50 Years In and Still on the Floor: Sherri Cawn on Developmental Practice, Mentorship, and Why Relationships Change Everything

Sherri Cawn has been a speech pathologist for 50 years. She's trained internationally, co-authored DVDs with ASHA, and helped build Chicago into one of the leading cities for DIR/Floortime practice. But ask her what gets her out of bed, and she'll tell you it's the babies.

"Mommies, daddies, and babies are my thing."

On this episode of Clinic Chats, Sherri traces a career that started in 1970 with a graduating class of 12 and evolved into a multidisciplinary private practice model that puts relationships, not protocols, at the center of treatment. Her story is part career retrospective, part argument for why the profession needs to think differently about how we treat complex kids.

The Mentors Who Rewired Her Thinking

Sherri's path into speech pathology is personal. Her younger sister had a severe speech problem in the late 1950s, back when clinicians were called "speech correctionists." Three times a week, her mother drove downtown Chicago for treatment. Nobody thought to check the oral structure. Nobody clipped the tongue. Sherri was the one sitting with her sister every night, working through the binder of practice words.

That early experience planted something. But what shaped her clinical identity was a chain of mentors. Sandy Tanzer, a speech pathologist who became a special education director, was the first. Sherri actually took a job at Sandy's school district because she wasn't done learning from her.

From there, she moved through special education co-ops, diagnostic roles, and an infant team that paired her with PTs, OTs, and social workers in the early 1970s. That interdisciplinary exposure stuck. Watching a physical therapist work with a child at home, then an occupational therapist, then circling back to communication, it changed how she understood what kids needed.

"I needed to know more," she says. And she spent the next several decades making good on that.

Why She Moved Therapy to the Floor

In the early 1990s, Sherri was in a study group at Northwestern when someone brought in a book by Stanley Greenspan and Serena Wieder about a developmental, individual-based, relationship-based model called DIR/Floortime. She and a colleague flew to a conference in Bethesda, Maryland, half-expecting to bail and go sightseeing.

She didn't leave her seat for four days.

"My pen didn't leave the paper for four days. And I knew there were holes in my own development."

What resonated was the model's insistence on understanding the whole child: their sensory profile, their cognitive profile, their relationships with caregivers, and their developmental stage. Not where they "should" be, but where they actually were.

She went home and made changes. She brought parents into the therapy room. She ditched the table and chairs. She became one of the original trainers for the DIR/Floortime model, eventually joining Profectum Academy as a senior faculty member. She traveled nationally and internationally, training clinicians and working with families who flew in from as far as Australia and Hong Kong.

But the core philosophy stayed simple: meet the child where they are. If you have the parent, you have the baby. And she doesn't care if that baby is 12 years old.

The Case for Multidisciplinary Teams (and Against Working in Silos)

Sherri's practice, Cawn, Krantz & Associates, runs lean by choice. Three occupational therapists, six speech therapists, an OTA, a clinical assistant, and two social workers across two offices. She knows every family. She hangs out in the waiting room.

But what makes her model different isn't size. It's integration. OT and speech sessions are often scheduled back-to-back, which forces clinicians to actually talk to each other. Every week, the team gathers for a multidisciplinary case study meeting where they review video of sessions, not to critique, but to wonder together about what happened.

"We're not saying, 'Oh, you should have done that.' We're wondering about what was going on during that session."

That reflective practice is baked into the culture. New clinicians get one-on-one mentoring. Everyone videos their sessions. And the team includes mental health professionals who support not just the families but the clinicians themselves.

Sherri is blunt about why this matters: the children showing up in clinics today have increasingly complex neurodevelopmental profiles. A speech pathologist working in isolation can't serve those kids well. Neither can an OT. The work requires people who understand each other's disciplines and trust each other enough to learn in the open.

Coaching Parents Is the Hardest Work You'll Ever Do

For Sherri, treatment doesn't happen in a vacuum. It happens through the parent. And that means the clinician's job isn't to perform therapy while the parent watches. It's to coach the parent into becoming the primary agent of change.

This is harder than it sounds. Parents come in anxious. They weren't expecting to "parent with us," as Sherri puts it. They thought they had this figured out, and now someone is gently suggesting they talk softer or reposition themselves so the child can see their face.

