Why Can’t My Child’s Tongue Thrust be Treated at School?

Parents often ask: “Why can’t my child’s tongue thrust be treated at school?” When parents discover that a tongue thrust is often treated by a Speech/Language Pathologist (SLP) they assume that the speech therapist at their child’s school has been trained to do therapy with tongue thrust just as they were trained to treat other speech problems. Unfortunately, this is not true. At the present time, there are very few graduate programs of Speech Pathology that even address tongue thrust problems in their courses.

By law, a child can only be seen in the public schools by a speech therapist for an educationally handicapping condition.…