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Local Living
A community podcast for Palm Beach to Parkland.
Local Living
Mallory Boyd: Accelerating Child Language Development with Blossom Speech Therapy in Boca Raton
Join us for an insightful conversation with Mallory Boyd, the founder of Blossom Speech and Language Therapy in Boca Raton, as she offers guidance for parents navigating their child's speech and language development. Mallory, inspired by her sister's early experiences and her mother's encouragement, walks us through the unique services her practice provides, from in-clinic sessions to convenient house calls. She also breaks down the educational path and clinical requirements necessary to become a licensed speech pathologist. With key developmental benchmarks highlighted, this episode is a treasure trove of information for any parent concerned about their child's communication skills.
Blossom Speech & Language Therapy
561-270-4433
www.blossomspeechlanguage.com
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Welcome, welcome everyone to Local Living. We are a community podcast for Palm Beach to Parkland. I'm David Conway, your host for today's episode, and with us we have Mallory Boyd with Blossom Speech and Language Therapy right here in Boca Raton. Mallory, welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much for having me.
Speaker 1:I was looking forward to having you. You know I met you recently, asked you a few questions. I know a lot of our listeners have a lot of questions too about what you do. If you could start, why don't you just tell us about your business?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah. So my name is Mallory. I'm a speech pathologist here in Boca Raton and I am the founder and owner of Blossom Speech and Language Therapy. We are a pediatric speech therapy private practice and we offer services in the clinic. But now we've also expanded the community so we can see your child in their daycare in their clinic. But now we've also expanded the community so we can see your child in their daycare, in their preschool if the community allows that and in their homes as well. So we're very excited about that. We provide evaluations and therapy services for kids 18 months to about six years old, but we do see kiddos up until 10.
Speaker 1:So I've never heard that before. You're a speech therapist but you also do house calls. Did I hear that correctly?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so we try to make it as convenient as possible. We understand parents are very, very busy. So a lot of times we get requests of hey, I can't make it to the clinic, I work too late or I have too much going on in my life, too many schedules. I got to cook, I got to clean, I got to bring my kids everywhere. Can you see my kid at home? Can you see my kid at their?
Speaker 1:school, so we do our very best to try to make that happen. So how did you get into the industry? When did you decide to become a speech therapist?
Speaker 2:Yeah. So we all have a little planting seed story. So my sister a long, long time ago had a speech therapist and had actually a speech therapist come to the house and my mom would say, hey, you know, do you like your job? This looks very nice, you're working with children all day. And the speech therapist at the time said, yes, I love it, it's very rewarding. So as I grew up, my mom would always just say, hey, why don't you become a speech therapist? And I kind of looked into it, loved kids, I love teaching, I'm a helper, naturally, and I just never looked back. I never changed a major, I never thought about going into a different career. So it was really one of those things where my mom was like, hey, let's do, how about you try this? And I tried it and I really enjoyed it. And here I am.
Speaker 1:So you were one of the smart ones that actually listened to mom, listened to us all, the that actually listen to mom, listen to us all the few times I did yes, and so was this during high school, where you had already set your sights on this, or did you choose your major and everything all based on this?
Speaker 2:All based on my mom. Yeah, so it was probably so. My sister had therapy when she was like three, so we were young, but as, like the middle school, high school's coming up, we're talking about college and what do you want to do for your career, and she just kind of said, hey, speech therapy. And again, I looked into it, never changed a major, never thought about anything different. It was really one of those straight fire things for me.
Speaker 1:Now, how do you start off when you get out of college? Do you work for someone else for a while? Do you intern? What are the steps necessary to get where you are?
Speaker 2:Sure, yeah. So you have to have your bachelor's degree in communication sciences and disorders and that's kind of the springboard to get into a master's program. So you have to have your master's degree to be a fully licensed speech pathologist. After you earn your master's degree you do have to go through a clinical fellowship year, similar to like a doctor or surgeon. They go through their residency. It's not as long. We go through about a nine to 12 month clinical fellowship year where we are working independently but we're under the supervision of a what we call a therapist, who has their C's, so they're clinical of certificate competence. So once you get your master's degree you get your state license and you get your national certification. But then you have to earn your C's, as they call it, and that's going through that clinical fellowship year and that's kind of finishing that education. And then, once you finish that clinical fellowship year, you are a completely independent speech pathologist.
Speaker 1:Now I know you've built a very successful practice and most of it has really been based on word of mouth success that you've achieved with other people's children, and they recommend you to help their children. But for parents at home that are wondering what are the benchmarks? How do I know if our child may need speech therapy? Are there some clues or how does that work?