"If mom can do the work, it looks different," she says. "And I think coaching is the hardest thing as clinicians we can do."

The payoff, though, is significant. Sherri describes a recent case where a six-month-old showed developmental red flags. The family committed to twice-weekly OT, twice-weekly speech, a Feldenkrais specialist, and early intervention, all coordinated as a team. By age three, the child was in a regular preschool.

Does that happen every time? No. But Sherri believes something that drives her entire practice philosophy:

"If we're in early enough, we can change the neurology."

Running a Private Practice on Clinical Judgment, Not Just Credentials

The business side of Sherri's practice reflects the same values as the clinical side. They accept only two insurance companies, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Humana, because the reimbursement from other payers wouldn't cover the cost of keeping quality clinicians on staff with competitive benefits.

She's candid about what she looks for when hiring. Courses and certifications matter. She can send anyone to PROMPT training or a feeding course. But clinical judgment and empathy can't be taught the same way. If a clinician can't connect with parents, can't sit with uncertainty, can't watch themselves on video and be honest about what they see, the fit isn't right.

"I don't have a problem with traditional tracks," Sherri says. "I just don't think it's gold standard anymore."

What she considers gold standard is a clinician who thinks developmentally, works relationally, and isn't afraid to keep learning 50 years in. On her bad days, she jokes about selling hosiery at Macy's. On her good days, she reads the box of thank-you notes from families and remembers why she's still doing this.

Running a multidisciplinary practice means coordinating across clinicians, families, and disciplines. ClinicNote is a HIPAA-compliant EMR built specifically for private practices and university clinics, handling documentation, scheduling, and billing in one place so your team can focus on the kids in front of them. See how ClinicNote works.

Transcript

Kadie: You are listening to Clinic Chats, the speech therapist's private practice podcast, a podcast full of personal journeys where we not only talk about success stories, but also real life struggles of small business startups. Clinic Chats is sponsored by ClinicNote, a HIPAA compliant, cloud-based EMR platform used specifically by private practice owners and university clinics. I'm your host, Kadie Jakstat, and thank you for joining me today.

Kadie: I am joined today on the Clinic Chats podcast by Sherri Cawn, a co-owner of Cawn, Krantz, and Associates. Hi, Sherri. Welcome.

Sherri: Hi, Kadie. Thank you for having me. I'm looking forward to this.

Kadie: I'm very excited to hear your story. I really don't know too much yet, so let's dive right in. If you can give me a quick background about your private practice and kind of how you began.

Sherri: Of course. You know, I like to tell people these days, this is my 50th year as a speech pathologist, and I have to say when I graduated in 1970, yes, there wasn't a graduate program. I've been a practicing clinician all that time, but have allowed myself to change and grow as the profession and discipline has done that. So I feel most fortunate indeed.

Sherri: How I came into this, and it's an unusual question you ask, but a good one, is for every person I interview for our clinic, that's the first thing I want to know, is I want to know their story. Actually, it's a sweet story because I was born in Chicago and have lived here most of my life in the suburbs. My younger sister, who was three years younger than I, had a terrible speech problem. Back in the late 50s, I know I'm aging myself here, back in the 50s, there were speech teachers or speech correctionists, if you can believe it, but there weren't many.

Sherri: We lived in the northern limits of Chicago, and my mother found someone to take my sister to in downtown Chicago. My father thought this was adorable, that she talked like this, and three times a week she would take her to downtown Chicago. So my sister would sit at a table and they would look at pictures. Little did anybody know, to check the oral structure of her mouth, to see that she had most likely needed a tongue clip. My dad was a physician and he was very conservative about what he let his three daughters do, but I was the one, she had a binder, where all the words she had to practice were. I was the one that had to work with her every night. I was three years older than her.

Sherri: Through high school and so forth, where most women my age were sort of curated to go on into education or become a nurse, I mean, the women's movement hadn't begun, and so women were always looking at careers. I went to school at the University of Illinois. My graduate and undergraduate work there. Back in the day, there were 12 people in my graduating class, and then we had an old house that we went in, but I was interested in it because it was unique. I was very comfortable working with children who learned differently. That is what the labels and literally labels that they had at that time, and I knew there was something about working with young children that inspired me.

