Talking with Children with an Acquired Brain Injury

Audience – Healthcare professionals, Children and Young People, Parents

This Children’s Trust page looks at the way speech and communication is affected by acquired brain injury. It offers advice on talking with children with acquired brain injury.

When any one of us holds a conversation, we rely on a number of things:

• The ability to find the word we’re looking for¹, and to organise words into sentences.²
• Our memory and our attention.^{3 4}
• The unspoken ‘rules’ of conversation – taking turns, listening to someone else’s ideas, judging the right thing to say, staying with a topic.^{5 6}
• Putting ourselves in someone else’s shoes.⁷
• The complicated system of muscles we use to speak and produce sound.⁸
• The ability to start a conversation.⁹

All of these things can be affected by an acquired brain injury, and so the way a child holds a conversation can be affected in different, sometimes complex ways.

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Other resources and useful information about acquired brain injury are also on this site.