I Have a Masters Degree in Speech Therapy Now I Don't See Any Clients - Why I Quit Clinic Work
Ming quit clinic speech therapy because sessions don't transfer home: therapists get kids talking in the office, but parents can't replicate it. He now focuses on parent coaching and free online courses instead, arguing the system keeps kids dependent on therapy rather than teaching families to help themselves.
Chapters
Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com I just want to make a video today to tell you about why I've stopped seeing children, parents, clients, patients, whatever you call it in person. And it's been a very difficult decision I had to make after Agents of Speech has become more of a real company. And I'm telling you here, not because I'm saying that I'm quitting as a speech therapist. And I'm making this video because I've been inspired by a few videos that there's something wrong with the system. And I really do think so. And I just want to sit down and have a genuine conversation with you. And that doesn't mean I don't like working, I don't like doing whatever. In fact, I'm busier than ever. And so I just wanted to make this quick video or not that quick. Let's see how it goes about why I'm not seeing anyone anymore, despite some parents asking me to fly over, some parents wanting to fly over to where I am. And it's a hard decision and it's quite difficult because I went through a bunch of training to become a speech therapist. It was an expensive process. It was a long process. And to tell others that, oh, I'm not really doing that anymore is like, like I get side eyed a little bit. And it's hard because it's something that I've been doing for a long time, teaching children who are special needs children especially. It's very difficult to just say, oh, I'm not doing it anymore. And in fact, it feels awkward like just saying that, oh, I'm not seeing anyone. I am a speech therapist, but I'm not seeing anyone. And then people would say, then why not? Like there are so many people that you're meant to help. And this is the first point is that I feel like the current system of the clinic isn't really helping a lot of people. Don't get me wrong, it's. It still works, right? But I had a conversation with an American parent this morning through our Q and A calls where I answer parent questions. And if you want to join those like Q and A sessions, these are for free. You can go to www.agentsofspeech.com course that's inside of our community. So she told me how in the USA she was going through some ab therapy and speech therapy and stuff. The speech therapy was going great because the therapist was able to grasp the child's attention, get him to say things, have fun, fully engaged for 30 minutes. But other than that, outside of that work, the mother had a really hard time replicating at home. And I've myself, I'll talk a lot more about this, this story a little later, but I've had this problem myself. In the beginning, when I started as a therapist, nothing worked. I'm telling you, I was on the verge of getting fired in my first job at the ABA Center. And then after I had my master's and I became a speech therapist and the whole process of which I had to learn a lot, our livelihood was on the line. So I had to learn quick or else I would have had to change jobs. A lot of parents don't understand that therapists go through so much training. It's from the day they start real work, it's just seven clients in a day, and they have to make it work. And whereas you, although you only have one child, right, which is a lot of work by itself. Right. We only need to see them for like 30 to 45 minutes a week or twice a week. And I'm saying this when I don't see any clients anymore, definitely it makes me feel a little bit fraudulent at times. But at the same time, the reason why I do parent coaching nowadays is exactly the reason why. Because speech therapists, they can take out their surprise bags, they can take out and turn on Disney mode, they can follow the child's lead and everything. And that itself is great. It's easy for the therapist to get results, to make children talk. And that's what inadvertently the parent is paying for. Right. But outside of the clinic already, it's not something that is covered by the service anymore. So by the time you get home, it's going to be the same story yet again. I've talked about this many times. I feel like there's a huge discrepancy in terms of skills. Like the parent today from America was saying how, oh, my son knows who to respect and who to disrespect. And it just showed that the mother was one of them to be disrespected. So she was feeling down and she was using the courses that we had for free, which she didn't have access to anyways, even if she paid about how to do something at home. So she tried it. And the problem was that she couldn't get the child to speak. He would run away. There was a lot of problems when doing therapy at home. So when this happened, the ABA center in America decided to implement a tactic called a break card. So instead of pushing the child and Forcing. Some people would say that I would never force a child to do anything. Just for the record, right? The child could take up the brake card, show it to the clinician or the parent and walk off. So we know for a fact in this case this child is totally good and easy to work with. When the parent or the clinician has a lot of skill in doing naturalistic or follow the child's lead. Very hand center, very child directed child led therapy, Right. But the opposite of that is that the main, the opposite, the structured task, it would only work if the person is very firm and very know what they're doing and stuff. So as a parent, as you go into two extremes, either the very child led therapy, that's not really going to work because like you need to have a lot of skill in order to make it work. That's just how