On Monday, September 17, 2007, the National Post featured an article entitled, "Cultivating Couch Spuds: Are all those videos for kids really helping them or just giving parents a break?" The article described the rapidly growing popularity of child and infant-oriented teaching tapes and attempted to determine their effectiveness in facilitating language acquisition.
Recently we heard a heartwarming story about the innovative use of It Takes Two to Talk resources by an army family at Fort Benning in Georgia, USA. The father, a Major in the army, was deployed in Iraq on his tour of duty. Meanwhile, back home in Georgia, his wife grew concerned about the communication development of their young son.
A few months ago I was invited to an information session about the “Hanen-It Takes Two to Talk” program. Being a mum to a beautiful three and a half year old girl with Global Developmental Delay, I was definitely interested as my daughter spoke only a few, unclear words. Like many of the parents at this information session, a look of despair came over my face when I learnt of the commitment needed to undertake this program and in my head I was saying “This goes on for how many weeks!” Little did I know of what was really in store.