ABA vs Speech Therapy | www.agentsofspeech.com/micro

Alrighty. Hi, guys. Welcome to our Monday Live. If you're new here, it happens every Monday, 9pm at Jakarta time, which is what they call WIB. But for the uninitiated, that would be GMT +7. Okay? So if you're in the US, that's basically 9am in the morning. Estate. Today's topic is about ABA and speech therapy. And the reason why we're doing this. There's always a reason why there's. The topic, right, is because of your questions, okay? So parents have been asking my child is so and so should I see speech therapy, occupational therapy or, like ABA or whatever therapy there are, right? So let's define what is aba? So aba, the long form of aba, is called Applied Behavioral Analysis. Okay? The whole thing. Thing about ABA is that it's driven by behavior, all right? And what is behavior is like, if you look at a textbook, they will say that, oh, behavior is something that you can look at and you can measure and whatever and so on, so forth that you can observe, okay? Stuff that someone does that you can observe and measure, okay? So anything can be an behavior. And, you know, for instance, smoking a cigarette is a behavior, right? Treatment. Drinking water is a behavior. Throwing a tantrum is a behavior. So therefore, to Ava people, at the very least, is what, in the psychological department, what we call, like, a behavioralist, right? And if you know what, like, behavioralism is about. It started off, you know, about teaching dogs to salvate when they hear a bell, when there's no food. You know, that kind of thing, what we call conditioning, right? So all these kind of stuff, you kind of need to understand where it came from. But nowadays, ABA is very different from that. Very different from teaching Mouse how to go through a maze or something. That kind of stuff is helpful in terms of theory, and it does give us some insight about teaching a person anything. It doesn't matter about anything. And aba, behavioral. Behaviorally talking about. They think language, speech, socializing, all these things. All these things as behaviors, okay? And therefore, that's why they teach a wide spectrum. And I said spectrum, I mean wide. Different types of skills, not only speech and language communication. All right? They teach a lot of stuff. In fact, ABA is actually used in a lot of. And actually used not only to teach children, it's also to, you know, to use to teach and counsel PTSD people, like veterans in the usa. And ABA has a very large base of research money, funds and people who are practicing it in the usa. Okay. It's more so over there. Okay. Okay. So today we're going to deep dive into, like, what it is, if you should do it or not. Right. And the main point is that children who go through ABA are most likely on the spectrum because there's a huge backed up study, like, studies that children on the spectrum on, like, on the autism spectrum, okay. Benefit from ABA therapy. Okay. And coming from myself, I used to be. Before I took my master's to become a speech therapist, I worked in the ABA clinic. Okay. And I would say that most of the time, the things are very useful, very practical, it makes a lot of sense. And at the same time, I think they do quite a good job. All right, so what's the difference between ABA and speech therapy? Number one is that AB teaches stuff more things than a speech therapist would. Okay? They would teach more about academics. They would teach about, like, you know, classroom rules, how to survive in the classroom. Like, lining up is one of their goals. Sometimes potty training is something that ABA therapists would target as well. And then they would target a lot of things, such as being able to wait, okay? Teaching them how to play with certain toys, teaching them how to control the tantrums, these kind of whatever, whatever types of behaviors that are, they will treat it. And the difference between ABA and speech therapy is that speech therapists like myself, we target communication. We target. Are they able to interact with people? Are they able to get their messages across? Aba, on the other hand, is more functional. You see, it might be that, oh, I want the kid to be able to eat so that they don't scream and shout. Okay? ABA can do that, right? There's ways of teaching a child to sit down and eat nicely. And that's why, you see, if you see on my channel and people in the Facebook group and on YouTube, they ask me about, like, certain things about going to toilet, like potty training, feeding issues like eating. I can answer some of those, right? Because I've done that before during my time in the ABA clinic. Okay. So the first difference is that between ABA and speech therapy, given that you know the history and what ABA is, right, is that AB teaches different things. Speech therapy focuses on communication, which