it is. Because if you don't know how to embed language goals when you're as you're playing, even playing is going to be hard with your child. Getting them to want to play with you is already a difficult task. And you want to put language goals inside is the highway to destroy a relationship between the child and the parent. Because every time you bring out something, they're gonna think, oh no, it's this again. I'd rather just jump on the trampoline. The parent was telling me this morning. So the other side though, the structure task is that although it gives the parent better structure, it gives the child a lot more structure. A lot of times, you know, children aren't predisposed to want to sit with you. And we had a lot of debate back and forth within this industry. Even, oh, should we like do like clinician led or like child led or whatever? It doesn't matter as long as it's effective and the person who's able to do it with their time can actually make it work and it's actually effective. So what's happening here with this particular case is that the naturalistic child led stuff is only done like it's only working with a clinician, with the speech therapist. But the aba, the structure stuff on the under end, the mother is also working on it. But the ABA center also introduced something called like a break card and trying to be more like accommodating to children, like not to force them or whatever and allow them to leave when they want to. And the parent was like, I don't know what to do because like in this situation I allow him to leave. Which is what the American standard now is nowadays, right? The westernized society nowadays is you cannot force them to sit on a chair. You cannot even touch them. And not in any way. Like, for instance, I had a client in, in the uk, in Ireland to be exact. I advised in a consultation to the teachers, I said, yo, how about we just not let him leave the seat? And she thought, that is a no. Because we cannot touch a child from the waist down or even waist up sometimes it's not good, just in fact. And I'm like, okay, how about we just like tap on the shoulders? Oh, so we cannot touch. What do we have left in the arsenal? Just words. What if that child is non verbal? What if their speech delayed or whatever? Then whatever we say is not going to work, right? So back to the story of the American mother and the child. It really makes me sad because if we teach a parent what to do without 100% teaching them the nitty gritty, and also tell them how to troubleshoot and so on, and tell them why it's not working, it's just gonna leave a bad taste in everyone's mouth. Like the child, the therapist, the parent. If you don't trust me, just go behind a clinic room with a bunch of therapists in a break room. They're gonna say, oh, the parents didn't do their home practice yet, right? Oh, the kid today is whatever. It must be the mother who created this, right? It must be the mother who kept on giving him this, the snack or whatever. That's why it happened, right? They weren't doing their home practice. They weren't contingent with their, with their language goals and so on. And that kind of sucks because we're supposed to be on the same team. And you wouldn't believe what therapists say to each other when they're working on the same case. Oh, I disagree with this approach. I don't like that you're doing this right now. We should focus on whatever. So, like, in this American mother's case, you can see that what the speech therapist would say to the ABA therapist and what would the ABA therapist say with the speech therapist? And even if you change, like between two speech therapists, they would say totally different things. Let me tell you another story. Now, I know this video has been going on for some time now, and I just want to tell you all these stories that I hear from parents. And trust me, this is just gonna make you understand why I'm not seeing anyone, any clients anymore. So I'm making this video also to tell people, yo, don't come to see me because I'm no one special, first of all. The second thing is, yeah, I can probably do therapy work. I do therapy work. That's how I make a living before. So getting your child to talk is not a problem. The major problem is, can you make your child talk, or can you have a good relationship with your child and your child wants to talk to you? That's a different issue, right? So at the end of the day, that's the question you have to ask. Are you buying therapy service to hear your child talk at the clinic, or are you buying therapy service for you to actually communicate with your child? Those are two different things, right? So let me get back to the other story now. I get sidetracked a little bit. There were a few parents who told me that they went to two different speech therapists, and diagnosis was totally different. The approach was totally different. And nowadays, as I have been very verbal about a lot of things on this channel and through what I write and what I say, is that a lot of people are trying to shove their approach onto every child. Right? And you say, oh, man. You also. Right. Your agents of speech, then your parent coaching programs, your free courses or whatever. Aren't they just one set of methods? I'm like, no. Like, there is a process of individualization. You get individualized feedback from us, and you also have some logic to hide behind what we do. Like, logic as in, if this happens, then do this. If it doesn't, then do that kind of logic. And it happens a lot with the gestalt language processing. I don't want to keep on harping about this. And last time I had a conversation with a speech therapist, because she was a stuttering expert, she would say, oh, have you ever thought about it was stuttering? Yeah, but the child's nonverbal, right? It feels like everyone's trying to use their specialty and use their specialty to explain a certain thing. Like, I'm sure there must be a clear explanation about, like, why it would work using a certain approach. Right? But it doesn't mean that you treat every child like a nail. