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The Speech and Language Team at MITOS love to celebrate what is important to our clients. Watch this short video about Milly and her love for Makaton. 

This article has been reproduced with permission from RCSLT Winter 24/25 bulletin Auditory Verbal therapist Catherine White shares her approach to supporting parents to help their children develop language skills. When I first started out as an SLT, my mentor said: “Parents are critical to the success of therapy. What we do as therapists is just a drop in the ocean”. It always stuck with me, and 25 years on, it is still a foundational principle of the way I work. I first came across parent coaching when I trained as an Auditory Verbal (AV) therapist. AV therapy (AVT) is one of the early intervention approaches to developing spoken language in deaf children. Intervention can start as early as infancy...

Emotion Coaching has been developed using the principle that "nurturing and emotionally supportive relationships provide optimal contexts for the promotion of children's outcomes and resilience." (Gottman 1977). Our work using these tools are beneficial when used with both children and adults alike. Further research can be found on the Emotion Coaching UK website. If you're interested in learning more behind behind the tools we're using we've referenced articles below and will be adding over time. Gus, Rose & Gilbert (2015) 'Emotion Coaching: A universal strategy for supporting and promoting sustainable emotional and behavioural well-being', Educational & Child Psychology, 32(13), pp. 31-41. [link here] McCarthy (2016) 'Science of the Heart: An Overview of Research Conducted by the HeartMath Institute'  [link here] HeartSmart is a brilliant tool that can be implemented into...

Mental health and wellbeing has jumped to the top of the agenda in almost all organisations, even more so in the wake of the global pandemic. The pandemic has uncovered huge gaps in mental health provision while emotional resilience, at organisational and individual levels, has been tested - often to breaking point.  So, just how sustainable is existing wellbeing and mental health provision? Through extensive practice, training and research, we have come to understand that the majority of mental health challenges and the greatest struggle with maintaining a healthy mindset is down to an accumulation of unmet emotional need. Emotions are widely misunderstood as the thing that controls us. In actual fact they are a rich data source which, when harnessed...

Children learn their social cues by mirroring {1}. Just as language is learned through constant exposure, so too is nonverbal communication.  We learn to shake hands or smile when someone opens a door for us because it’s what we’ve seen ourselves. Our children are growing up in a new reality where the only full faces they see are those they live with. Strangers are kept at a distance. In the first four years of development, the human brain is in its greatest growth phase. At two years old there’s a significant increase in brain activity {2}. The impact of coronavirus, although only a year or two of disruption, may potentially leave small children with gaps in their neurological development.  The...