entails a few things. Speech and language, and also some social language is inside of language. Anyways, okay, we're not going to deep dive in that, but if you have any questions later on, you can ask me about that. Okay? All right. So other than that, another huge difference is about the intensity of therapy. ABA is very intensive. Research shows that at least when I was working back in the day, like 2013, 14 is that Aba therapy needs to be effective for, you know, according to study. Right. For children on the spectrum, three hours a day. And the number of the times it should be every day. Every day, Three. Every day, three hours. Okay. And that would be the most effective. All right. And I know it's a lot of time, so it really is very intensive. So if you're going into aba, it's a commitment. All right? So someone asks, actually Evelyn asks, what about occupational therapy versus aba? I will talk about that later in a bit. Okay. We'll talk about occupational as well later. Okay. So ABA in itself is very intensive, whereas speech therapy, if you come to me or you go to some other colleague, then it would be like, you know, the packages would be like one therapy session per week or two times, at most three, you know, we won't see you a lot. And the reason is because we're very into teaching a child a strategy, a way of expressing themselves, teaching. Teaching the underlying stuff, like I teach you, like, the language skills, and then hopefully you can generalize to other ways of talking and so on and so forth. And we're very huge on teaching parents as well. Whereas aba, although it's very intensive, three hours every day, I rarely see. Okay. It's not. I'm not gonna poop. I'm not gonna poo poo on aba, because I am from that world as well. Right. I rarely see parents are involved in, like, directly, at least in the session. There are parent training, there's parent coaching, but at the same time, parents are not allowed inside the therapy room because ABA is like. They package it as more of a science thing. So I'm laughing is because it's both. It's never a science, okay? Predicting human behavior can never be a science, let alone we're talking about kids, Right. So you can put numbers and whatever to it, which ABA is super keen on, and us as well, actually. But at the same time, it'll never be something that's. And a lot of people are going to be very angry when I say that. Right. It's a social science. Right. It's something that you put values on that you can observe. And that's probably it. You cannot do much without it. You cannot put it into a formula, and then it will work for every kid. It's not that way. Right. So ABA in itself is very systematic, which I like, by the way. Okay. And speech therapy is all about, you know, flexible. Am I able to, like, teach them an underlying way of doing so that they can, like, later on they can generalize that and use it in other places. Right. So talking about parent training and aba. Yeah. Rarely, like I. There is. Right. But there's no direct training with the year I was in aba. Right. Basically, I've only worked with parents. Like, only one parent out of all the cases that I had. And I had a lot of cases. And the only reason is because I'm a guy, first of all. And it's not easy to work with autistic children. Right. There are most of my field, if you see on YouTube or just in general around everywhere, 99% are women. So what happens if you put a therapist who's a girl and really challenging children is that they get sick quite often because, you know, everyone works very hard, works very, like, long hours. We don't get paid very well. That's another topic. Anyways, and the thing is, people get sick and I don't really. I don't really get sick. So I. And at the end of the day, I pick up a lot of cases because of that, and therefore I see a lot more. Okay. I'm grateful for it, but not so grateful when I'm doing it right, Because. Because I'm picking up other people's work without much pay. Right. I don't get compensated for that anyways, so I was talking about parental intervention, right. There isn't a lot. And if you want to become like, you want to go in, it's impossible. And why I said it was a science is because when you add yourself into the equation of therapy, it changes the whole dynamic. Right? It adds another variable to the child. And if you know what I'm talking about, when your child, like when you are in the room, the same room as your kid, they aren't performing the same as when they're alone with the therapist. Okay. That's for sure. That is for sure. And for speech therapy, we want the parents to come in because it's different, because we cannot be always there. Right? We can't always be there. So what we want to do is what we want to see how it is actually at home so that we can give you suggestions to change