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail that's the same, right? Like, oh, I'm gonna hit the hammer the same way that I'm gonna. Whatever. That's actually one of the most dangerous things you can do in life, not only in therapy, is, oh, there's a blanket solution for this. And that usually in turn makes all of us go into problems. Because that's why you need consultants, right? That's why you need different ways of solving problems because each problem has a little bit of a unique situation in there. Although you can basically put them into buckets, like I always say, like you always put your child into buckets in terms of speech and language abilities. But at the same time it seems like the overarching kind of narrative in therapy is like, oh, if I'm an ABA therapist, I will see and analyze things in a behavior level, right? If I am a, what is that called? Like those parent emotional therapists. That kind of like thing is always because of your relationship with your child is so and so forth the strain here and there. And for gestalt language processing experts, it's going to always be, oh, which stage is your child at? Is gestalt language for sure. So it's not either or it's not binary, it's not whatever. Like sometimes, most of the time it does work. If not, then they'll be out of a business. And I feel like this is the biggest problem in therapy industry is like we are paid to keep your child in therapy, right? And yeah, there is a huge wait list and we'll never probably finish doing that wait list in our lifetime. No matter how fast we pump out therapists, no matter how fast we finish and discharge clients and students. But that's just how we trade our time for money. When you come for, come to us for a consultation, we charge you for an hour, a 45 minute, a 30 minute, right? If we go to your house, we charge you for like X amount of dollars plus the transportation. Some parents don't like that. But it's just like that's just how it works because that's how we make our money, right? So inadvertently, there are some clinics out there that I've heard is, oh, how do we make sure that the client comes more often so that we can charge them more? Some people think that, oh, we can create some language boosting classes that cater towards people who can actually make more money. Cater towards people who can actually afford it versus taking in nonverbal children who are severely delayed at a lower price, right? These are all incentives, right? So at this point in time, because the public services have failed a lot of the systems around the world, right? So therefore it gives rise to like private clinics. Like I was in a private clinic, don't get me wrong, I love seeing clients, I love parents who can afford more, can pay more, who are more educated, they're much easier to convince and teach and have a proper conversation. Whereas like the people who are asking for free services, public services, they are a little bit harder to. To have a conversation with. Right. And if you understand what I'm trying to say here is that what we need to do is actually parent education and not teaching the child. This is my final point. I'm trying to get there because it's unscripted. I'm trying to tell you how I feel. Because more and more people are, like, including myself, when I tell others I'm a speech therapist, but I don't do it anymore in person, they're like, oh, so how does that work? How's that effective? And it feels crap inside of me too. And I've learned how to express myself and come to terms with this is what I want to do, albeit maybe I make even less money. Right. It doesn't really matter about that. If someone's going to golden handcuff me, it better be like, towards something I signed up for, which was to help people to be of service and contribution to the society. And if you're talking to me and saying, oh, there's a lot of money to be made, is that more effective way to teach kids directly? Yeah, I get all those. I really do get it. But at the end of the day, if the kid only likes me, if the child only wants to speak to me, if it only wants to speak to that specific therapist and not you, the parent, it is pretty much all for nothing, right? Because you will get defeated seeing that, oh, it's talking to a stranger more than myself. Right. And sometimes we get comments on the YouTube channel saying, oh, yeah, you always say, like, parents, whatever. It's about the price, the availability or therapy or whatnot. That's just the practical side. Like the most realistic side of the therapy world I can give to you on the other side is who else do you want to talk to? Who else do you want your child to talk to? It must be you. And if you offload it to someone else. And that's what it is, right? Therapy world is done for you, I'll do it for you. But there are a lot of conditions, like at my place, at my time, at this price. And for the parents who are like, watching and stuff. Still watching now. Thanks. You would think it's a lot of work to bring the child over, especially if there's like huge traffic jams or it's far away from your house and at the end of the day, you come out of the clinic room with a piece of paper. Right? That's. Oh, the. Today's session is this. They could do this, they could do that. Sometimes they give a home practice, they give percentages, whatever. But have you really learned anything from this experience? Can you actually bring any of this back home? And that's when I started to realize that whatever I was doing was not effective. I wasn't really contributing to the family as a whole. Instead of building a great relationship with a kid, turning on Disney mode, taking out, taking out toys, making children laugh, mothers