Speaker 2:Sure, yes. So typically development happens pretty quickly. Usually by 10 to 12 months a child has their very first word and then every since we go from our 12 month period to 18 months, from six months to 18, I'm sorry, from 12 months old to 18 months, we should be growing our vocabulary pretty significantly. So, like I said, 12 months we should have about one word. At 18 months that goes to about 10 to 20 words. Then 18 months to the two-year-old, that 24-month mark we jump up to 50 words to 300 words. After that, from the 24-month to the 36-month mark. At three years old we just had about 1,000 words that we're saying. So after that year and a half we should be developing speech and language rather quickly.
Speaker 2:And I think people I get a lot of parents in here and they say oh, I didn't know my kids should be talking, I didn't know this. So there definitely are a lot of barriers to education. So it's something very important Our children should develop. After one years old our children should be gaining new skills and speaking fairly, fairly quickly, imitating from us fairly, fairly consistently, learning new words, understanding new words each day. We can say weekly, but as they get older, 18 months, 24 months. Each day we should be picking up new words and understanding more, so I think that's really really crucial for parents to understand. Development does happen pretty quickly.
Speaker 1:So I know speech challenges they must manifest differently. Is it sometimes that a child just can't enunciate the word, or is it sometimes where there really are processing issues, associating definitions to a word and when might or might not be the appropriate time to use the word?
Speaker 2:might not be the appropriate time to use the word Sure. Yes, exactly. So that's why it's so important. If you have any type of concerns about your child's speech or language development, it doesn't hurt to get an evaluation with a speech pathologist to do an evaluation. We'll do an evaluation, we'll get your parent report, we will. You know it's also known as acts of teachers if they're in school or in daycare how the child's doing, and after that evaluation we can kind of look at those milestones and kind of look at those developmental skills and say, hey, listen, this looks pretty typical, we can give you some strategies to work on at home. Or, hey, this is something that's going to need some intervention because your child should be doing X, y and Z and we need to work on those.
Speaker 2:It can range from late talkers, it can range from speech delays. It can range from even, you know something more severe Maybe child has some special needs, maybe there's more of a motor-based disorder. That's why it's so important not to just say, oh hey, my kid's little, they'll grow out of it. We get that a lot sometimes in here, and then our kid's three, four, five years old, and that early intervention is so important, so we could have been working on this earlier and kind of getting ahead of it, so it really just depends. There's such a wide range of things that can happen and so many speech and language disorders that it's just very important to get it properly evaluated and properly identified.
Speaker 1:And when a parent wants to get that initial evaluation. So they just call you Mallory at Blossom Speech and Language Therapy and then you may have the child and the parents in and you consult with the child for a certain amount of time, right? And you have certain tests that you run, or how does that work?
Speaker 2:Exactly so. We are an insurance-based clinic, so if a parent were to call, we would go ahead and see if we accept your insurance and run those insurance benefits. Once everything is good with that, we will make an appointment with you guys. You'll sign up for our intake paperwork, we'll get to know you a little bit and then again, yes, when they come in, we'll do a full evaluation. We'll talk with the parent, we'll get the developmental milestones, what the concerns are, what the medical history is, what the family history is, social history, anything that we should know that's pertinent to the child's development.
Speaker 2:If the child is old enough, we would do a standardized assessment. If they had the attention to sit through a standardized assessment, go through pictures, follow directions and things like that. Sometimes the kids are too little, they just don't want to comply with us. So we'll do more of a play-based assessment, assessment and we'll kind of do those informal assessments. Then, at the end of evaluation, we will definitely give our recommendation if we recommend therapy or not, and then give a justification as to why we're recommending therapy or why we're not recommending therapy. And then, of course, to give you a frequency of how many times a week do we think that this child should be coming in for intervention.
Speaker 1:So I'm sure there's a lot of fears involved for parents that are going through this process, do you find sometimes they may have some misconceptions about what to expect or what all this means?
Speaker 2:For sure. Yes, so some misconceptions are that it's a quick fix. You know, some people are like oh, I went to physical therapy and I broke my arm and it was like a 12-week process or a six-week process. So when you talk about therapy, there's different types of therapies. So with speech therapy we have two different types of categories. We have habilitative therapy and we have rehabilitative therapy.
Speaker 2:Rehabilitative therapy is hey, I had a skill, I got into an accident or something happened to me and I lost that skill. So now I have to go to a rehab center to rehabilitate that. I want to gain that prior function that I had. And then again that's like, for God forbid, you got into a car accident or you had a stroke. Those are more rehabilitative services. Now, habilitative services is we're teaching someone a skill they never had.
Speaker 2:So usually those late talkers, those speech delays, those language disorders, these children never had these skills, so we're teaching them. That's habilitative therapy and that's what we do here. That's habilitative therapy and that's what we do here. And with habilitative therapy it's not a quick fix. Speech and language development is neurological. This is very, very complex. It's not. Oh, hey, you'll come in twice a week for six weeks and we're going to be good. This may be something that could take six months, or this could be something that could take years, just depending on the diagnosis and, of course, the cooperation of the family, their attendance, the motivation of the child and the cooperation of the child and, of course, how they're responding to the therapy.