that dynamic. Okay. If we can do that, then that. That would solve, like, the underlying problem that it's the interaction between you and your child as causing some of the miscommunication. And therefore they don't talk as much. And therefore if they don't talk as much, they don't get enough practice, and therefore they will be little. That might be one of the factors towards their delay. And Definitely not. Because, okay, whoever says, oh, you don't talk to your child because. And that's why they have a speech delay, that's totally. That's nonsense. Okay? There are. It is a factor. It's a huge factor, but it's not because, okay, so I have a whole other video about it, why you're not to blame or whatever. And we talk about all this, like interaction techniques in the micro course. You can go to agentsofspeech.com micro here and then go and check it out. Because I can't make videos. Videos all the time talking the same thing over and over. Yeah. So anyways, speech therapy and aba, the difference is like that one focuses on all aspects of the child. And a parent was asking about occupational therapy. This is where like ABA kind of steps on a lot of professionals. And therefore other professionals don't like it because they have a system, what we call a behavioral system, right? A way of teaching a kid with a very structured task, you know, like. And then they teach all kinds of skills. Sometimes it might be even occupational stuff, right? And sometimes it might be physiotherapy stuff, sometimes it might be speech therapy stuff, okay? And I remember very vividly when I was at the ABA center and vice versa has happened. Let me tell you the first story, okay? So the first story is that we get a kid into the clinic. My supervisor looks at the report from the speech therapist and then she says, it's rubbish because the assessment doesn't say enough or whatever it is. They don't really understand what they mean by certain words. Which I think is a huge problem, by the way, in the field of, you know, children, like teaching children. Why would you try to say such jargons to people? People who don't understand stuff, right? So anyways, this kid went on, we thought that he was non verbal. He would go, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. Like that, right? He kept on saying ba for everything. And we thought he had no words, right? And then so the speech therapist taught him to use like, oh, an open palm gesture, like that and say yes, like that and some gestures basically just so that he can talk, right? So my supervisor is like, that's. That's stupid. Why would you do that? Teach him the speech, right? So then on we realized all the ba was actually words, okay? And why we know it is because his stress and his tones were correct, right? Now that I'm a speech therapist, I know this is like the real word for it. So he told us, the kid told us that he was going through the East Harbor Tunnel in Hong Kong. Okay? So he was like that. The East Harbor Tunnel, right. So why we knew that was because he was pointing at the tunnel at. From the office. And he said. And then he said. And he was looking at the car and he was doing like. Like that. And it was pretending. And there we knew that he would. He's actually. His language was fine. It was a speech problem. And then my supervisor said, hey, that's stupid. The speech. Speech therapist didn't do anything to help with his speech, but he went on to do gestures. That's just crazy. Okay, That's. That's story number one. I'm going to come back. Okay? Speech. The story number two is when I became a speech therapist and I started to get cases from ABA centers, all right? And I would say I'm very lucky that where I worked for ABA was actually very good, okay? When I started to get cases from other clinics, ABA clinics, right. It was just a nightmare. I would say sometimes. And the reason is because, you know, in every profession, in our profession, right? Even for me, I cannot say I'm like, a perfect, superb therapist, right? I mean, I'm still learning a lot of stuff, but there are places where they don't know that they're not doing the right thing or like, you know, like, every therapist would say that, oh, I'm doing a better job than the other one. They don't know what they're doing, right? So anyways, it might be the case that I am looking at it wrongly. So don't take my word like, word for word. What happened was that I looked at the report, I looked at their individualized educational plan, iep, right? And then I looked through everything, and it was just very, very, very astounding. Okay? So one of the goals was, like, I still remember it word for word. And this is what I wrote. And I'm not going to tell you the name of the clinic or the name of the kid or whatever, but the kid is, like four, nearly five. He speaks in sentences. He can answer