Can't Afford ABA Therapy? | www.agentsofspeech.com

Hey, everyone, this is ming here from AgentSpeech.com real quick live today to talk about ABA therapy. The reason for this is because just adjusting the camera real quick is because parents, we're doing a promo, basically, and we're using. So basically a parent messaged me, emailed me, and said, hey, Ming, thanks for giving me all these courses and stuff. And I just wanted to say, you know, I'm very happy that people are saying that. And at the same time, she said that, oh, we cannot, I can't afford this stuff. You know, like the ABA therapy and because it's every day. So what I asked her was, what kind of courses do you want? Like, what do you want me to teach you? And she said, frankly, I don't know because I cannot afford it. I cannot, like, do anything about it. So, you know, it's kind of difficult for her to tell me what she needed. And that's why a lot of courses inside of agentsofspeech.com is like, it just tells you what to do and it just guesses where at and try to meet you there. Right? And so if you can't afford it right now, there are a few options for you. Number one is to get a diagnosis, right? And then see if the place you're living at has some more subsidies for children who are diagnosed. Right. Obviously you know this and I know this, but there are parents out there, I don't know if it's you or not, who don't want to get a diagnosis and are struggling. And those who don't want to do a diagnosis, obviously you won't be watching me, first of all, because you've already searched somehow on Facebook, YouTube, whatever, on Google about like speech delay and so on. So you have come to terms with it some. Some way, shape or form. So I'm very happy about that. And that's why you're listening and we're having a chat right now, right? So and about that, if you can't afford it, I know what, what happens with, with parents, they go into Google rabbit hole. They're like, oh, how can I fix this? What if. How do I do this myself? How do I get help? And so on. So, so the first step is always to get a diagnosis. I cannot do this for you over the Internet. And that's because of a lot of problems. Not problems, but like solutions from before. And that involves getting a. Someone who is professional to look at your child. That's always important. That's always important. And there's that for area to area Even from state to state, city to city, there will be difference in jurisdiction. Okay. There's different rules and, and so on and so forth for everyone around. And the reason why is because you cannot have. Well, you can have, but it'll be a chaos. Like some of the cities that I've been to in Southeast Asia, I'm not going to name anyone or anywhere or whatever. It's just that for, for us, for us in Hong Kong and for a lot of people who are inside of United States or, you know, in uk, whatever. Therapists like me are trained till like postgraduate. A lot of them are even Doctors for like PhDs, for instance. I'm, I just did the bare minimum a master's degree. And so, you know, there's a gap in professional knowledge. You see a lot of places inside of Southeast Asia they would require not even up to university level. So I'm not saying that they are doing a bad job. It's just that to find someone who is qualified to have this kind of conversation and be able to give you advice would be difficult. And then those places, you cannot, like, if you can't afford aba, that's the end of it. There's no sort of like, you know, government funded services because no one's advocating for it. No one's blah, blah, yada yada. And I know, I know this is like kind of just banter to you. Like it might be rubbish to hear this. So what can you do? Right? So the second thing you can do is try to find somewhere that you can group together and do some group therapy. Right? And I don't know about your situation right now, but group therapy is a little bit cheaper. Okay, but is it less effective? Yeah, most probably, especially in the beginning stages because you have to work up to group state group therapy instead of, instead of starting with group therapy. So, you know, like it's better than nothing. That's what I mean. Okay. And the third option is something that, you know, I always talk about, which is like parents acting as a therapist. That's why it's called agents of therapy. Like agents of speech came from that word. So I really think that is a place that we're going more and more and more often as it becomes more and more expensive for people to, to actually become a part of, of therapy, you know, like, because, you know, like they're always saying that therapists and teachers are underpaid, which is true. By the same time, to become a, to have private speech therapy or ABA therapy or whatever, therapy is expensive because it's Skilled labor. It's people. People who have gone through a lot school, right? And sadly, the financial burden of funding those. Those student loans lie onto the parents, okay? So what you need to do is to equip yourself with as much knowledge as possible if you can't afford ABA therapy, okay? There are loads of, like, there's one mother, I'm sure she knows who I'm talking about. If I'm talking about her. If she hears me, I'm not going to tell. Say her name, right? But she's. She's a great mom. The first time that she decided she would take on the mantle as a therapist was when the doctor said, hey, ma', am, your. Your son is going to take a long time to speak, you know, whether you like it or not. So she just focused 100% of her energy into teaching that kid, okay? Sometimes the older child does. Would say, yeah, mom is a little bit, you know, not focusing on the older child who's okay, but, you know, she has to do what she needs to do, and she