What Progress Looks Like in Speech Therapy
Progress in therapy doesn’t follow a single path or pattern. Growth is complex and rarely linear.
When Progress Doesn’t Look How We Expect
Many clients and families expect progress in therapy to look steady and predictable. A new skill emerges, improves a little each week, and then stays. When progress doesn’t follow that pattern, it’s easy to worry that something is wrong or that therapy isn’t working.
It’s common to imagine progress as a straight line. A skill is learned, practiced, and then consistently used. In real life, speech, language, and executive function development rarely works that way.
Instead, progress often includes:
Skills that appear one day and are harder to access the next
Strong abilities in some areas alongside ongoing challenges in others
Periods that look like plateaus before noticeable changes occur
This kind of variability is not a sign of failure; it’s expected. It reflects how we learn, integrate, and respond to changing demands.
Context plays a significant role. Fatigue, stress, sensory input, environment, and expectations can all influence how a skill shows up on any given day. Someone may “have” a skill without being able to access it consistently across settings yet.
What Progress Actually Looks Like
Non-linear progress often feels confusing from the outside, even when meaningful growth is happening.
Some common examples include:
A child using more language at school but not at home
An adult managing tasks well some weeks and struggling the next
Communication improving in familiar routines before generalizing to new situations
These patterns do not mean progress has stopped. They usually mean the skill is still becoming more flexible and integrated.
Development is less about acquiring a skill once and more about learning how to use it across different people, environments, and emotional states.
Why This Matters When Thinking About Therapy
When progress looks uneven, people often wonder whether something is wrong or whether more should be happening. Understanding that progress is rarely linear can help ground these decisions.
Therapy is not only about developing new skills. It also supports stabilization, generalization to multiple contexts, and access. Support can be appropriate even when progress looks inconsistent or slow, especially when the goal is long-term functional use rather than short-term performance.
If we are looking for that straight upward path, we may miss the progress happening right in front of us.
A More Realistic Way to Think About Progress
Instead of asking whether progress is happening every week, it can be more helpful to ask:
Is access to the skill becoming easier over time?
Is the range of situations where the skill appears slowly expanding?
Is frustration decreasing, even if performance still varies?
These shifts often signal meaningful progress, even when consistency hasn’t fully developed yet. Progress does not need to be linear to be real.
If you’re unsure about the progress you’re seeing in therapy, a conversation with your speech therapist can help. They can listen to your concerns and work with you to reflect on what you’re noticing and decide together what support looks like moving forward.