a lot of questions. He's working with me on, like, back then, like, two years ago, he was doing stories with me, right? And then on the AVA sheet, it says that the kid will increase his play skills. And what the play skills is, is that they sort it into fine motor and gross motor. For those who don't know what it is, it doesn't matter. Just listen to this goal they wrote. This kid will crawl on his belly for 1 meter to retrieve something. So if you can imagine it. His belly is on the floor, he's mopping the floor for free in the clinic, and then he's trying to grab something while crawling on his belly. How is that play skills? Like, number one, like, it's impossible, right? It's impossible as playing, okay? And then the thing is, why is that a goal? Right? It's impossible for someone to do that. So my point being is that when you're doing ABA and you look at speech therapy goals, it doesn't make sense, right? When you're doing speech therapy and you look at AB goals, it doesn't make sense either, okay? That's point number one. Point number two is that there are good therapists and therapists who aren't doing their jobs well enough. You know, I'm not trying to say, you know, sometimes people say, oh, I'm stepping on other therapists or whatever. I'm not. I'm quite junior myself, okay? I'm still learning a lot of stuff. And I seek for advice as well, okay? And if I don't know something I really don't know, and I refer it to someone else and I ask them for their opinion, okay? Sometimes I even ask for supervision, okay? And enough of that. Trying to protect my own myself, I'm gonna keep on going. Basically, for aba, you have to be very, very, very, very, very, very, very careful. And the reason behind why there's a distinction between ABA and speech therapy, why speech therapists, you can be a little more relaxed and you could be okay, is because, hey, we have to go. We have to go to, like, a master's program. And we also have to go through, like, placements and get our hours and have supervision from people at different fields. You know, fields as in like, maybe like someone who specialize in toddlers, someone who specialize in, like, kindergarten kids and primary school kids, right? We needed input from other people to tell us what to do and to learn from it, right? We had placement hours, whereas aba, pretty much anyone can do it. Fresh grad. I was a fresh grad when I went into aba, right? With my first clients. I had no prior experience. I relied on my supervisor, which is very good, by the way. If you have a very good supervisor in aba, they can turn things all around, right? But what I'm saying is you have to be very careful about how you select a clinic for aba, okay? And I'm saying this because I've had bad experiences working here in Jakarta and also in Hong Kong. And sadly enough, they are the same, of the same brand, okay? And There are other smaller ABA clinics that are. That can be very, very good that I've worked with. I've, you know, I've referred to people with, you know, I've. I've asked them to help me out and teach me some stuff and vice versa. But at the same time, they are very, I would say, disappointing clinics out there that I would never recommend anyone to. And that's the same for any industry. I don't say this to mean, oh, you know, it's not all flowers and butterflies in any industry, right? There must be some places where you don't want to, you know, take touch, right? So what I'm trying to say is you have to be careful about aba. The quality by itself is much, much, much hard to grasp because there's no sort of regulating body, whereas speech therapy, at least we have. At least. I'm saying we. We go through a master's degree and we also have some sort of regulatory body in the city, right? Someone who is, like, looking after our registrations, make sure that we go through continual education and so on. But aba, there isn't. Okay? So the bottom line is. The bottom line is both therapies will help a child immensely if you choose the right person. Obviously, that's down to luck and research and whatever. And also. And also, ABA will help you out a lot in terms of behaviors, in terms of tantrums, disruptive behavior, you know, hitting, spitting, biting, all that. All that stuff. Toilet training, everything that you can think of that you need to be fixed, you can get it to give it to an ABA therapist who can analyze their behavior and come up with a plan, all right? And ABA is more of a done for you service. Done for you, okay? More of. I'm not saying it's totally done for you because there's still parental training that you still have to go through if you go to a good clinic, okay? So that's something you have to remember, okay? It's not totally done for you. No therapy out there is totally done for you because at the end of the day, your child goes home. Still