just. Every breathing moment, she's just thinking about it. And that's how anyone gets anywhere in life, okay? No matter what you want, you need to do that. And, you know, like, I cannot say for being a mother or a parent, I'm not one yet. And I can tell you, when I'm teaching someone, like, I'm teaching a kid, if they're always on my mind, those are the kids who tend to be improving the most. And those parents who are constantly, like, working with me are the ones who are improving the most. I'm not trying to, like, say this to tell you, hey, man, forget about therapy. You know, learn it all yourself. Go YouTube it or whatever. Go Google it. That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying is work with the therapist as much as possible, right? If you can't afford it, use your time. Because there's only two resources in the world that can solve your problems, all right? Either time or money, okay? And maybe knowledge, obviously, but you can. You can learn that with time, right? So these two currencies, choose one, okay? And even. Sometimes money doesn't even solve the problems because I am in Indonesia right now, and a lot of people, you know, like, there are wealthier people in Indonesia. At the same time, money doesn't solve problems. You know, they can't even find therapy that is suited for their children. And frankly, I cannot. I'm not like, I cannot treat everyone. There are children, there are clients who need specific things, like, such as occupational therapy or physiotherapy or things that are very specific to certain types of disorders like cerebral palsy. Right. Even like I get a lot of people asking me about adult cases. I can't do those. I don't, I don't, it's not like, I don't know, I know the bare minimum for those to pass my masters, right. I've worked in it. I've interned at a hospital and so on. And, and you know, it's just not something I want to specialize in. And I think I'm not doing that person a good service. You know, I cannot help everyone. And that's why I've Agents of Speech. As agents of speech because it's only for pediatric, it's only for children and it's only for parents and it's only for parents who want to learn. Right. So a real quick side note are like I did talk about our promotion like today. Like if you've been on my email and you've saw, you've seen on Facebook and YouTube, I'm going to talk about it. I'm going to put the, going to just put the, what's that called? The, the promo code right here. So it's 25 moms only. And it's a thank you for the mothers who have been supporting me along the way. And we, you know, I never do discounts, right. And it's already very discounted. It's only just one, one dude over the Internet, that's me. And I've been making these courses for, for parents like you. So it's 25 moms only. I know it says 25 is typo. I'm doing a 20% off for all courses. So if you would go to agents of Speech.com. i'll just type it here. Agentsofspeech.com store there are. After doing this for quite some time, I finally am able to create around four courses. So all these four courses are discounted 20. 20%. Right? So let's see someone who is asking a question. So I cannot see your name because it's on the Facebook group and it's restrictive. But anyways, let's see. What if the child has been on therapy for too long so that the initiative is very lacking. How to build initiative? Well, it depends on what type of like what kind of question. What kind of therapy are you talking about? Right? That's, that's the first thing. Second of all, if they don't have enough initiative, then you got to find that, you got to find that you got to find out, you know, what what is. You got to find what is. What is a reward to him. Right? And you. You said that ABA therapy is too long. Well, of course it's too long. You know, I'll tell you a story. So, and this is from a student from Indonesia, all right? By no means she is at this time, she is able to, like, speak or whatever, but her whole behavior, everything that she's doing right now has improved significantly. The mom can get her to do things. Before she would just, like, lie on the floor and do nothing. And, you know, during AB therapy, she's just like, oh, just like, do whatever and stuff, right? And not only that, I have another. Another mom who was consulting me also. In Indonesia, the son is like, 6, 17, 18. And then whenever they're doing some sort of therapy, the kid only goes like that. Like, no matter what you say, the effort is very low. They just want to get through it. So what we did here is to check what is a reward? Is your child rewarded during ABA therapy? Because that's the main driver of ABA therapy. If you don't have a reward for what they're doing, then you're doing it wrong. You know what I'm saying? Like, you must have something. You must have a salary, so to speak, okay? And it doesn't need to be a hard reward. Sometimes it can be, like embedded reward, and that's what ABA people call it. For us, it's just like, for a speech therapist, we just call a context where, you know, it's something that we both enjoy doing. Okay? It cannot just be. We sit down and do something together. Most children who are on a spectrum or, you know, who are delayed, they know it's hard. You know, they know what you're trying to do. They know that you're trying to teach them something, and so they give the bare minimum effort. They know that after some, like, three hours of torture, torture, they will be leaving. Right? And, you know, there are a lot of accounts of children saying a lot of counts of people who have been in ABA therapy and said, oh, I feel so traumatized, whatever. And I put it in quotation marks because I'm not even sure if that's even the correct, you know, if they're even doing it correctly. You