Building Equitable Outcomes for Families with Young Children Through Access to Information

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On this episode of the Learn With Less® podcast, Ayelet sits down with Sydney Bassard. Sydney is an ASHA-certified speech-language pathologist, with a B.S. in Public Health. Her clinical focus areas are working with individuals who are deaf and hard of hearing and those with literacy challenges. Sydney engages in research with these populations as well as clinical practice. With a passion for access to high-quality service and care for all, she takes the time to invest in each client and their family. Her motto of listening, learning, and advocating stems from the three principles that guide her clinical practice.

We discussed:

• Sydney’s new book, “A Day With Mom,” which she co-authored with her own mother



• The importance of health literacy



• The fine line between “doing enough” and not doing enough for one’s child



• How everyday routines can be developmentally beneficial



• The importance of play, and what high quality educational materials actually are



• Where to find high quality resources for families

Helpful Resources to Acknowledge For This Episode:

A Day With Mom, by Pearl and Sydney Bassard

Understood.org – great resources on early intervention and early learning

Free downloads for families and professionals from Sydney

Early & Bright SLP (formerly Mommy & Me Milestones)

Maximizing Natural Language Opportunities, Without Toys, featuring Joanne Cazeau

How to Use Everyday Routines to Boost Infant & Toddler Development, featuring Stacey Landberg

Parent Coaching and Routines for Early Language Development, featuring Cari Ebert

Free Infant/Toddler Development Blueprint: what are the four major areas of early development… and how can you use the pillars of Learn With Less® to support that learning, using the time, energy, and materials you already have?! Download our free blueprint today.

Learn With Less® Facilitator Training & Certification Program, helping educators and therapists create lasting impact in their communities with a high quality, evidence-based, “plug & play” program

Expand Your Impact Workshop Bundle: for early childhood educators and developmental therapists hoping to serve new families in their community and support themselves, using their existing skills

Learn With Less® Bundle: our best infant and toddler development resources for families and educators alike, including our bestselling books Understanding Your Baby and Understanding Your Toddler, our acclaimed family music album, recorded Learn With Less® “caregiver & me” classes, and a caregiver handout featuring ideas for carryover in the home

Learn With Less® Stories: Testimonials from educators who’ve provided the Learn With Less® infant/toddler family enrichment curriculum and families who’ve experienced our programming.

Connect With Us:

Sydney: Website / Facebook / Instagram

Ayelet: Facebook / Instagram / Pinterest

Text Transcript of this Episode

Sydney’s Book, A Day With Mom

Ayelet: Okay, welcome Sydney Bassard, to the Learn With Less® podcast. I’m so happy you’re here today. And I’m really excited to have this conversation with you, we have met all over the place on the internet. But finally, in November 2022, we got to actually connect and spend lots of good time together at ASHA in New Orleans. And we also around that time, it became very clear that you had just embarked upon the journey of publishing a book, which is incredible. So I wanted to make sure that before we get to the rest of the episode, we have a chance to talk a little bit about what that book is, why you wrote it, its name, and how people can order it, because I’m just very excited that my copy is on its way! Please go ahead and share with the good people.

Sydney: So first off, it was so great meeting you and getting to spend time together in person at ASHA. It was great to just finally get to connect with the people you’ve been talking with over the internet for the past couple of years. So the title of the children’s book that I co-authored with my mom is called A Day With Mom. The principle of the book is to really just tell the authentic story of middle class Black families: to show that Black people live everyday lives, oftentimes in children’s literature, Black children are put on pedestals of being extraordinary – they’re super smart, they’re scientists, they’re all of these amazing things, which can be true! But they’re also allowed to just be ordinary children. Everything doesn’t have to be rooted in being super amazing, and everything doesn’t need to be rooted in poverty and struggle. So that was our mission behind writing the book, and then everything in it is based on activities that my mom and I did as I was a child growing up, from making breakfast together, going to different book fairs, to just shopping at the mall and looking for a good sale.

Ayelet: Yep, that’s great. And tell us the name and the best place that people can find it.

Sydney: Yeah, so the name of the book, again, is a day with mom, and people can find it at artistmadridbooks.com. Please, please, please, we are so thankful for the people who have read the book, for the people who have shared the book with their audiences. But our real goal is just so people can feel seen and represented in this story. But also just to continue to make good connections with your kids. Everything doesn’t have to be an extraordinary experience, sometimes the simple things create those lasting memories.

Ayelet: That’s right. Fantastic. All right. Thank you, Sydney for that. That is very exciting. And again, of course, we’ll link to that in the show notes. So let’s get on with the rest of the episode. You and I have been in community on Facebook for quite some time now. And it’s just great to hang out with you in well, not in the flesh, but synchronously here now.

Sydney: Thank you so much for having me. I am so excited to chat with you today.

The Trajectory of Sydney’s Career as a Speech-Language Pathologist

Ayelet: Yay. Why don’t you, instead of reading a bio out loud, it would be great to hear from you a little bit about your story, you know, what led you to the work that you are doing today? And what is that work?

Sydney: Oh, that is such a long story. But I’m going to do the condensed version today. So I’ve been an SLP for almost three years. And I tell people that I kind of ended up in this space by chance. I originally went to school to be a pharmacist. I was dead set on being a pharmacist. And then I took organic chemistry II, and found out that I was not cut out for the pharmacy life very quickly.

And so I was kind of in the space of not really knowing what I wanted to do or having a strong foundation. And that’s around the time that my brother found out he was dyslexic and had ADHD. So I ended up working for