your problem, right? The problem behavior, the language is still a problem. You still have to deal with it. It's never done for you. All right? And someone will say, oh, just get someone to, like, sit in our house and be there 24 7, okay? What if that guy leaves? Right? All happens all the time, okay? So ABA is more done for you. You can ask your child. You can ask them to take your child three hours or six hours a day, a full day. To look after your child and teach them everything that they need in order to survive in school and, you know, and learn to cope about this world. Because at the end of the day, people like children who go to ABA are most likely children on the spectrum, right? Because research says so. And some clinics only accept children on the spectrum, okay? And last time I referred a child to a certain clinic that I think actually I worked in, like before, right. Because I don't want to endorse anyone anything. So I'm not going to say the name. Right. If you're interested, you can just go find out. Okay. Okay. That's out there. My resume is out on the Internet. Anyways, so. Yeah, so the thing is, they needed a diagnosis of ASD in order to be enrolled. I told them, hey, you better have that diagnosis handy. And you know, before I always say that, oh, diagnosis doesn't really matter. Whatever. This is when it matters, okay? This is when it matters. Because when you need to get service and you need to get to the bottom of it, that's when you need it, okay? And that's another rant for another day. Anyways, so for speech therapy, it's more of a done with you, okay? Parents need to sit in with you, right? And then the therapist would teach you some therapy techniques, some stuff that you need to know and learn and whatever in order to handle your child at home and teach them the correct language and so on, so forth. So it's more done with you, okay? And obviously you watching this thing and signing up from agents of speech.com micro. The micro course and our courses coming out later, this is like diy, right? Like, do it yourself. But at the same time, there's like, that's me. That's. That's. I'm teaching you and so on, right? Okay. So let's keep on going. So at the bottom line is these two therapies will help you a lot if you like, if you choose wisely and you choose if you're lucky and so on, right? ABA is a little more expensive. We're talking about something more practical here. And it's because it's down to the sheer amount of hours, right? So ABA by hour, per hour is cheaper than speech therapy, okay? But if you add up all the hours, in a month, ABA is going to be like a lot more expensive, sometimes even 10 times more expensive, okay? And it's just because if you do it three hours a day, six hours a day, you do that five days a week, you know, you do the math. It's Going to be expensive. Okay? And plus, if you do aba, some clinics say that, oh, you cannot go to anywhere else because it might screw up with my plan, and that might be true or whatever. I cannot comment on that. Right. But what it means to you and your child is that you are going to sacrifice some activity, some therapy, some kind of stuff that you want to do just for aba, okay? It's a huge. It's a sacrifice. And also, you're putting all eggs in one basket. And sometimes that is what you need to do in order to succeed for your child. Right? You need to double down on whatever is working. Okay? Make sure highlight on the word working. Okay? Some ABA centers out there keep on doing stuff that isn't working and they don't care to change. Okay? So if you're trying to choose a therapist, a clinic, that is another topic for another day. But to me, it just comes down to, is the therapist or the clinic? Do other people talk about it? Do other people like, well, you know, at the very least, everyone should be happy inside, all the kids. The first session should tell you a lot if the kid, you know, was happy, was having fun or whatever. And at the same time, after like, two or three months, if something's not working, are they willing to talk to you? Are they willing to change? Or are they shooting you down and telling you that, oh, we're going to keep on doing it until it works. And even if they do, do they give you a good reason? Okay. Because I also sometimes shoot down parents and say that, hey, I'm not going to change. This is what we're doing, and this is why. Okay? Okay. And usually parents are very on board when I say that. But I don't know, sometimes parents come to me and then something happens. And I don't blame the therapist. Right? But parents do not understand why it's happening. Okay, so hopefully this is a pretty much a roundup about ABA versus speech therapy, right? ABA is more about, like, teaching autistic children. Speech therapy is more a huge spectrum of communication problems, like