If you think Bridget looks golden, a little sparkly and shining, you’re right. It’s new love (his name is Sarfraz) and it makes her bewitching and delightful to all of us older, more experienced types whose loves are more measured but no less deep. It also makes her just a little hard to get on the phone as he is  invariably already talking to her. That phone grows out of her ear and it is part of the syndrome that she loves being teased about it because it gives her yet another reason to talk about him. Ah! Youth!

She does have a professional persona as well, however. Bridget is a talented and dynamic speech therapist, volunteering with us here in the Foundation for three months – and we are squeezing her for every possible ounce of knowledge she can share while we’ve got her in our midst. Yesterday I sat in on the tail end of a workshop she held for the teaching staff and wished, as I often do, that I could start my career over again and become a speech and language development therapist instead of being a fundraiser, administrator and blogger.

What an amazing field! Human communication is such a vast and complicated subject and the more one learns the more one realizes how connected it is to every other aspect of our development. For example, so many behaviour problems originate simply from an inability to communicate. When a speech therapist gives a child a way to “speak” (it can be through gesture, symbols, signs or pictures), many of the troubling and difficult behaviours disappear. And it works, I gather, the other way around as well: when we learn to communicate in different ways we become more intuitive in our listening and understanding, as well as in our ability to make ourselves clear: that helps children know what is expected of them and behave accordingly.

Speech therapists, as a tribe, just seem to believe in the innate goodness of kids, in their desire to learn and to do the right thing. And with their unique skills and understanding, they give kids the skills and understanding THEY need to do it.