Sherri: I believe, and I guess I'd be interested in knowing about you as well, other listeners, that having mentors throughout my career have had an enormous impact on what direction I've taken it. With that being said, back in the day when you were graduating as an undergrad, you were totally trained to be a speech pathologist, get your Cs and so forth. I had a mentor in a suburban school that was pretty far away from where I was living, and she was a game changer for me. To this day, when I say her name, Sandy Tanzer, she was a speech pathologist. She went on to become a special ed director at a huge, very well-known school district out in the north and northwest suburbs of Chicago. She was my mentor, and she got me on the path to be thinking differently about language disorders in children. I actually took a job where she was because I wasn't done being mentored by her.

Sherri: I moved on. Back in the day, there were these special education districts, and I went on to work in that community, still knowing I liked the younger kids, but I sort of liked the older kids. I spent two years in the public schools, two years in a self-contained situation, but little by little, I had the chance to work with Suzanne Morris and learned about feeding and working with kids with cerebral palsy and other more low-incidence kind of children.

Sherri: Then I moved on to become a diagnostician in the early 70s and just worked for a special ed service that all we did was evaluations, but I was missing the therapy side of that. At that time, IDEA was now passed, and early childhood was now passed, so I went on and got an extra certification in those areas, always thinking I was going to be an administrator, to be perfectly honest with you.

Sherri: Then the opportunity opened up for me to work as part of an infant team before early intervention even mattered, but I got put on a team with a PT, an OT, a social worker, and myself. This is like in the early 70s, was already an inkling that I liked working on a multidisciplinary team, and that sort of set a long-range tone for me in terms of where I was going to be going because I needed to understand more.

Sherri: When we went out and saw children at home and watching the PT work and then the OT and the speech person brought new dimensions to the work I was doing, for sure, I needed to know more. I took short breaks to have children. I have three, and although I worked a little bit of part-time, when they were a little bit older, I became an early childhood consultant for a school district.

Sherri: At the same time, my now partner, Jerry Krantz, was going on maternity leave, and she said to me, hey, do you want to cover my practice for the summer? I'm going on maternity leave, and I'll be back. She had opened up a very small solo practice, and I said, okay, I was going to do that. That's when I dipped my foot into the pond of private practice, and I found that I liked it, but I was still working at the school district as the early childhood person three days a week, and then two days a week, I would do private with Jerry.

Sherri: We saw all sorts of kids at the time, kids with Down syndrome, kids with social-emotional kinds of issues, of course, phonology. We saw the gamut of children coming through, and there was something that I loved about the private piece because I had the parents' ear in a different way than I had in the public school.

Sherri: I was now beginning to take courses in infant mental health and in sensory processing development, and I was working with another pediatric OT, and I kept thinking, why aren't SLPs and pediatric occupational therapists married? Because what they know is what we need to know. Because without their foundational layers, it's hard for us as communicative specialists to start to begin to work with our kiddos on something as intricate as communication.

Sherri: I also started becoming a developmentalist. What I mean by that is that it became very important for me to know where the child was at developmentally, and not necessarily, you know, my treatment wasn't informed about where they needed to be, but meeting them more where they were at.

Kadie: Correct. And then moving up.

Sherri: And that was a real, in terms of where the profession was going, that was really different because speech paths were considered in their own department, OTs in their own department, infant mental health providers in their own department, and yet that didn't make sense to me because we were seeing more complex children.

Sherri: I was in a study group at Northwestern with a bunch of speech pathologists that were also in independent private practice, people that are pretty well known in my community right now. We got this book, and this book was by Greenspan and Wieder, and they were talking about this developmental, individual-based, relationship-based program called DIR Floortime. And it was a huge book, and it caught my interest, and there was a conference going on in Bethesda, Maryland.

Sherri: And so one of my other colleagues, another SLP, and I said, okay, let's do this. And we were saying, if we don't like it, we'll go touring the D.C. area. And we went in, and there were a couple hundred people at this broken-down Bethesda Holiday Inn. And out comes this guy, and my pen didn't leave the paper for four days. And I knew there were holes in my own development. I was, you know, I loved what I was doing, but I felt like I wasn't as complete. I took courses all of the time, but there was something missing.

