Giulietta: Early Communication Practices

Until Giulietta was eight years old, she had no reliable means of communication.

We didn’t know what she understood. We didn’t know what she wanted to express. She had no tools to tell us. She seemed lost in a world with no connection to the people around her.

And yet, her eyes lit up when she heard music. She smiled when we read to her. Her face came alive when she saw instruments. She watched videos transfixed, completely absorbed. Sometimes she would burst out laughing for no apparent reason. Her laughter was beautiful.

It meant she had an inner life. But she couldn’t respond to verbal cues in any way that suggested she either understood or could reply.

In 2009, we embarked on a two-week intensive trip to the PROMPT Institute in Santa Fe, New Mexico. PROMPT is a speech therapy technique that uses tactile cues, the therapist physically touches the child’s face, jaw, and lips to guide the precise movements needed for speech, and is considered especially effective for children with apraxia. Both Benji and Giulietta spent full days at the clinic, five days a week, for two weeks, subjected to intense efforts to support their verbal speech.

We achieved nothing.

When we returned home, I invested in training Toronto-based therapists, who were overseen by the specialists in Santa Fe for ongoing intensive speech therapy. After a year of zero progress and enormous financial drain, we finally gave up on PROMPT.

We then hired other speech therapists and speech therapy assistants to work with the kids in a whole-life communication program 7 days a week 8 hours a day. My biggest priority at the time remained verbal speech. I couldn’t imagine that my beautiful children would never be able to talk. I simply couldn’t accept that as possible.

In 2015, after nearly Giulietta’s entire lifetime engaged in intensive speech therapy with absolutely no return on investment, I realized we needed to focus on an achievable goal: Alternative and Augmentative Communication.

What mattered at this point wasn’t the method, it was that Giulietta, this beautiful child, needed a meaningful way to communicate. As her parent, it was my responsibility to find the tools that would unlock her voice.

I knew she was in there.