stuttering. Right. Like articulation disorder. Someone on the group the other day asked about initial consonant deletion. A, B. People won't know about that. It's basically just a speech problem where you delete the first sound when you say dog. Instead you say og. That's initial constant deletion. Right? So you have speech problems, you have language problems. Right? Unable to speak in coherent sentences, unable to tell stories, recount stuff. That was all speech therapy. And also, we also do, like, social Pragmatic. Like stuff about, like, how to talk to people, how to think, how to. There's a whole bunch of stuff that speech therapy does. And the scope is wider, not only targeted at autism, autistic children or persons. Right. Asd. I'm sorry. I mean, ABA is very singular focus at serving one type of population, but serving them in all aspects of their life. Nearly. Okay, so that's the distinction. Okay, let's answer some questions now. Are you in Canada? No, I am not in Canada. I am in Southeast Asia right now. Hello. Hi. Hi. Hi. Oh, SLP as well. Hey, welcome to group. Alrighty. Hi, Anna. Hello there. All righty. And Lena. Hi. Okay, so let's go back to Evelyn. Evelyn asked, what's occupational therapy? Okay, so if you have been through some sort of therapy center, you will know that there are three T's in. In. In at least, you know, like, not only in child therapy, but also in. In hospitals dealing with elderly adults. We have three T's, Right? Number one, st. I come first. Right? And then ot occupational therapist and PT physiotherapy. Okay? So these three T's are important and they serve different functions. Okay. Number one, speech therapists, us. We do communication stuff. Okay? Anything above the neck is us, basically. And we talk. And I would say that we also teach, like, gestures and getting our lang. Our message across. Our major focus is communication. That's speech therapy. Number two, occupational therapy is dealing with. If anyone, any colleagues would like to hop on. If you hear this and you want to say, oh, that's not a good definition, by all means, please help me out. But occupational therapy basically means if you need to do something, for instance, if you cannot hold a pen, right? If you cannot brush your teeth, okay. If you cannot put on your shoes, anything to do with getting stuff done with your hands, all right? And it's funny because it's called occupational therapist. It's because if someone loses their ability to do the occupation, right, maybe it's a clerk who cannot write anymore after an accident, then an occupational therapist will help them to regain the ability to do their occupation, to do their job. Therefore, it's called occupational therapy. Okay? Okay. And again, please chime in if this is totally nonsense. Okay, so occupational therapy for children, there are a few things that they would do, right? First of all, they will work on the fine motor skills, like picking up stuff, like knowing how to grasp stuff, hold a pen, so that their occupation is as a student. So they need to be able to become a student, right? So there's a Lot of things that need to do. And within occupational therapy, there are many reasons why someone cannot hold a pen, cannot concentrate and do their work, right? That's what a lot of occupational therapy does right now, like concentration, cognitive ability, you know, able to stay on task and stuff. They deal with a lot of stuff. So, for instance, it's not only fine motor, it might be a sensory problem. So sometimes they deal with sensory. They do a lot of brushing to normalize their sensory. All around the body, on the feet. You know, if it's a ADHD guy or girl who cannot keep their feet still, and they're like, they cannot do their occupation as a. As a student, right? They would put bands on, like, the rubber band on the table so that they can, like, step on it and have some sensory feedback so that they feel better and they can concentrate on doing work. So for occupational therapy, it's more. It's like fine motor. It's a small, small stuff and huge on sensory, okay? And what they do is they devise a plan and break down about why they cannot hold a pen. It might be because they cannot feel a certain thing. They cannot do a certain grip, right? They cannot stay on task because their legs are moving, therefore they're not concentrating on their hands. Right? There's a lot of reasons, okay? I'm not an occupational therapist as much as I know. I don't want to go into a world where I'm not very familiar with. Okay. Anyways, physiotherapy is more about. I mean, everyone knows what physiotherapy therapist is, right? It's only that speech therapists and occupational therapists have to explain what we do. Okay? So physio is the gross motor. Like, big movements. Walking, stepping on, like, stairs, you know, sitting down, building