“Blue Sky” the boy called, repeating a gestalt phrase he had learned in another context. “Blue Sky, can I have a kiss?”

This being their first meeting, Sky was still a bit hesitant around this tall fifteen year old who moved jerkily and had periodic vocal tics. I was giving her time and watching closely to see if she would actively consent to interacting with him, as she hadn’t yet experienced meeting anyone like him. As I supported her with quiet praise and a hand on her side while making sure the boy didn’t try to hold onto her legs, Sky slowly transferred her front feet from my lap to the boy’s and began to wiggle and kiss his face.

A mutually loving bond between these two blossomed before my eyes.

This moment about a month into Sky’s therapy dog career is seered onto my heart as when I knew she was indeed meant for this work. A natural people-lover, she nonetheless has an active and high-strung temperament, so I’ve introduced Sky into work days extra slowly to ensure she feels safe.

Here’s three challenges and three successes Sky and I have faced together over the past half a year:

Do you work with a perfectly imperfect dog? I happen to own four of them and have used three as speech therapy dogs at my pediatric Speech-Language Pathology private practice. Each one is amazing, entertaining, loving….and sometimes maddening!

When I’m faced with a challenging behavior, I take some comfort in knowing that I have options for how to handle it. I can: throw my hands up in defeat, train a more useful response, or manage the behavior.

Ok, so maybe the first option isn’t very productive, but let’s be honest, sometimes it’s the knee-jerk response we all have when our fight our flight response kicks in…

What’s the difference between these two hug scenarios?

Consent is the biggest factor, but also the actual physical components of the hug. Yet social media posts abound of cute photos of kids hugging dogs, sometimes physically lifting them off the ground in their enthusiasm.

While it’s easy to anthropomorphize our therapy dogs and assume they welcome hugs because we do, the reality is that dogs communicate and experience the sensory world differently than humans.

So how can we incorporate a therapy dog safely into a session while:

· respecting their welfare,

· keeping the situation safe for all involved, and

· providing for the sensory and emotional needs of our clients?

Let’s explore good therapy dog etiquette to improve our animal-assisted interventions:

The realization hit me and I felt like an idiot. After all, the whole reason I first delved into animal-assisted therapy was to help my clients establish a calm, focused state to better learn new concepts. Yet here I was, asking my young therapy dog Sky to learn a new skill when she was tired, satiated on the food rewards I was offering, and probably a little overwhelmed.

Over the past five years of working with four speech therapy dogs of widely different temperaments I have learned to better recognize when I am inundating my furry co-therapist with too many ideas. Fortunately they’ve been very forgiving of mistakes I’ve made as I learned largely through trial and error.

Here are three situations I now approach very differently in order to minimize the stress my therapy dog and I feel at work and hopefully contribute to a longer, happier career:

Oh Delta, you’re soooo lazy today!” I groaned, hamming it up for the giggling first grader as my canine co-therapist barely lifted her legs high enough to make it through the hula hoop we were holding together.

Working on symmetrical lip protrusion for the “j” sound as part of post brain-surgery speech rehabilitation, the little girl clearly didn’t care that Delta’s trick was sub-par. In fact, the unexpected nature of Delta’s poor performance and the laughter it elicited may have even made this activity more memorable.

While Delta does indeed know several tricks,  I’ve found the kids on my caseload are rarely critical of how she performs.  They are far more impacted by the bond they share with her as they practice emerging self-regulation and communication skills.  There are certain skills that do come in handy across a day of animal-assisted speech therapy, however.  Here’s my personal favorites, the ones I call upon most often, and the treats I rely on to reward Delta’s hard work:

What’s the number one question I get from clinicians interested in adding a speech therapy dog to their practice?

“What if something happens…will my liability insurance cover me?”

It hasn’t been a straightforward question to answer, but recently an exciting opportunity opened up to allay those fears a bit.  I’ve also spent a lot of time considering what else can be done to make sure we never get to the point of having to call upon liability insurance, and I’d like to share these thoughts here…

Have you ever started on a venture and been surprised where you wound up? When I first brought my dog Delta to work, I really thought it would be for the occasional special session for children who were struggling to make progress toward their communication goals. Fast forward a few years and those early experiences with Delta have propelled me deeply into the world of animal-assisted interventions, leading me to: work with four different therapy dogs to date, write a book for other SLPs, and start the Speech Dogs website to provide resources and education about the topic. Here’s a few surprising things I have discovered on the journey:

I’ve always been a bit different…and I actually like that about myself. So when people in my life off-handedly dismissed my idea of writing a book about animal-assisted speech therapy, it didn’t stop me from trying. Contrary? Oppositional? A “drive for autonomy”?

Call it what you like, I’ve just always been one to pursue my interests come what may. And guess what…I’m a new author!!!

Paws for Progress: Integrating Animal-Assisted Interventions into Your Speech-Language Pathology Practice was a two-year process. In book publishing that’s actually pretty quick. Here’s three critical factors I found in moving from rough ideas to a finished product:

“She did it,” I thought to myself, gratefully leaning down for an enthusiastic puppy kiss from my little Sky.

Though she was the fourth dog I’d taken through the CGC training and testing process, I didn’t know if I would be successful this time.