Sherri: And the reason this so resonated with me is it really looked at the child through a developmental lens and said, look, you have to understand the child through the eyes of the relationships with their parents, through the child's individual learning profile, and that could be their sensory profile, their cognitive profile, their educational profile. You had to have a good understanding of that, and then you had to understand development. Where was that child developmentally? I love this, I wanted to learn it.

Sherri: And it was at that point I decided to go into a solo practice. I was working three, four days a week out of my house, and then I would see kids with her in the weekend.

Kadie: And so for the first time, did you kind of feel like instead of a pediatric generalist, you had this newfound passion and that was the direction you wanted to go?

Sherri: And then I got to be trained by both Serena and Stan and work with them because they were training the trainers. And I was one of the initial trainers. It made such sense to me that not only was I going to have the parent with me in the room and my work was going to be with them because my motto always was in the beginning, when you have the mommy, I'm mommy and daddy, you have that baby. And I don't care if that baby is 12 years old, right?

Sherri: So number one, parents were going to be coming in the room because we were all going to be learning together. I took my table and chairs where I was working and I said, we're moving to the floor. And at this particular time, autism was coming into its being. And at the same time, Floortime was moving in that direction. Yes, there were other behavioral programs that were out there, but this really made a difference.

Sherri: I teamed up with some people in my area and we all were training, we were all interested in this approach and we teamed up together and we began to train. We had a study group together and we saw kids together and that really created this wonderful nurturing environment and in fact, Chicago is probably one of the leading cities in the DIR Floortime program where I feel lucky enough that I've trained enough people in it and I became a trainer for this organization.

Sherri: There's two organizations now, ICDL, the International Council of Developmental Learning Disorders and the Profectum Academy, which does online training and I'm a senior faculty member. But even more important, I love this work so much that I began to travel nationally and internationally and be able to train and work with colleagues. So it could be a preschool, we had families coming in from Australia and Hong Kong, this sort of took on and wherever we went in another country, there were parents, the internet was floating now and people were getting information and what we found was that when it comes to their children, parents will do anything for their kids.

Sherri: I mean, you know that, you're going to be a newborn again and so forth but when it comes to your children and this is in the early 80s now and people are using PDDNOS, high-functioning autism, there's all this information but the DSM hasn't come out with anything that we really can use and one of the things that I loved about the organization and the people that I was working with is, we were in a situation where we were writing books, even ASHA, a very conservative organization, did two DVDs with me on this and the second one, they let an occupational therapist do the second study manual with me and but that took, I had to beg for that a lot but the fact that they were open to it, to see that we can't exist in our own little box.

Sherri: The children we were seeing were not just, you just don't have autism because for every child, you know this, you've heard it a million times with autism, you've met one child that has that diagnosis and there are a lot of people that aren't prepared to get that diagnosis, right? And in my world of developmentally-minded, relationship-based programs, I don't care what the diagnosis is. That won't affect how my treatment looks. What affects how our treatment looks is, at this very moment, what is this person and their family? You know, where are they in their process? We're process-based, right? So yes, the end product is important but I'm a speech pathologist first but I'm informed by a developmentally-minded, relationship-based model. Does that make sense?

Kadie: Absolutely.

Sherri: The training nowadays is so interesting to me because we're always hiring and having a private practice, you know, coming into our practice, there's a learning curve because some of the things that you've learned in school may not quite work out and what I usually give an example is, as a young therapist, you might bring in 20 things into a therapy room and you've gone through them in five minutes and you still have 50 minutes left in your session. We've all been there.

Kadie: Oh yes.

Sherri: You know, this all seemed to have just kind of happened. You found your passion, you got your training. One thing led to another. Did you still have private clients?

Sherri: I did. And you know, I was already 20 years into my work when in the early 90s, Floortime really came in to something I could do. So I had more flexibility. In terms of private practice, having the partner is sort of like having a second spouse. So, I mean, we divide and conquer together. Sometimes it works and sometimes, you know, it doesn't but I always remember saying to someone that she's my first call in the morning and the last call at the end of the day to see what's going on because we employ a full multidisciplinary team.