up, require muscles to do certain things, maintain a posture. Okay? These are all physiotherapy stuff. Okay? So we have three things. Like, three things. Physio, occupational, and speech, right? All dealing with communication, fine motor skills to do stuff around, and then physiotherapy to, like, be a proper human being. Like, even, like, we need it if we screw up our. Our ankles or something, right? We screw up our backs and whatever. We still need physiotherapy. Okay? So I hope that answers your question and more than answers the question, Evelyn. And this is where, you know, ABA therapists will come in and say, oh, autistic children, we know all about it. And therefore, we will do the jobs of occupational therapy, speech therapy, and physio. Right? One of the goals before that we were teaching a child was for them to learn how to ride a scooter for their play skills. Obviously not as crazy as, you know, like wiping the floor with a belly. But at the same time, yeah, at the same time we do go into the realm of physio, we do go into the realm of occupational therapy. Right, because we do teach them some like fine motor imitation. Right. They have their own words in therapy. It's their own world. Okay, so now I pretty much have covered all I wanted to talk about today about the difference between ABA and speech therapy. And hopefully it can help you to understand more about what the this stuff is. Right. And at the end of the day, ABA and speech therapy, they are not mutually exclusive. And I realize that that's something that maybe not everyone will understand. So what I mean is like someone can do ABA and speech at the same time, but they have to work together. They cannot do conflicting goals. Okay, what if I'm doing a lot of gestures, I'm teaching the mom and the kid, you guys do some like sign language, teach you some sign language, you use it to talk at home. And then in ABA they teach pecs. Right. Then it would be very conflicting because which system do you want to use? Sign language or pecs? So therefore, professionals need to talk to each other, read each other's notes and understand what you guys are doing. Right? What I'm doing, what you're doing, what the parents are doing. And we have to align each other or else it's just gonna be like you're stretching your kid like three directions. You don't even know what you like, how you're gonna achieve. So let's see what Leena is saying. Okay, so Leena says if you're, if a child has behavioral problems, can a speech to be done a little bit strict or using some ABA way? Yeah. So obviously Lena is a very, she's very experienced mom and she's saying this to lead me to talk about like the styles of therapy, basically. So. Yes, of course. So ABA is famous and I use a lot of ABA techniques myself during speech therapy. Okay. And particularly if we're dealing with like a speech issue. Like for instance, if autistic child comes my way around five years old, they cannot do the L sound like that. And they've been doing ABA for a long time and it's been working. I'm not going to try and be lovey dovey and natural and stuff. I'm going to be strict and ask what techniques they were using. In ABA that were useful in keeping him in check. Right. Because it's not going to be effective at all if I don't. My job, my job is to, at that point in time is to help them to, to create like. No, no, to correct their speech sounds. So if they come to me with the L sound that's not pronounced correctly, it's my job. It's not ABA therapist job or anyone's job. That's the number one priority for me. And therefore I will use ABA ways, a strict manner to treat that because it's been proven to be effective. Okay, but given Lena is asking this, right, Behavior problems, there are loads of ways of dealing with it. ABA has their own way and I'm gonna talk about that. ABA sometimes isn't about strict or not. Okay. Many people, many parents have a misconception and say, oh, there's a lot of studies out there that say ABA is like very strict. It's very old fashioned. It gives children ptsd. The. There's accounts of children going out there and giving testimonials and saying, oh my God, I'm getting PTSD from aba. Maybe that's true, but you know, from the many children that I have talked to, many, many, many children. I cannot count. Okay, to give you a ballpark, right. Autistic children who can speak and express their emotions and talk to me is over 10. Okay, over 10 or nearly to 20, I guess, from the years I've working with a vast population of students. Right. They never said anything bad about ABA themselves. Okay. So yeah. So styles of therapy, they do overlap. A, ABA therapists, they do a lot of natural stuff as well. A lot of them are certified in the floor time, you know, and teach T, E, A, C, H, whatever it's called. They're certified PACs. Right. Other. The other