As a pediatric hospital speech language pathologist (SLP), you provide speech language therapy to patients aged anywhere from infants only a few months old, up to teenagers in high school. For very young patients, your duties are to provide preventive and early intervention care, assessing and addressing speech difficulties or impediments before they are allowed to form. For older patients, your responsibilities include assessing the type of speech difficulty, forming a treatment plan, and communicating with parents and caretakers on how best to overcome the impediment. Patients suffering from severe difficulty may even have trouble eating, and you may have to feed them and teach coping strategies so that they may eventually care for themselves.