Parents and Children Together (PACT)

Parent and Children Together (PACT) is family-centered phonological therapy. Caregivers and loved ones play a big role in therapy. They will learn technical information and develop skills to use with SLP guidance.

Who It's For:

This approach is appropriate for 3- 6 year olds who have mild, moderate, severe phonological impairment. It has been shown to be effective with children older than 6 years old with developmental delays.

How It's Practiced:

Targets can be non-stimulable, later developing, and sounds are consistently in error.

  1. Parent Education

Parent(s)/Caregiver(s) learn techniques like: modeling, recasting, self-correction and self-modeling by the child, specific praise, and providing focused auditory input.

  1. Metalinguistic training

Talk and think about speech sounds and how they are organized. Games and activities involve sound picture associations, phoneme segmentation for onset matching, awareness of rhymes and sound patterns between words (minimal pairs), rudimentary knowledge of the concept of a “word”, awareness of the use of revision and repair strategies, judgment of correctness tasks, and morpho-syntactic structures.

  1. Phonetic production training

You will teach the chid how to make sounds that are errored. Parents/Caregiver will work with the child at home using listenting and talking games and activities.

  1. Multiple exemplar training

Parent/Caregiver and SLP read word-lists to the child and the child will sort the words by their sound features.

  1. Homework

Parents/Caregiver perform activities with the child for 5 to 7 minutes practice sessions one to three times per day.

Download PACT Handout Here

Duration:

Sessions are about 50 minutes in length. The child spends 30 to 40 minutes one-on-one with the SLP. The parent/caregiver must spend the last 10 to 20 minutes at the end of the session or 10 minutes at the beginning and 10 minutes at the end.

The first block of therapy lasts 10 weeks, the first break lasts 10 weeks. The remaining sessions per therapy block dimish while the breaks are the same length.

When the child is on a therapy break, the caregivers are not supposed to engage in formal practice for 8 weeks. They can provide models and reinforce revisions and repairs. The last two weeks of break, they should read the speech book with the child and do any activities the child is interested in.

Resources:

Bowen, C., & Cupples, L. (2006). Pact: Parents and children together in phonological therapy. Advances in Speech Language Pathology, 8(3), 282–292. https://doi.org/10.1080/14417040600826980