think they are paying me a good money because I'm entertaining and getting children to talk. I'm from Hong Kong, man. If you think about it, where one of the most competitive places on the planet. I was on the street working as a speech therapist in a private clinic. I had the lowest amount of experience there. Everyone else on the street was like 20 something years of experience or 10 plus. At least I was the person with a single digit, a year of experience. And so you, you can trust me when I tell you I know how to show parents my value and my worth in order to survive. And it comes at the cost of setting them in the clinic room because other private clinics, they're not going to allow parents to go in, right? But for me, because I had to put on a show just to make sure that the child and the parent knows where my expertise is. I just don't want to live like that anymore. I feel like people come to the clinic room for a result and if the result is only delivered inside of that room and not outside anywhere else, then the result is not fulfilled. Don't get me wrong, there's still a lot of results, a lot of good work being done in the clinic setting. But I feel like there's a gap. There's a huge gap in fact. And I feel like if we can use, we can teach parents to those who want to learn and not try to outsource it to everyone. And as a, as an Asian person, I can say it. Nowadays I have to be very careful about what I say on the Internet. People treat me as a therapist. I give you money, you do it right? You get the solved, you do that, you do this, you do X and Y. I don't really need to care about the process because in Chinese culture, give you money, solve it. I used to love that because you give me a child who isn't talking yet and I solve it. It's a, A lot of people cannot solve that problem. So I feel good about myself, but somewhat along the way there will be resentment from both sides because I paid this money. It only works in your clinic. I received your money, I taught your child, but at the end of the day, he only talks in my place. That's something what we call generalizing language ability in our industry. And why don't we put more effort into that, where the functional language really takes place, which is at home. Home. That's how it works. And I know this video is going really long, so the last thing I want to say is I really do not like where our culture as a whole species is going on onto. And this is why I actually stopped. One of the reasons that I stopped working in a clinic is because I want more time with, let's say I have a kid down the line, which I do hope we do. Would it be fair to put my child at a daycare? Right? Would it be fair, because I have to work, that I give my son a screen to watch? And that's unavoidable, by the looks of things, from what is happening around the world. Because if you go out to a restaurant, every child is glued to a screen. And when you bring your child out to a restaurant, your child's gonna see that screen and think, hey, how come I don't have that? It's like the yo phenomenon of. In primary school, one person brings out yo, everyone buys it, gets banned. After a few years, it happens again. Rinse and repeat, right? So it's impossible. One person does it, so so be it. And if the child sees you use the screen, they also want to use the screen because like, dude, you're eating. I want to eat you. Watching, I want to watch, right? Monkey see, monkey do, baby see, baby do. Hopefully, if they understand imitation, that is, at the end of the day, I don't like it that way. Spending so much time focusing both parents. Go to work, send them to daycare, come back, oh, no, my child's not talking. Let me get a speech therapist. Oh, no, right. The child's actually doing well in speech therapy. But I don't get to see, I don't get to feel it, I don't get to enjoy that time with my child. And it seems like all this stuff that we're working on, the work, the money comes in, it goes out in a different way, rather than spending it on a speech therapist, maybe the best way all along was to have a better relationship with your child, whether or not he or she is able to speak as much as you hope for. Because nowadays the kindergartens are way too crazy, man. Have you seen the homework that kindergarten children have to do? Have you seen the amount of interviews they have to sit through? Just the other Day, like a parent was asking, oh, they live in Singapore. They're scared that the child at 2 cannot get into a kindergarten. And I'm like, what? What's going on? He's 2. Kindergarten isn't at 3, maybe, right? Why are you scared? Oh, it's very competitive. They ask you, who's your favorite author at three, you're supposed to read books now. I thought kindergarten was a place where you learned to read, not a place where you already knew it. Then why are you going there? Right? I was like, oh, yeah, it's for social stuff. Then you could just go to the park. So I really don't like where things are going because in my world of the therapy world, we're teaching the people who need to catch up to something and that arbitrary goal is set by the competition out there. And so what if your child is able to compete in like a smart cookie? Does that make them any happier? I don't see my friends who are super smart any happier than I am. I'm just saying as a personal opinion. That is so a lot of the stress that you have about, oh, my child's not catching up. They're not speaking yet. They're doing this and that. They're too hyperactive in, in the preschool. They're too, whatever. They don't know ABC A for alligator, B for whatever, C4, I don't know, chocolate or whatever. You know, those are made up. And if you say, oh, ming, I. You don't understand. If they don't catch up speaking now, how are they going to go to university? And then if they don't go to university, how are they going to make a living? If they