicates
- Child’s stage of communication development which facilitates the setting of realistic communication goals. It also enhances parents’ responsiveness to their children’s communicative attempts.
2. Early Language Intervention: Parents learn to apply language facilitation strategies flexibly across contexts so that intervention becomes a natural part of their daily interactions with their child. Strategies highlighted by the SLP for individual parents are specific to supporting their child’s communication goals. These goals are developed collaboratively with the parents and modified over the course of the program. Since effective and consistent strategy use by parents is critical to the child’s progress, video feedback sessions play a major role in helping parents see and modify their interactive behavior with their child.
3. Social Support: In It Takes Two to Talk, parents gain both formal and informal social support. The SLP, whose multi- faceted role includes that of group leader, interventionist, coach and counsellor provides more formal support. The parent group itself provides informal support through the sharing of experiences with individuals in similar situations. Parents report that this constitutes a vitally important component of the program.