Since 1988, a Missouri clinic has been doing its part to help young children with speech and language problems.
Walker Scottish Rite Clinic at Maryville University in St. Louis provides services throughout the state free of charge to Missouri children who don’t qualify through other programs, like First Steps and Head Start. It has provided therapy to about 20,000 Missouri children.
Jacob Gutshall (Photos courtesy of Walker Scottish Rite Clinic)
The donor-funded clinic has seven locations in the St. Louis area and several independent sites around Missouri.
Jacob Gutshall, the clinic’s director, says about one in ten children has a speech or language problem.
“We work with children with language delays, children that aren’t saying very many words yet – they can’t produce sentences, have trouble expressing their wants and needs. We also work with children who have receptive language delays, children who otherwise can’t understand what other people are saying to them. They have trouble with directions and participating,” he says.
The clinic serves children, ages two through six years. Gutshall says early intervention is key.
“By the time the children are five years old, they should be speaking pretty close to adult like sentences. And if you wait until the child enters school at kindergarten, oftentimes they’re further behind than they would have been if you would have gotten early intervention. Starting early really can help them to not fall further and further behind as they get older,” he says.
According to Gutshall, there is a real correlation between early speech and language difficulties and reading abilities.
He says the cause of communication problems is often unknown.
“The child might have learned something incorrectly for a speech problem or they might have something like what we call childhood apraxia of speech, where they have trouble with coordinating the movements for speech. Language disorders a lot of times in our clinic what we find is the children are having difficulties with hearing,” he says.
Guttshall says there are some simple ways to help prevent these disorders, such as reading to children, talking to them about the world and things their kids are interested in, limiting time on electronic devices, and giving the child choices – to get them to respond.
COVID-19 has shifted our world in a variety of ways. Guttshall says many therapists have been providing services virtually.
“We were worried at first, how is this going to work with young children, preschoolers on a screen trying to interact? Are we going to be able to keep their attention? Are they going to just walk away and never come back, or Mom’s going to be trying to force them to. And really, what we found is that children are responding much better than we expected, especially those young children, I think you probably can realize this, but children are just used to technology, they’re used to FaceTiming, with grandma and other friends. And so, they really responded well to telepractice. Some of them, obviously, some of them, they require that in person, but for a lot of kids, it’s really working okay for them to receive telepractice,” says Gutshall.
He says the pandemic has been a silver lining by opening up some doors for children that otherwise wouldn’t receive the care that they need.
“For instance, we have children that are low-income, very low-income that we serve, and the families are working, and it’s really difficult to get to therapy. And so transportation is sometimes an issue. And so with telepractice, the family can just log on, and they can be at their home, they don’t have to figure out who’s got the car. They can just jump on, have a session, and then jump off and get right back to their normal lives. So telepractice has been, you know, forced upon us more quickly than we ever wanted. But it’s been really a benefit to certain families. And, and I think that it’ll always be a tool in our toolbox that we use moving forward to be able to provide access to those kids that have a computer and have that internet connectivity and receive that care that they need,” he says.
To hear the Show Me Today interview with Jacob Gutshall, click below.
For information about the Walker Scottish Rite Clinic, call 314-529-9200 or click here.
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