way is also correct. Speech therapists like myself are ABA trained. We can be ABA trained. We might do things very strict as well. It doesn't really matter. Okay, so thanks Lena, for the question. Of course, of course they should. Speech therapy should be a little strict if they, if ABA methods are useful for a child. Okay, so someone here says, I cannot see it because it's from the group. I'm so sorry, it's not focusing well. Oh, there we go. Okay, so she says, why most therapies center? I visited me first ABA sessions would be hard for parents as kids would be crying like crazy. A friend of mine had her daughter cried for a whole session. Yes. This is an actual fact. Okay. I want to tell you most of the time. In any setting, a child will cry their lungs out if you put them in a room for three hours without their mothers. Right. I mean, it's just any kid, unless they're very sociable. Okay. It's just an actual fact. I mean, it's not because they're doing a bad job at all. I've been on that. I've been in that seat many times. Okay. I've seen many new students with my time in aba. All right? It's always hard for parents because parents cannot go in. In aba, right? Kids cannot seek comfort from their parents. Okay. And kids are. If they need therapy, it means that they're lacking in some way. Right? So if you put them inside of ABA for three hours with a stranger, and usually ABA centers, they have multiple people and it's noisy, and there's a lot of kids running around, you know, and you're inside a room where, you know, it's. The air is. It's cold. You know, the air is kind of stale. It smells of disinfectant. I'm trying to reimagine my workplace back then. Okay? And then, you know, when you cry, the walls bounce back. The sound, and then you hear the echo. It's not pleasant the first time. It really isn't pleasant. Any kid, not only if they're on the spectrum. Okay. Even one of my bosses before, they asked for their children and also their friends, children to come so that they can give us an idea about how normal children, typical children are. And I'm very grateful for that, because even for those typical children, the first time they came in, they were crying because their moms weren't there. Okay? It's just as simple as that. All right? So it will be hard for parents. A speech therapy is much easier because the parent should come in, and I would want to watch the child and the parents interact and give some feedback there. So we've already soothed them by doing that. Right. And yeah, it's just. It's just like that most of the time. Not most of the time. Like, maybe 10% of the time, children do still cry on the first session for. For me as well. Okay. And it really is up to the therapist skill and what kind of toys and what kind of treats you have inside that can calm them down. Okay. Okay. So this is a very good, very, very, very, very, very good question. Okay. It does happen. It will happen. Sometimes children will take, like, two months to get used to a place not only in the ABS center, but, you know, like. Like a child Care like a kindergarten. It really comes down to how flexible your kid is. Okay? And it's the same when they have to leave somewhere, like leave the ABA clinic or go somewhere else. They will pry as well, because it's different. All right, so that's a good question. If you have any more questions, please throw it my way. Right. And if you haven't, you should really consider going to agents of Speech.com micro because it gives you like basically all the, all the advice that I know about, you know, how to, how to talk to your kid, how to, how to, how to promote language at home. And I've been giving this advice forever, okay? And I really believe from what parents tell me it works. And you can see from what the parents tell me, it works. Okay? So I don't think there are any more comments here. You can continue to put comments in this comment section. You can ask me questions, give me feedback, put statements. If you don't agree, then you know that's fine. You can not agree as well. It doesn't matter. We all hear free speech. So that's all for tonight. Thank you for tuning in. Well, we went on live with 40 minutes, so if you like and want to know more about like ABA and like speech therapy, then you can like comment below and I can do another live about it. You know, it's something that I can go on and on and on and on about. You know, it's basically my work. Right. And also. Yeah, just let me know what other questions you have and I can make videos about it as well. Okay. Last of all, really need to check out agentsofspeech.com micro. That's all I'm going to say. Good night, guys. And maybe good morning in the USA or Canada and I don't know what time it is in Europe. See you guys. See you next Monday or next Sunday, depending where you are and have a good one.