Sherri: So we have speech pathologists, we have occupational therapists and we have mental health people because for the kids that we see, it takes a village. And not only do these people support, do we support each other as a team but mental health is not only for the parents but it's for the people that work as well.

Sherri: So one of the things I think that we offer in clinic that is so special is something that was new to me as a clinician and maybe for you because you got your training, you know, much later than I did is that part of this developmental-based work is self-reflective case-based mentoring and that is a big part of our work.

Sherri: And so one of the things that we offer to any new clinician and clinicians like myself as well is the capacity to not only have one-on-one mentoring but every week there's a multidisciplinary case study meeting. I run both of them where everybody brings a case. So there's one case that we join together to not necessarily tell the clinician, oh, you should have done that but to wonder about what was going on during that session and the best way to see that is to video. We video everything.

Sherri: I'm not sure if you've ever been to any of the courses and stuff that I teach. I'm really lucky that I have all these wonderful families that let me do video. I can direct you to this wonderful grant that I was part of a couple of years ago where we literally train parents and paraprofessionals how to do Floortime through webcasts that are free on tablet, computer or phone.

Sherri: And we took into account, we got a grant to do these webcasts that would help parents who did not have access to Floortime professionals in states and cities that are far away. And there's five steps, seven or eight webcasts and the people that are on there are the best in the business. So there's a pediatrician, an executive director of a school, an occupational therapist. I was lucky enough to be asked to be part of it. So it's speech, OT, Serena Wieder, psychology. So there's five of us that each did seven webcasts a piece.

Kadie: And do you have statistics or analytics on how many people have been able to access this whereas they normally wouldn't have access?

Sherri: So here's the best part. I'm going to tell you now how to get to there. We've had 9,000 hits and we're going to get proof of concept on this. So if you go to www.profectum.org. On the first page, on the homepage, it'll say the PPT, the Profectum Parent Toolbox. You just have to log in, then they'll take you through whether you want to start with what steps.

Sherri: Since I became a senior Floortime practitioner, I am usually, people usually come to the clinic to work with me just in Floortime. And so I figure after 50 years, I can sort of pick and choose what I want.

Sherri: Mommies, daddies, and babies are my thing, and we don't do early intervention. And that, from a private standpoint, Kadie, is because we can't turn around meeting payroll every other week if we're staying in the early intervention system because of the delays in Illinois, you know, was at such a standstill with budget and so forth.

Kadie: So is it private pay and insurance, I assume?

Sherri: Yeah. You know, over the years, we've learned that we can't have all the insurance companies because we can't afford to do that. So we carry the two that pay the best because I think, and I'm sure your listeners will know, in order to get some really good speech pathologists, even if there's CFs coming on with you, you have to be able to have a good benefits package. And so to do that, we can only take two insurance companies, Blue Cross Blue Shield and Humana, because the rest pay so many pennies on the dollar that we couldn't afford electricity.

Kadie: Exactly.

Sherri: But yet, there is something about, you know, in my practice, we want you to have clinical judgment. I can send you to any course, right? I can send you to PROMPT, I can send you to the SOS feeding course. We can do all that. My partner does the feeding, she's the specialist in that. We can send you to Michelle Garcia Winner's course. But if you don't have good clinical judgment, and you can't be empathic with parents, this isn't going to be the right track you want to go down.

Sherri: I don't have a problem with traditional tracks, I just don't think it's gold standard anymore. I think cutting edge is, we can't teach development because it's a moving target, right? Would it be great when parents come in and say, well, you know, I've been thinking about speech, but my mother told me, and I know you've heard this story, my mother said my husband didn't talk till he was four. And so that I shouldn't worry that he's two and a half and not talking. And of course, the first thing I want to do is say, your mom wasn't worried at four. She didn't, even back in the day, my mother knew to take my sister for speech therapies.

Sherri: And we deal with pretty savvy families, parents get information, not always in the right places. But parents get their information, or they talk to their friends. And since I specialize in autism, I get to see a lot of these children early on. In fact, we just finished up with a little guy six months ago, who at six months, we were concerned not that he had autism, but there were key pieces missing that we would expect as an SLP or as a developmentalist of what he should be doing as an infant.

