How I Taught 288 Parents to Become Speech Therapists at Home

So in this video, I'll tell you how I taught 288 parents to become speech therapists at home. And I don't mean this in a way that they got licenses, they took a master's degree. It just means that they are the primary therapists that their children are working with. And we did it through coaching programs. Okay? And how we started was that I decided to put a lot of the things that I teach parents into online courses, and it's now made free. You can just go to wwagents.com course, put in your email, and you can watch those all for free. This is all just basic therapy knowledge. I believe that government services, you know, books all out there, they say around the same stuff. There are approaches, strategies or whatever. These aren't my methods or agents of speech exclusive stuff. It's just things that you can read in books. And that's how I learned it. And through practical knowledge and supervisors telling me about what to do, I've learned to put those theories into practice. And that's what I'm teaching parents all over the world. So the first part is always giving that kind of basic knowledge to parents, because you're all over the place the most. Like, I talk to so many parents on a daily basis that I know a lot of them are searching on the Internet. And somehow you found us. Right? And so during this process, there are loads of information out there. If you look at government websites and documents and stuff, and maybe even the pamphlets that you get after getting a diagnosis from the pediatrician, you get overwhelmed. So basic knowledge, basic that we talk about are a few things that I'll summarize here. First of all, the diagnosis. Don't worry about it too much, because in the beginning, the therapy is almost nearly identical for most children who are not speaking. All right? That's the first point. The second point is that, okay, now that you need therapy for your child, how can you actually help with language development at home? Right. What are the things that you should not be doing? Right. A lot of times therapy is about subtracting, not adding. That's why in therapy, we only have three goals that we're concurrently doing. I'm not talking about ABA therapy. They have a lot more goals because they have a lot more time. But for other type of therapy, we only have, like, at most, three goals that we're doing. Firstly, it's the time. Secondly is that how much can the child actually know and learn in a specific time frame? Right? So we want to give parents that basic knowledge. It's all free on the Internet. Just go to agents of Speech.com course, okay? You'll learn tons there with the community that goes with that online courses. And, you know, as I'm recording, there's like 7,000 something people in there. You can learn from other parents, too, which is my second point. The parents learn from other parents, all right? Sometimes those parents who are like, no one child is the same, but things certainly rhyme, okay? That's why there are diagnosis, right? Because we're putting in them in buckets so that professionals like myself or any speech therapist out there can see, oh, this is a case that has these characteristics. And therefore, when I'm looking at that child, I'm thinking about these certain therapy goals, right? So then when parents see other parents who are doing something similar, then they can start generalizing and think about these things, right? If they're both at nonverbal level, and we try to put parents who are at the same level and the same coaching programs, and these poaching programs are paid, all right? But a lot of the information I talk about here are free for you to go. You know, like, you don't need to pay us, okay? You can just go learn it. And anyways, so when parents learn from other parents, it's knowledge sharing. They see it in action, right? And number three, the most important part is that you feel like someone gets you and they're going through the same thing, and it pushes you and motivates you to keep on going, right? Because the number one killer of home therapy is the lack of motivation. Or like, you feel, like, so overwhelmed, you don't want to do it anymore, right? You feel like, oh, I'm so lonely, right? And those are words from the parents, not from me. I'm not gonna read your mind, but maybe most of the time, the situations rhyme. And that's why I can say things that are like, oh, my God, you're reading what I'm thinking. I'm not. It's just I've done this so many times, right? So 288 is a number that I'm not sure if that's the case. We probably have a lot more than that, because throughout the years, I've been doing this for four and a half years now over the Internet, and there certainly is a lot of parents, and we're starting through a lot of videos to show you on this channel and also inside of our online courses, some specific examples that we can teach you, right? And the third thing that how I did it, not anyone else, I Can't attest to like any other programs out there or talk about anything else because I don't know. And I, I don't know how it works or whatever, but how we did it was through a feedback system. And how feedback system works is that okay? You know, the knowledge, what tasks to do, right? Because if you search, what kind of therapy goals can I do, right? You can go on to teacher pay teachers or whatever services there are, or even like a lot of tons of YouTube videos talking about, oh, you should do this, you should do that. But there's not enough about the quality of how the goal is performed. Because if you put the same language goal with a seasoned therapist or like just a student, you will see a huge difference of how it's actually done. A lot of the time, like I would say probably 80% is how you present the task, how you're talking to the child, and how you are performing soft skills that are therapy related, right? Giving feedback, making sure your instructions are clear, and at the same time ensuring that you're not relying on too much of the rewards or the activity you're doing and building a strong relationship with your child. These are things that I can just say, right? But you know, like, after you hear it, you're like, what, what the heck does that mean? Like, how does that help me, right? No, crap, I need to be nice and play with my child. But how? So then the feedback system that has, that we've made to help parents all over the world is that they send us videos and we provide feedback. We say, hey, here, you should do that. Hey, you forgot to do this here. The reason why he ran away was because of that. The reason why she was crying is because of this, right? At least that's a hypothesis. And you have a third eye looking at it, right? So how we do this is that we go through like coaching programs and we have a set instruction about a particular goal that we want to shoot for. And then what happens is that the parents will film themselves and send it to us. I'm pretty sure there are no other services out there that can take so many videos. So at Agents of Speech, we do that. And that's how we support this channel, the information we give out. And that's my philosophy. And our philosophy is that the information should be free, right? If not just like very low cost, costing your time and attention and the effort that you're putting in. And we're just repackaging a lot of the stuff that we learned from our practices, our degrees, and so on so that parents will know. And then if parents really want to, they can hop onto like the coaching stuff. So that's how I did it. And about the success rate and stuff, I cannot make any claims. I'm just telling you that if you stick to it, we always see positive results. Not going to share numbers here. Maybe if you're in the community, we can share a little bit more about case studies specifically we're doing. And that's pretty much it. So if you go through those three steps, you get the basic knowledge. Doesn't need to be from us. Learn from someone, right? Find a community of parents who are doing the same thing, right? Cheer each other on, look at how they did it, how does it relate to you and stuff. And there's no shame and no whatever if you want someone else to do it for you, right? That's what therapy centers are for. And you can go ahead and do that. Okay. And the last piece of the puzzle is feedback, because you need feedback in order to become better. So a lot of times I see parents going into a rabbit hole after a rabbit hole and they start doing a thousand things and then the hypothesis for what the child is a little bit wrong. And this is where I see like the free communities out there on Reddit, on Facebook, they focus on the wrong things, like for instance, what the diet should be, like, how to reduce autistic symptoms or whatever. That's never the case. And we'll talk about that in a video later on. So that's how I did it. If you really want to start your journey, you can do it totally free@agentsofspeech.com course we have courses for children who are no words and all the way up to full form sentences. And we're always adding workshops and things that we learn from our paid clients and the things that we do here. Okay, anyways, that's the end of this video. If you liked it, just tell someone about this video. And that's pretty much it. Thank you. See you next week.