How to Support Family Use of AAC?

I have heard that establishing new routines takes at least 30 days of doing that thing every day.  Building new habits takes time.  Those of us who live and breathe AAC in our profession need to slow down and consider that family life is busy.  Here are some tips to support families:

• Validate what is already working well for families. Families want you to know they are doing their best to support communication.  Celebrate what they are doing well to support multimodal communication!
  
• Help families explore times during their routines where communication might be more difficult. Perhaps the child can communicate by spoken word or gesture for food items but not at bedtime when they want you to give them a big hug.
  
• Help families explore the idea of communicating for basic wants/needs vs. communicating for shared social enjoyment. A child who communicates “want+cookie” vs. a child who communicates “love+mommy”.
  
• Start small, have families identify one daily routine where they can try to integrate AAC use. I sometimes suggest “contained” moments or moments where the child is not running around.  These might include sitting at mealtimes, sitting in carseat, in the bathtub, tucked in at bedtime. 
  
• Start even smaller, show family how the strategy you are recommending they use (e.g. modeling, contingent responding, 1 upping, etc.) can be worked on at home 1-3 minutes per day.
  
• Project ImpAACt is one example of using a sequence of 8 steps to effectively help communication partners establish new AAC routines.  See for more information: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1525740116651251?icid=int.sj-abstract.citing-articles.26
  

Check in with your families weekly.  Simply ask "how is it going" or "what is working well" or "what are you struggling with" or "is there anything you are hoping to review".  This type of support is important for families to feel they are working with you toward a common goal.