Sherri: And so if we have the mommy and daddy, and they understand their child's profile, their learning profile, if we can coach the parent, I know this is going to be a big phrase I'm going to say, but I believe it with all my heart, we can change the neurology. If we're in early enough, we can. And so this little boy who was suspected, even from this developmental pediatrician I work with, that he might have autism, the parents came twice a week for occupational therapy, they came twice a week for speech therapy, they saw a Feldenkrais specialist, they had early intervention, and we all worked together. We were a team. I mean, it was a beautiful thing. At three, he's in a regular preschool.

Sherri: Now, does this happen all the time? No. But when we can get in early, it makes a difference, particularly if the parent is willing to change themselves to be part of their child's individual profile. That's the hard part, right?

Kadie: Right. Right.

Sherri: And so I love that. I still love it. You know, sometimes I can't lie, I will walk out the door and say to my partner, I'm applying for a job at Macy's, I'm going to sell hosiery, someone will return, they can return. But when it's a good day, I say, I'm doing this again tomorrow. This was great. Right?

Kadie: Yes.

Sherri: Or, you know, I usually always have another clinician with me when I'm working. Number one, I want them trained. You know, Kadie, and all of your listeners know, there are not enough of us trained to meet the needs we are facing from 2020 on, the numbers are spectacularly high, how many children have complex neurodevelopmental needs.

Kadie: Yes. And you know, I think that specific point is exactly why I am where I am today. I'm super happy that I have found a job, a career that I'm satisfied in now. But I just, I could not deal with the imposter syndrome, I couldn't deal with not having the means of support to specialize and feel adequate in about every diagnosis under the sun at the school I was at. So, like you said, I mean, those clinicians under you are just fortunate.

Kadie: How many are there total in the practice?

Sherri: You're going to be surprised when I tell you we're a small practice. I like to know every family. I like to hang out in the waiting room. I love babies more than anything. I'm a chick magnet to babies. I love being around them. I love to watch a typical baby in a restaurant. You see me, they're looking at me, I'm looking at you. Can you be with me? I just want to eat them up, right?

Sherri: So right now, in my office in the suburbs of Northbrook, I have three occupational therapists. I have six speech pathologists. I have one OTA, occupational therapy assistant. We have a clinical assistant, I'll tell you about her in a minute. And I have two social workers. And then part of that group of speech therapists work at our Chicago office as well. But I don't have a full multidisciplinary team in Chicago.

Kadie: How many days a week are you treating?

Sherri: Well, I'm supposed to be off on Wednesdays, but somehow I'm always there. See if a baby comes in, I'm on it. And I always have another clinician with me. I still travel and teach a lot. I do. I do mentoring groups online. I do clinics where I'll see them once a month.

Sherri: Because I think the more we're able to look at cases, Kadie, together, and think about what are we seeing here? Is this child ready to go on to be talking? Is he even ready for words? I could go on and on. But I think there's a certain amount of lack of understanding of what comprehension is. And so I look at comprehension as something very important that is worked on from the time the baby's born till way into the school age years. But during the first year, this conversation without words for young infants needs to be in place.

Sherri: And so it's my job to figure out, and I tell this to all clinicians, and even when I teach, it's like, what makes the child go away? How do you get him back? And how do you keep him there? What do we know about this child's developmental profile?

Sherri: And I think the more we can ask clinicians that, the more as a group we can talk about, oh, I didn't notice that. Because if you watch yourself on video, I'm going to tell you, it's like your instant do-over. But once you watch and you say, oh, I didn't even notice that the mom had a sad face on, or I didn't bring her in. I always want to tell the clinicians, when mom's with us in the room, we can never look better than mom, right? Because then is she going to go home and follow a good session? Nope, she isn't. But if mom can do the work, it looks different.

Sherri: And I think coaching is the hardest thing as clinicians we can do. It's the hardest work you can do. And I think you need training in that.

Kadie: I'm sure it takes a lot of getting used to, to be strictly telling the parent feedback and instructions versus stepping in. I mean, I'm sure there's times you show them, but it's got to be challenging, stepping on feet kind of feeling.