don't make a living, how are they going to X, Y and Z, whatever, right? I don't know all of these questions. All I can say to you is like, the people who I love serving and I'm very happy to be able to serve, are those people who are willing to simplify their lives, not care about what other people think of them, especially for their child, because they can't really change that. All we can do is change our behavior and change our worldviews so that we don't stress our kids out too much. Right? And there was a mother from Malaysia the other day I was talking to. She was in our coaching program. And before that she was already feeling very guilty because her son was eight. He was marginally verbal, like pretty much non verbal. And after now this is like gonna sound like, oh, my God, you're saying that your stuff works If I didn't think it would work, why would I keep on doing it? Just like the therapy stuff, if I thought it was working, why wouldn't I stop doing it? So he came into the non verbal program and now he speaks in single words. And how the mom made it happen was that she quit her job. That was holding her down time wise and she made that switch. So I'm not saying for you to quit your job or whatever, none of that. I'm just saying that maybe there are some adjustments in your life that you can make in order to make more time for your child and change your expectation about or you don't have to change. This is really up to you, man. Whatever floats your boat, whatever is less stress free, whatever makes you feel happier, makes your child feel happier, make you have a better relationship with your child. Do that. And if you're still listening to some random Chinese guy on the Internet talk about speech therapy, when the whole industry is like white woman with a child, then great for you. Good for you man. Kudos to you listening to me. Thank you for that. And it's really difficult nowadays. It's really hard to tell someone honestly how someone thinks because it's very easy to get cancelled. And one of my friends was like, I don't understand how are you not canceled yet? I'm like, yeah, I don't know either. I'm in this totally crazy industry where 99 of women and the edge that I have, I've thrown away. I start not to see clients anymore, right? And that's really hard for me to be honest to say no to seeing children because once I start, I don't think I can stop and see it through. So I'd rather not see. So hopefully you understand why I've done this and not see and decided not to see anyone and then extend the future. I probably will not do this anymore. I feel like what I have right now is to teach parents who are willing to learn, like at least go from 0 to 1. I'm not saying I'm an expert or whatever. And if you like what you hear here, you can totally just go to www.agentsofspeech.com course. Look at the free courses there. We made it for free for a very important reason. Because this speech and language delay, autism, whatever, gestural language or whatever you like to call it, right? Your child is not the same development like developing not at the same pace as their peers. That's not a rich only problem. It's like a problem that is all across the, the world in different cultures, different languages. And I feel like it's only fair that we make it, we try to make it for free. Free. And the biggest difference that we're trying to give into this world is that the advice is simple, it's actionable. You get why you're doing it instead of. Sometimes our industry likes to gaslight parents as, oh, you got to follow the child's lead, get to the level, look at the interest, observe what's happening here. Yeah, it takes a lot of time to learn that. And I believe that there are easier ways to do therapy. And although, yes, I also do think so, that it may look not as naturalistic, it may not look as child led or let's say nowadays, the values and the standards of therapy, it might not meet those, but it works because people forget that children spend 99% of their time with their parents. Right. Unless you're one of those parents who. I was one of those, by the way. My parents were working parents. I was sent to my grandma's place. I just get to watch TV for the whole day, doing nothing, rolling around on the floor, going swimming myself and stuff. Amen. We all carry some guilt around us. Why don't we use that guilt for a better purpose? Right? Just as I'm carrying the guilt of not seeing people when people ask me to, I'm carrying the guilt of saying no to helping people. But I believe that what I'm doing right now is helping a lot more people than I can with just my two hands and a scheduling calendar. All right, Last thing, really last thing is that, dude, I'm not anyone. Like, there are loads of speech therapists who are like child experts out there on the Internet who do a lot of good work. So you can go check out their stuff, like some YouTube channels, such as teachmetotalk. Mary Barbera, I think that's her name. Like Speech Sisters, just to name a few. Those are great people. Listen to them and you don't have to listen to me. Like, we're basically saying the same stuff, just said differently. So choose the person that you can relate to the most and that you can listen to and follow things as much as, as far as it goes. And the most important thing is that you trust that person. So that's all. If you haven't, Please go to agentsofspeech.com course. Get the free courses and the free community. We have 1200 people inside of that community. We have a weekly call for free to answer questions. There are paid coaching programs. You don't have to join if you don't want to, and most of the time we're pretty much full. So if you're interested, shoot us an email, ask in the community, go to our website, fill in the form, whatever. I don't know, reach out. Okay, that's it for now. Thank you for listening, and I'm off to lunch now. See ya.
