Hanen More Than Words Overview - Ep.056
While we understand that communication is more than talking, it’s not always easy to explain why this is so to parents. Concepts that are so familiar to us—joint interaction, pragmatics, gesture development—are a whole new language for parents of kids with social communication disorders.
Hanen More Than Words gives SLPs the tools to coach parents on the non-verbal aspects of communication. Parents then become the experts in fostering social communication for their preschool age child.
In this episode you learn:
- How Hanen works
- What it means to OWL
- The four stages of pragmatic communication
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Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission
Transcript
Hello, welcome to episode 56 of the speech umbrella podcast. Today. I'm really excited to share one of my all time favorite programs with you, which is called Hanen More Than Words. Hanen More Than Words is designed to help parents become experts in treating their child's communication difficulties.
It's specifically designed for children on the autism spectrum. There Are so many approaches out there for working with the pragmatic difficulties that children on the autism spectrum experience, and I'm a big fan of the Hanen philosophy, and I think you will be too, after you hear it.
I thought it was high time I shared the program with you that has changed me the most. This has made the biggest difference in how I treat children on the autism spectrum. To be honest, before I was trained in Hanen More Than Words, I really struggled sometimes in knowing how to treat children on the autism spectrum most effectively, and to really make a connection with them. This program has changed all of that. It's a highly effective, relationship-based approach.
Let me tell you a little bit about what Hanen is and who they are before we dive into More Than Words.
[00:01:41] Hanen Center Background
The Hanen Center is a non-profit based in Canada, founded by an SLP who saw the potential for involving parents in early language intervention. The Hanen Center does a lot of things that have a lot of programs, you can see that when you go to their website. I'm only talking about the More Than Words program, which is the only one I'm trained in.
Since parents are already the expert on their child, all Hanen More Than Words does is help them become the expert on improving the communication of their child and especially the pragmatics of it, the interaction, the back and forth relationship. There's a whole lot I could share with you about More Than Words, but I got to keep it simple. So I'll talk about who it's for. What does it look like? And the top three things I love about hand and more than words.
[00:02:24] Who Is It For?
Who is it for? It's for parents of preschoolers on the autism spectrum. While the Hannon philosophy applies to a broad spectrum of clients, the activities they suggest and the guide book they have for parents is based on what preschoolers would be interested in.
And of course, it's also for SLPs who want to work with that group of children and their parents.
I need to put in a quick disclaimer here, the SLPs who are trained in Hanen More Than Words, can share information informally about the program. Obviously this is not a training on how to do More Than Words. I just want to spread the word about how awesome this program is.
When I tell you what Hanen More Than Words looks like, I want to tell you what it looks like if you were to take the training and I want to tell you what it would look like if you were using Hanen with parents and their children.
Now, this has changed a little bit since COVID, but I took Hannah More Than Words, training pre-COVID. I went to an in-person training for three days. As an SLP taking the Hanen More Than Words training, I went through all the classes that a parent would go through.
We were in the parents' shoes. We did the activities of the parents would do we watch the videos they would watch. And it really was extremely helpful to be in the role of the parent taking the training. And then we covered a few things, individual to being SLPs, but the bulk of the training was going through the program and then understanding how we would teach each of those sessions as an SLP. And also we learned how to do one-on-one coaching with the parents because part of Hanen is to review videos that parents take of them working with their child. This has done one-on-one, not in the group, so that you can really coach the parent into how they could implement the techniques more effectively.
And the goal, as an SLP, implementing Hanen More Than Words with parents is to be a guide on the side and not the Sage on the stage.
When I first showed up to take the Hanen training, I was with a bunch of other SLPs. We went around and we introduced themselves. And what I noticed right away is I was the only private clinician in the room. Everyone else worked where a agency, like a school district or development center or something like that.
And I thought, oh, well, that's interesting.
Well, there's a good reason for that, it turns out. It's a really big time commitment to run a Hanen More Than Words program. And it helps to share the load with another SLP. So if you're a private clinician and you're the only one in your practice, that could be a really big time commitment.
The cost to parents in the private practice model would be really big. It would be a really big chunk of money all at once because it takes about 12 weeks to implement the full Hanen More Than Words program. But it's a lot of hours bunched into those 12 weeks. So you can see that an agency who presents the program to parents and maybe share some of the costs with parents and an agency that has more than one SLP, might be able to implement Hanen More Than Words, more effectively.
But here's the cool thing. It didn't matter one bit to me. Because the things I learned in Hanen More Than Words opened my eyes on how to establish better relationships with my clients. How do we explain things better to parents. And I have way better outcomes with my clients now. That is because of the Hanen More Than Words philosophy. Which brings us to the themes I love about Hanen.
The Hanen philosophy is called owl, O W L. It stands for observe, wait and listen. So in a nutshell, you give your child a reason to communicate and then wait. And the waiting can be pretty hard sometimes, because we are just programmed to jump in after just a few seconds and not give them time to wonder why the thing they want to do is not progressing while you, the parent, aren't just carrying the activity forward.
[00:06:06] Observe
What does it mean to observe? Observe means to observe their interest, so that you choose something that's highly motivating that they're going to want to continue with, even with that little bit of a wait. You observe how well they're regulated you observed the sensory needs. And some children need to have a little bit more excitement brought into the activity to keep them engaged. Maybe they need to jump around a little bit. Maybe they need to throw a ball. And some children need to have things brought down a little bit. They need to be a little bit calmer in order to be in that perfect sweet spot of self-regulation, where they're really ready to learn. And so Hanen helps teach you how to observe those things about your child.