Sherri: You know, you're, I can tell by just talking with you, you're this sweet and open and curious, curious person. And when parents come in, you know, for them, it's very anxiety producing to come in because they weren't expecting to parent with us, right? And when you decide you're going to have a baby, you think, I got this. And then all of a sudden, someone is saying, well, if you talk a little softer, he might come back. You know, how do we woo them? How do we get this gleam in their eye? We can't talk to them when their back is to us. How are you going to position yourself, right?

Sherri: And so I don't want to teach them, I want to interact with them. So if they trust me, and listen, I have gray hair, it's easier to trust me than it is one of my clinicians. If you have a good relationship with your mother, then you're going to trust me. But if you don't, you're going to probably not feel like I'm your best fit.

Sherri: When you come into my clinic, we don't say, oh, you're here for DIR Floortime, although a lot of developmental pediatricians will say, that's what I want them to have. But it has to be comfortable for you. You can't say, well, I had a father say to me yesterday, he goes, well, what's my homework for this week? I said, oh, the same thing we were doing just now. He goes, but it feels like last week. I said, I know. Do it forever from here on out.

Sherri: But you can see how parents are so, and I hate to say this because of what we do, product-based in some ways, I don't even use the word speech anymore. I use communication. Because I think the minute you say speech, because it's the most salient thing parents are aware of, it's a game changer when you say communication.

Sherri: So I try to say, you know, and a parent will say, well, you know, is he going to talk in a week or so? Nope. Nope. Today, but I said, but look what we did today. I really do love the work. You know, I'm saying this on a podcast. The administration stuff I could do without. I used to be able to tolerate it much better, but there's a lot of admin that goes into private practice.

Sherri: But when parents are grateful, they're grateful from the bottom of their toes. In fact, I have a whole box of notes that I get. And on a bad day, or if a parent has chewed me out and I feel really bad, I'll go read those notes because I know somewhere someone really appreciated it.

Sherri: Yes. I can never tell anybody, yes, you have independence, but you also have financial burdens. You have to know when to cut back. You have to know when, you know, no, you can't spend money this month because we're coming into the Christmas holidays and everybody's going to be canceling, right?

Kadie: Oh, yes.

Sherri: So have we made a lot of mistakes? Of course we have, but we've been partners for 30 years. We make decisions together, big decisions together. She focuses on the feeding program, older kids, language learning disabilities, and social. And I do the babies and the toddlers. And I travel and still train a lot. Not as much as I used to because I teach two online classes and I have found on the Zoom platform, and you have to have your cameras on in my class, because I can't relate with you unless I can see you. And so having you on camera with me helps. And it's always case-based. It's always us learning from each other.

Sherri: And I think for an SLP, that is such a positive way and sort of inspiring way to think about, not that, oh, I have a kid just like that. This is what I did. I don't think that's what another clinician wants to hear. What another clinician wants to hear is, I wonder what the mom was thinking when that happened. Or I wonder what made the child go away then. And at least the clinicians in my practice can honestly look at it and say, oh, I see what happened. I see I moved too fast.

Sherri: And the idea of having, most of our children, parents don't like to come out too many times a week. So OT and speech are often back-to-back. And that requires them to talk to each other. I have to respect the people in the public schools. I think they have the hardest job of all of us, right? Because you have to know a little bit about everything. And I really respect that.

Sherri: So as I tell my clinicians, make a relationship, you two work together. I want the clinicians, I want the parents to feel in a private practice that they're at the best place they can be, they're being held emotionally, and that we're going to do our best with your person.

Sherri: Now, after 50 years, do I know who the right people are to go to in my community? You bet I do. Because I forge relationships with them. Because at the end of the day, everything's about the relationship and deepening it.

Kadie: That might be a great place to end. I'm going to have to have you back.

Sherri: Yes, okay. I'm so excited for our listeners just to hear all of this information. And I know that we could just keep going.

Kadie: Right, I know. But I appreciate you giving me the place to talk about it. I'm excited to do this work. I would love more people to be involved. And thank you for the platform.

Kadie: Thank you for joining me and listening to Clinic Chats, the speech therapist's private practice podcast. If you have a moment, please leave a five-star review for Clinic Chats to help other SLPs find our podcast. If you'd like to share your own personal journey through private practice, please email me kadie at clinicnote.com. That's K-A-I-D-E at clinicnote.com.