Karen O’Connor was a speech and language therapist with six years’ experience working with children when she discovered the huge role music could play in helping them to develop linguistic and social skills.

She decided to learn more about it, from experts as far away as Canada, America and Australia where music plays a huge role in speech and development therapy.

Karen started incorporating music in her treatment programme and now, 11 years on, she says she has never found a child it hasn’t helped. That has led her to writing a book on her experiences, Music is the Key to Unlocking your Child’s Potential.

It offers parents an insight into how specific music programmes can help their children to be calmer, more communicative, interact better with other children, improve their concentration and even their balance.

Karen, who is originally from Donegal and has lived in Galway for the past 12 years, offers three special programmes in her private Listening Therapy clinic in Furbo. There, she treats children with everything from autism to Asperger’s Syndrome, dyspraxia and other development challenges.

At present, Karen is the only therapist offering these programmes in Ireland, but it’s her dream to see listening and sound therapy adopted by the health service, so that it becomes widely available. Because it combines effectively with existing therapies to give results more quickly, it will save resources in the long term, she adds.

“I started to notice it was helping all the children I treated in terms of attention, comprehension, clarity of speech, putting sentences together and social interaction,” she says.

When Karen worked in the public health service, which she did for several years, she found that most children with speech problems improved. However, some did not achieve their potential.

“But we had to let them go when they reached a certain level. That disheartened me. I felt there had to be other tools for those children and looked at things, including music.”

By then Karen had already began to adopt a holistic approach to assessing children, thanks to a speech and therapy manager in the health service who had trained in what’s known as ‘sensory integration management’.

That sounds complex, but it means assessing a child to see how they react to the world around them at all levels – in terms of touch, taste, smell, sound and balance.

For more, read this week's Connacht Tribune.