know, a lot of times if a child is. Doesn't have initiative, that means you don't have a reward. And if you don't have a reward that works, then you got no therapy. That's just the end of it, you know, like, you can only help a person if they want to be helped. This is the single one, most thing that we do in therapy. It must be that the rapport comes first. Right. The momentum of the therapy must be there, and then the last thing is what we teach. Yeah. So I guess for you. Let me just check who asked this question? I just really want to know for myself. Let me see. So I believe it is. Sorry, I'm not on Facebook because I use this other thingy and. Yeah, it's Marissa, actually. Okay, cool. So, yeah, Marissa. I mean, like, that's. That's my answer to you. If you have any more questions, let me know. But at the same time, you know, in terms of ABA therapy being too long, Yes, I think it can be a little bit too lengthy at times. And, you know, I. I'm not the biggest. You know, when I was working as an ABA therapist, I always thought, oh, my God, I'm seeing a kid every day for three hours. And not every day, you know, we have, for generalization purposes, which is healthy for any therapy or any teaching, to have other people coming in to switch roles and to help the kid so that the kid doesn't only listen to one person. I think that's fine. That's cool. That's good. But at the same time, it's. It's a lot of work, you know, and really is a lot of work. If you talk about just work in general. I think doing therapy work, doing ABA therapy work is a lot of work, you know, a lot of work. Just hours on end, just sitting at home doing this and that. Just a lot of. Just a lot of work. That's all I can say. And that's partially the reason that I thought, hey, maybe we don't need to do all the work in one place. You know, maybe we can do it at home, some of it. Some of it at school, some of it in a therapy center. And that'd be a little more natural as well, you know, So I think that's what we need to do from now on. And. And my vision for therapy is gonna. Is that, you know, it's going to change by a lot because, yes, there's a lot of places where, you know, therapy in general is becoming more of a popular study. Right. For people who are smart and who want to make a living and make a. Make a. Change the world. Yeah. But at the same time, it's very hard to catch up because even in. In UK and usa, even where I'm from in Hong Kong, all the, you know, so. And so called developed countries, they don't even have enough speech therapists for their own population, which is declining, right? Which is declined. The birth rate of like, you know, you know, everyone around you, the birth weight is, the birth rate is decreasing, right. So if you think about it, they can't even do that. You know, like even I, I don't know about Japan. Japan has the lowest birth rate ever, right. So I don't know if they can, Their, their child care service can, can do all the speech therapy stuff. But if you're from like even Australia, right, with small population, so to speak, in terms of land mass, you still have to, it's still a long queue for government services. And I had a few like parents from New Zealand who also told me that they had to wait for a very long time. So how would you think that in Southeast Asia or like other parts of the world, you know, Latin America, all these places that are exploding in terms of population growth, right. And they're having to train up new therapists. How are they going to keep up? It's impossible. Even the developed countries cannot. And for developed countries, there are more therapists graduating than ever. You know what I'm saying? Like, it's just, I'm just very concerned it's not going to happen. You know what I'm saying? It's just not going to happen. And, and what's going to happen is that the private sector is going to kick in like it is right now in Southeast Asia where I'm, where I am right now, where I can see it. And the financial burdens are going to go to the parents. That's all right. So, yeah. So Joey, Hey, Joey. Is an effective therapy to get a child to start to talk. Yeah. So, you know, Joey has been sending her child to talk to Aba. Sorry. It's pricey in Malaysia. That's what I heard. It's very pricey. So what we need to do now is, you know, I'm casting my vision here, but I truly believe that this is not a good model at all. At one point in time we have to, there's a cutoff point where more and more people are coming into the city where they will require, they will start to know, oh, the kid needs to go to school. And I can see that they're delayed and because they're delayed and you know, somehow the educational system, education system is a race and a very unhealthy competition between a peer group. You know what I'm saying? Like, you know, I, I cannot complain myself because I've been always okay myself. I've been always not the best, not the worst, you know, just getting by with minimal effort as well, you know. So I would say that, you know, this model needs to change. And how it's. How it changes is from, you know, number one, parent education. What I'm trying to do right now here. And second of all, we have to start using some sort of, like, AI. Like, I'm not trying to be like a. I'm not trying to sound like Mark Zuckerberg here. I'm not trying to sound like, you know, those crazy tech people. But what I'm saying is there is a need for it. At the very least, what I can think about is all the speech errors, all the very mild cases, we can get them done. And, you know, if it's only like a sound or two, or teaching speech sounds in general, that their language is fine in terms of, you know, like, they can understand you, they know what's going on. It's just a speech matter. It's. I