Speaker 1:So I know you're busy, you're all in with Blossom, speech and Language Therapy, but when you're not at the business, at your office helping patients, what do you like to do? Are you local here in Boca? So I live in Boise.
Speaker 2:Beach. So I'm definitely local. I am originally from New York. I think everyone is down here, but I've been down here for my gosh probably 30 years at this point. So I grew up in Coral Springs. I was always in Boca, I lived in Boynton, so I'm very, very familiar with the area. I married to my husband, michael. We love traveling. He's an airline pilot, so we love to travel, we love to go boating. We just love the Florida lifestyle. We love to go down to the Florida Keys and just relax and have a good time. And I'm a first-time aunt. Now I have a six-month-old nephew, so that's been filling up a lot of my time lately. They live up in Vero Beach so I got to make the haul up there. But yeah, we just have a great time. And you know we love Florida. We love the warmth, love the weather, love sandals and T-shirts and we love to be here.
Speaker 1:And so normally I ask was there something in your life or a hardship that you might use to benefit you with how you handle your practice now? But was it your sister, or was it that experience seeing her go through speech therapy and how that was handled Do you think that influenced what you do today?
Speaker 2:Yes, for sure. You know. Again, my sister needs speech therapy when she was little. Funny fact, she's actually a speech pathologist too now, so you know she followed up. She's my younger sister. She followed in my footsteps and it's just so funny to see everything come full circle.
Speaker 2:My father was a business owner as well, so you know he planted these seeds for me as I was going in college of hey, you should open your own business, and things like that. Unfortunately, he passed away two years ago during a very big moment of growth in my practice. It was very unexpected, unfortunately, but with business the time is now. I could have easily taken a step back and I was hiring people and I could have said hey, listen, I'm going through just too much. Right now I can't do this, but it really tests you how bad you want it.
Speaker 2:So going through all those personal challenges but still being able to have my practice thrive and grow has been so rewarding for me and it just made me more resilient. And if I can go through that and continue my business, especially in those early stages when it's really the hardest to get that traction in the community, if I can go through that, nothing scares me, no matter what else happens in this business, I know I can do it. So I'm very proud of myself and I'm very grateful that the community accepts us here, that they love us here, and we're just so excited to be in Boca.
Speaker 1:And what's one thing you want our listeners to know about your business?
Speaker 2:That I'm a startup. This is not a franchise, this is not something I bought into, this is not something I bought from somebody. This is truly just a girl with a dream and I made it a reality and it was based off of my own funding. We don't have any investors, so everything you see here is literally from me, and it's so wonderful to see the community come in and the clients and watch the business grow and watch my team grow and to know that, you know, I just had a dream, I had a crazy dream and I made it a reality and it's just very, very rewarding to see what I, to know the things that I you know obviously, people don't know. You know things that you go through on a day-to-day basis but to know that I'm still standing here, the business is thriving, we're growing, it's just, it's a wonderful moment.
Speaker 1:You know if I needed someone to evaluate, my child had some speech challenges. I can tell you, the competence, the confidence and the enthusiasm that you have shared with us today would make me feel extremely comfortable bringing my child to you, and I've got a feeling that our listeners feel the same way. I really appreciate you joining us today.
Speaker 2:Yes, thank you so much for having me on. It's been a real pleasure. And yeah, if they need us, we're here and we're happy to help.
Speaker 1:So, before you go, how can our listeners reach you?
Speaker 2:Yeah, so you can visit us online at blossomspeechlanguagecom. We are in the midst of actually updating our website with some photos of our team and of our clinic. We are active on our socials as well. On Instagram at Blossom Speech Language Therapy. Same thing on Facebook, blossom Speech Language Therapy. And on TikTok, we are Blossom Speech Language Therapy. Same thing on Facebook Blossom Speech Language Therapy. And on TikTok, we are Blossom Speech underscore Boca.
Speaker 1:And I know you accommodate families. You may go to their place of residence or another appropriate place for them, but if they want to come in your office, where would that be?
Speaker 2:So we're right off of the Glades and Turnpike, so it's a great location. We're pretty much right off of the Turnpike, great for people coming from Coral Springs, parkland, even Delray Beach board. 8177 Glades Road. We're in the upstairs suites, in suite 202, right here in Boca Raton.
Speaker 1:Mallory, it's been a pleasure having you today and I really appreciate you coming on the podcast.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much, David. Have a wonderful day.
Speaker 1:Once again, that was Mallory Boyd Blossom, speech and Language Therapy in Boca Raton. I'm David Conway, your host for Local Living, and until next time, I look forward to seeing you then.