Monday Apr 08, 2024

Growing With Grace: Essential Skills for Child Development Professionals

In today's episode we talk about the skills that we see as essential being paediatric clinicians.

It is without a doubt that it takes a special kind of health professional to work with kids and we have worked with and trained up so many amazing speechies and exercise physiologists over the years and what we see is that there are two distinct sets of skills that are required for this work.

A person's natural skillset and those skills that are developed over time. We talk about the Natural skillset, being the skills that give someone the ‘permission to play’; they are the natural skills that they possess as a person.

Some of these include:

Permission to Play- Natural skillset

Bubbly

Expressive and playful

Smiles

Warmth

Natural around kids

Calm in chaos

Curious and inquisitive

Confidence around children

Being flexible and adaptable - happy to go off plan and calm in a storm.

Creative, innovation with time, energy, planning, hold yourself and seeing things that aren’t there

See the potential

Be optimistic and positive

Nurturing

Educator

Playful

Ok asking questions

Note that most of these skills are not clinical. They are not technical. We unpack how new grads so often can be wound up with clinical skills and we both take these clinicians through training focussing on connection being the most important factor as when we cant connect we wont be able to share our clinical knowledge.

Then we looked at the developed skillset; the skills that we develop over time and through experience in the role.

These are skills that we don’t expect new grads to have when starting a position and skills that are built on through training and mentoring.

These include:

Calm in chaos- engaging kids creatively

Curious- improvising and finding opportunities to layer in therapy.

Clinical technical skills

Knowledge of research

Communication skills with parents and educators, skills to talk to different audiences and help them understand

Education skills in advocacy, teaching, educating for the profession

Skills in running a group of children and sessions in different settings

Managing behaviour and engaging kids

Engagement with kids more strategically to achieve goals

Learning using all senses, multimodal communication – how do you use all these to engage children

Multitask- Doing three things at once, talking to parent, while managing child, taking data and knowing your goal and where you are going clinically

Scripting for activities and goals

We hope you enjoy today’s episode and we would love for you to subscribe, share and review our show! Let us know what you are liking the most as we develop season 2!

Check out our courses and websites:

https://www.lizzydawson.com.au/ https://www.emilymackie.com.au/

@lizzydawson_ https://www.instagram.com/lizzydawson_/

@emilymackie.speechie https://www.instagram.com/emilymackie.speechie/

Watch us chat on Youtube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEnHKjQ7CD_B40Jy6RD04FQ