The Clubhouse Therapy Centers - Downers Grove

Speech therapy encompasses a wide variety of skills! The easiest way to know if your child needs speech therapy is to bring them into the Clubhouse for a free screening or a full evaluation. If you have any concerns or feel that your child is behind their peers, it’s better to be safe and get it checked out. If you’re not sure if your child is meeting their speech and language milestones, talk to your child’s pediatrician or check out our developmental milestones! If your child has missed more than one or two, a screening or evaluation is a good next step. Some common reasons for speech therapy include not saying sounds clearly, not combining words, difficulty following directions, and trouble interacting with others.

To get started with speech therapy, reach out to the Clubhouse! One of our clinic managers will go over your billing options and will schedule an evaluation with a speech therapist. After your evaluation, the speech therapist will make recommendations for how often your child should receive services and a manager will work to schedule sessions. From there, all you’ll need to do is show up!

There are many ways to do this! Your speech therapist will give you weekly suggestions for what to work on at home depending on what you and the therapist determine to be the best goals for your child. After each session, you’ll receive information on your child’s progress and homework to practice outside the clinic. You may get a list of child-friendly words with a specific speech sound to practice, ideas to practice following two-step directions while playing at the park, or something as simple as instructions to ask your child to name three things they did at school each day! Speech therapy is not a one-size-fits-all approach; the best thing you can do is to follow up with your child’s therapist and work with them for weekly ideas to practice.

How often your child needs speech therapy will depend on their goals. Most children receive speech therapy twice a week, which allows your child and their therapist to build a relationship in addition to working on speech and language goals consistently. Some children may be recommended for more frequent therapy depending on their needs.

A pediatric PT is a therapist who typically works with patients from birth to 18 years of age. Generally speaking, they specialize in helping young babies and children to move their body in order to access their needs and explore their environment. Pediatric PT’s help children to reach their highest functional potential! They usually focus on strength, range of motion/flexibility, posture, balance, coordination, stair negotiation, gait patterns, and sometimes, sport-specific or play skills, but the list goes on and on depending on the patient’s age, diagnosis, and functional level.

People often think of PT’s as sports/orthopedic therapists or rehab therapists for older individuals. In the pediatric world, especially when working with infants, things look a little different! A PT session with a baby will usually look like play, with some hard work mixed in. Babies receiving physical therapy often need assistance to learn how to roll, sit up, crawl, pull to stand, and walk independently. Pediatric PT’s find toys, games, songs, and people who best motivate the baby and use these as tools to help them reach their developmental milestones. For example, your physical therapist might use bubbles or a rattle that lights up in order to work on sitting balance and reaching with a young baby.

A large part of a baby’s success in PT comes from parent and caregiver education. Your PT will educate you on a variety of activities and modifications that can be carried out at home in order to help your baby meet their goals. In some cases, it helps to have your therapist educate daycare teachers, grandparents, siblings, aunts/uncles, etc. in order to incorporate these activities into their everyday life, depending on who helps care for your baby during the week.

Physical Therapy with The Clubhouse can be private in-clinic or can take place within your home. Early Intervention services are offered from birth to 3 years and typically take place within the child’s natural environment, such as the home or daycare center. Recently, due to COVID-19, sessions have started taking place virtually!

It depends!

Typically, the sessions look like “play” again for the most part. If the child is older and can follow directions well, the session will be organized with exercises that target the child’s needs. For more sport-specific orthopedic conditions, resistance bands, weighted medicine balls, yoga balls, and free weights/ankle weights might be used for basic strength training, similar to those used with adults. PT will incorporate games and fun therapy tools to help motivate your child. For example, a scooter board, soccer cones, playground ball, and beanbags are all examples of toys that can help facilitate strength and coordination during a PT session with a younger child. Every child is different, so every therapy session is just as unique!

A typical PT session will last for 60 minutes and will include weekly home exercises for the family to follow. Your PT will help your child work toward their functional goals, whether it be managing muscle tightness or spasticity, reducing pain and swelling after an ankle sprain, helping a child receive an assistive device (gait trainer, orthotics, etc.) to improve their independent mobility, improving endurance to keep up with peers in gym class, or helping a child learn to ride a bike. At the Clubhouse, you’ll find a ball pit, rock climbing wall, slides, and swings to help engage and motivate your child. We want to make therapy sessions fun so that your kiddo forgets how hard they are working!

No. Not all children who receive PT have a diagnosis from a pediatrician or other medical doctor. As listed above, typically developing children often receive PT short-term to manage and rehabilitate injuries or to work on developmental delays. Examples of common developmental delays include difficulty running, jumping, hopping or balancing on one foot, throwing/catching/kicking a ball, walking safely up and down the stairs, or riding a bike. Children can receive PT for general muscle weakness (hips, core, etc.), delayed balance skills, or concerns from parents that their child is not able to keep up with their siblings or peers.

On the other hand, there are a variety of common diagnoses that may warrant outpatient PT. Some examples include: Down Syndrome, neurologic conditions (Cerebral Palsy, Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Muscular Dystrophy, etc.), torticollis (head tilt) and plagiocephaly (a flat spot on your baby’s head), Autism Spectrum Disorder, Developmental Coordination Disorder, Idiopathic Toe Walking and other gait abnormalities, orthopedic conditions, hypotonia (low muscle tone), and general developmental delays as described earlier.