think it is quite easy. Okay, I'm saying this to train AI to evaluate a child's speech and then create speech goals and then teach the parent or some sort of game, which I know a bunch of people are doing already. And also to mark them. Marking as in knowing if the sound is right or wrong. And just give feedback over an app. You know, I really think that's totally possible and it will become something that will happen very soon. You know, like Google, you know, people who have als, the ice bucket challenge thing, they've been making apps to understand ALS people. And. And you know how when al you don't know, you. Sorry, you don't know. Most people don't know. So ALS people, when they talk, it's like all mumbled up. It's very difficult to understand because their motor skills have, like, decreased. So it becomes like a little bit slurred speech. So Google's speech recognition is so good that they can help them translate it and then play it back in real time. Right? That's crazy. And I think if they can do that for als, for the child perspective ones, it's a piece of cake, you know, at least for the speech department. But what aba, you might ask. So ABA is something like, what we need to do is to train up people as fast as possible. You know, I'm starting to sound like Elon Musk here. But what I mean is the courses that we do and Agents of Speech is all good, it's all great, but it's still not fast. Enough. It, you know, there are too many children out there who are waiting in line without any help and it's pricey. Not everyone can afford it. Right. And not every mother has a luxury to like watch videos over YouTube for extended period of time. So what can we do about that? And this might sound crazy to you, it sounds crazy to me as well. But what if. What if, right? What if you could learn interactively using a pair of like Google glasses and it tells you what exactly to do at that moment in time after analyzing your child's behavior? You know what I'm saying? Like, that's crazy. I would say that would be the future if one day government service or government funded services is not to bring your child for an assessment, is to give you like, gave you like a pair of glasses, analyzes your child's data against all the back, all the back data from, you know, from computer learning and as such, and then telling you the press, like, what to do immediately doesn't give you a diagnosis per se, but tells you what. What to do immediately. Right. Wouldn't that be cool? Just saying. But at the moment. Time. Sorry. Well, I think we'll take some time to do at the very least. For me, that's not something I'm. I know how to do, so I'm just kind of just, just talking, you know, by the same time, I am trying my best to. So agents of speech. Just a little update. I talked about this before as well. I'm trying to make it the best resource for parents over the Internet as much as possible. And yeah, so that's pretty much it. And the very last thing I want to talk about again is that we're doing a 20% off for moms for Mother's Day, so. So that was yesterday, I believe. Happy Mother's Day. Happy belated. And yeah, go there now. Go, go to agentsofspeech.com go to courses and then use this little coupon code which is 25 months only. All right. And yeah, that's pretty much it. And Joey says, looking forward to your new course. Yeah, I'm making two more courses. It's taking longer than I have expected, but very soon I'll be announcing it after I come back from a city for consultations. So I'll do that and I. And then after that I'll announce like an early bird for people who are interested to join and there will be a slight discount. There will be a discount, yeah, for people who join the first time because I need people to go through the course and you know, we're always tweaking the courses, adding this, fixing things that people don't understand here and there. And I'm very happy because inside of the courses there are like 20 plus comments for each lesson, nearly. I've counted and it really has helped me a lot to improve the product. So I think courses are great, courses are good, but we're going to have to start to think about more effective ways to help the kid asap. And I'm on it. Give me some time about that. And in the meantime, please hang on and learn as much as you can through the courses and through these lives and videos. Share it to other people. Let people know about, like, how to just help someone who, you know, like, if you watch this live and you've been here already, I'm sure you've seen the questions rolling over and over being the same thing, you know, and how do we eradicate that? You know, by just parents just sharing it as a resource right away. Like for instance, hand pulling. Haven't you heard that? Loads of times. No eye contact. I've heard that like maybe 10,000 times. No jokes, right? Not focusing, right. Not responding to name all these. It's all on the Internet. And I know Google is a black hole, is a rabbit hole for all this kind of information, but at the very least, I think I pride the information on our YouTube to be straightforward at the very least, if not like not detailed enough, but at least it's straightforward, right? So share it to people who need to hear it. All right, so that's it for tonight. The Mother's Day discount is going away soon, in a few hours, so I think I'm in three hours to be exact. And if you watch this late and you like missed that missed out, you can email me and I'll, you know, if within reason, don't, don't email me after like two months, right? Email me like tomorrow or something like within the next two days, I'll hook you up and I'll get you the discount. All right? So that's, that's all. And I'll see you in the next week. And next week. That's it. Bye bye.