Hanen also teaches parents to observe their sensory needs . They have handouts on different kinds of sensory seeking or sensory avoidance that children might experience. And that can help parents really tailor their activities to their child?
[00:06:57] Waiting
Waiting. Waiting is so hard and waiting is so key to what you do with the OWL philosophy. It's uncomfortable to wait sometimes.
I have a story about waiting that I've shared before, but I think it bears repeating it's about a client I talked about before in some of these podcasts, his name is David. When he was still a preschooler, I took this Hanen More Than Words training and I came back from that training all fired up to really do OWL so well. To observe, wait and listen.
We were playing with a toy food set, that kind of food that stuck together with Velcro. When you take a knife and cut it in half. And he was interested in it. And he really liked cutting the food. So I held the knife just at the edge of his vision, because he was so involved in the food, that he wasn't looking up at me. So I thought, well, I'm going to hold this knife and see what happens.
I'm holding a far away enough from him that he can barely see it, but he's going to have to do something to get the knife.
I waited and I waited and I thought a minute had gone by, I don't know how long it was, but it seemed like eternity to me.
And then I saw his little hand reach out and he grabbed that knife from me and that was huge for him. Simply huge.
It was all because I waited a lot longer than I would have before. It was way out of my comfort zone to wait that long.
[00:08:18] Listen
So that's observe and that's wait and listen. It's pretty self-explanatory listen with your eyes as well as your ears. And then you repeat and keep the activity going as long as you can maybe extend the activity a little bit. So you can get a little bit more kind of creative play going.
Before I took Hanen More Than Words, I thought I was pretty good at this whole getting a child to interact with me better. Getting a child who has some pragmatic difficulties to ask for things and to show intent. But I realized that I really wasn't doing it as well as I could have. And that waiting piece was just huge. And so it has made a big difference with every single one of my clients on the autism spectrum.
[00:08:59] Four Communication Stages
Another thing I love about Hanen More Than Words is how they break down where the child is at into communication stages. They've got four communication stages. I'm just going to run through them. There's the own agenda stage, and that's where our child isn't sending any intentional messages. Then they've got the requester stage.
A child at the requester stage is starting to respond and request, maybe verbally, maybe not verbally. But they're starting to request for an activity to continue and they're starting to respond. Then we've got early communicator. Early communicators are learning to communicate beyond requesting and they're even more responsive.
And then they've got the partner stage. Partners can respond to subtle offers to play. For example, if a parent just looks over at something. The child might look to and think, oh, mom wants to play that with me.
Kids at the partner stage are starting to get conversational. They're starting to ask questions.
That's a really brief overview of the four communication stages, but Hanen's got a whole page or two on each one of them, so parents can look at what you would see with a child at this stage and a child that the requester stage a child at the own agenda stage, so that they can really pinpoint this is where they are mostly at. Now all the children on the autism spectrum that I've worked with have a little bit in another stage, but you can figure out where they're mostly at, and that is hugely helpful because there are suggested goals at each stage. You can see how valuable it is to understand what kind of joint action or interaction you want to elicit because communication gets really complex really quickly.
These stages help keep the complexity on the right level for the child. Parents often don't understand that all they need is bubbles and balloons and they can do a whole lot with it. Sometimes there are too many toys around there's too many complex things going on and the child's not ready for that.
So these communication stages are really key.
And finally we want these skills to be robust. Children need repetition, repetition, repetition. And Hanen really shines at helping parents know how to grow these skills, how to extend play routines, how to use people games and toys and books and visual supports.
Just because you've seen a child do something once doesn't mean they have that skill mastered. They've got to do it a lot. They've got to do it in a lot of different ways to really have that skill in a robust way.
What I've seen is when I do these things that I learned at Hanen More Than Words, if a child has the capacity to be verbal, verbal language generally starts to emerge without me doing a whole lot else. It kind of improves on its own. And if the child doesn't have the ability to be verbal and I need to use, say PROMPT for their motor speech skills, that seamlessly integrates with Hanen. It's the same thing if they're using an AAC device, I can seamlessly integrate that with Hanen.
So you might be saying, " Do you do Hanen programs with parents?" And I don't, because of the time commitment. I have my own company, but I'm the only speech therapist here. As I was sitting in the Hanen More Than Words training, I was thinking. I don't know that I'm up for all of that: for all of those parent meetings and all of those home visits. But I can still take Hanen More Than Words and use it every single day and I'll be a much better clinician for it. And that is so true. I don't regret one single bit, not ever, taking the Hanen More Than Words training even though I don't use it to run a full Hanen program.
Every parent who takes the Hanen More Than Words program buys a book. It's called More Than Words. It's basically their textbook for the program it's available on their website, in ebook form or paperback. And it is so good. If Hanen More Than Words sounds interesting to you, you might want to take a look at that book. Hanen doesn't care if you're enrolled in the program, if you're taking the Hanen More Than Words class as an SLP, you can still buy the book. In fact, on their website, it says, " If you're waiting to attend a Hanen More Than Words program, or if you cannot find one in your area, the More Than Words guidebook and DVD can give you practical strategies that you can start using right away to build your child's social communication skills."
And I say the same thing would go for an SLP. You could pick up a Hanen More Than Words book. You could read it. You could start using some of those practical strategies, and you might decide that you want to do Hanen More Than Words training because of all the wonderful material you see in that book.
I think it would give you an excellent idea of whether their program would be a good fit for you.
What is more simple than Observe, Wait, and Listen? When you master the simple, observing, waiting, listening, often the complex language starts taking care of itself and that's the magic in Hanen More Than Words. Thanks for listening and talk to you next time.