The first time through the six-week preparation course with my three-year-old Brittany spaniel I had opted to sit out the actual test. I knew energetic Sky needed more work on impulse control and energy regulation, but even now after a second six-week class she was not yet consistently keeping her feet on the floor for polite greetings. Additionally, while she didn’t have any difficulty being apart from me when we had started this process, we had spent so much time together over the past six months that she had started to display a little separation anxiety.

I knew that regardless of the outcome of this attempt, however, we had built important, functional skills for our future work together. Here’s what we learned from training for the Canine Good Citizen Test:

“Simple doesn’t mean easy.” It’s a platitude I’ve heard many times in many contexts. A platitude I’ve largely ignored until this week, when my passion to combine the power of therapy dogs with my chosen field of Speech-Language Pathology seemed to hit stumbling block after stumbling block. Those four words exactly encompassed the emotional roller-coaster I’ve been on this week working with a new speech therapy dog recruit, reviewing skills with my experienced dog, and studying for the C-AAIS exam.

“What’s your evidence?” It’s a question I ask my older clients often as we work through comprehending social communication contexts or more complex reading passages. But it’s also a question lobbed at animal-assisted intervention in general, and, more specifically, animal-assisted speech therapy.

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is the foundation of our field. Yet it gets tricky when it comes to quantifying the effects a speech therapy dog has on our clients. Here’s three challenges I think researchers will face as studies on animal-assisted interventions become more common:

Delta’s expression made me laugh…

There she lay, shifting her weight like a surfer, ears pricked as she listened to the boy.  Like a character in Audrey Woods’s The Napping House, Delta was on top of the cushy mat on top of the relaxing child in a speech office where everyone was now smiling.

Time and again I find one of the most impactful benefits of working with a speech therapy dog is their ability to help a child achieve a calmer, more regulated state.  It’s a trait I take advantage of almost daily working with kids on my caseload diagnosed with autism, attention-deficit disorder, Tourette’s, and even some of my neurotypical kids who are just having a bad day. 

Here’s three ways my speech therapy dogs and I work together to bring about a calmer, more regulated state:

“I can’t imagine not working with a therapy dog moving forward! I have never been so excited about an intervention!” Hannah Young, high school social worker and partner to Fletcher.

Last post I explored the logistics behind school therapy staff partnering with a dog with help from Hannah as well as animal-assisted speech-language pathologists Maria Papas), Laura Kruger, and Betty Tedford. In Part Two we’ll find out how these four have observed their therapy dogs impacting students and staff at their respective schools.

Yellow school buses, joyful playground noise, rows of desks, and…therapy dogs?

That’s right! A few pioneering school speech therapists and other therapy staff are successfully incorporating animal-assisted interventions to engage the students on their caseloads. Speech-language pathologists Maria Papas and Laura Kruger, Betty Tedford and school social worker Hannah Young took the time to share their experiences and advice to help promote the benefits of therapy dogs for the Speech Dogs audience.

While therapy dogs bring a lot of gifts to a speech and language session, not all children and caregivers are immediately comfortable in a dog’s presence. As an SLP, it helps to identify why a child is uneasy to determine if some desensitization and/or education can enable the therapy dog to become a useful active component of therapy, will need to simply wait quietly during this child’s sessions, or would be better contained away from the child.

Sky’s clear chestnut eyes looked at me and my heart filled with pride. It was her fourth official work visit and I could see improvement each time. It wasn’t just learning some new tricks, but the learning that was happening on a much deeper level that pleased me.

Sky is the fourth therapy dog I’ve worked with and with each new recruit I am better able to appreciate just how much experience it takes to learn the job. Here I’ll discuss the top three skills my canine co-therapists have learned that take on-the-job experience to achieve.

Though still training for our Canine Good Citizen test, the wonderful families and Arlington Speech & Reading welcomed Sky in for a day to learn the ropes of speech therapy dog.

She has already been a few times before without seeing any kids to adjust to the environment and a couple partial days to meet families as a transition into the expected workload.

Follow along for ideas of how to transition your own therapy dog into your work.

Perhaps there are SLPs out there who always know exactly what to do, always execute their plan perfectly, and have amazing outcomes with every client. I am not one of those professionals. However, I care deeply about my profession and helping the families I serve and I’m (usually) willing to learn from my mistakes. When I decided to start bringing a speech therapy dog to work, I honestly didn’t have a clue what I was doing. I did my best to figure it out as I went with the limited resources I could find at the time. Five years later I have learned so much both about the theory behind animal-assisted interventions and practical daily application in a speech therapy setting. Let me share the 3 biggest things I wished I’d known when I started.

Therapy Dogs and reading, they go together like peanut butter and jelly! But perhaps for more reasons than you realize.

Sure there are popular programs where children take turns reading to a patient dog at school or a library, but did you realize there’s other ways to involve a canine companion to directly target specific literacy skills? Read on to find my three favorite ways to incorporate animal-assisted interventions with my reading clients, plus one I’m excited to try.

Have you ever stumbled upon a helpful tool or technique to use with your speech therapy clients but had no idea what it was called? Or been surprised that something you’ve intuitively been doing actually has a name and research behind it? If you’re already using therapy materials with animal characters and themes, then you’ll probably be pleased to know you’re already using Animal-Related Engagement, or ARE.