Is Speech Delay Permanent

Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com we coach parents on how to do home therapy for their speech delay children. All right, so today we're going to answer a real quick question that we get all the time, which is speech delay permanent? First of all, you have to understand what a speech delay is, right? So we have videos all about that. And obviously, if a child isn't hitting certain milestones, they're considered speech delay. So the word delay nowadays is a lot less common to use. A lot of times when you look at the reports and assessments from different, I don't know, speech therapists from psychologists, from pediatricians, the newer type of wording would be impediment rather than a delay. Why? Because a lot of therapists out there or pediatricians or whatever professionals there are, they would try not to write a delay because a delay implies that there is some sort of. They would catch up, basically. So they're trying to save their own bottoms and their jobs and the legal implications of such. And that's why nowadays you have a lot more diagnosis that would be called something like a specific language impairment or something. So that out of the way, does that mean nowadays if we don't call it speech delay, does it mean it's going to be permanent? The answer is no, most probably not. Speech delay most probably is a temporary thing for most children, and most, and I cannot give you the percentage here. And the reason why I say this is because just yesterday, right, one of our staff was like, oh, I can't believe we've been doing so much parent coaching. And a lot of the kids inside our programs are improving, but then it takes a very long time. And I was like, yeah, welcome to the world of therapy. This is how exactly things are like here, right? If you go into a clinic, you will see that a child might fly through some of the goals. Some children might be stuck on the same goal for a year, right? And we still have to do it because it doesn't matter how hard or how easy a goal is. If it's something that we need to hit in terms of milestone and it's a skill that we have to acquire, then it's worth it to go through all the pain and suffering to get it done. So. So is it going to be always like that? Are we going to be always stuck there? No, but I'm telling you is that there should be a timeframe in your head. Like all children will get stuck somewhere somehow. You will get stuck somewhere somehow, right? And it's not just about like, speech, language, behavior, play abilities. There are some points where children will get stuck at and everyone is a little bit different. So let me give you some examples. So the first thing is, the first hurdle, as we always call it, is to get your child to start imitating, right? Imitating actions. And then the second hurdle that we usually get to is the imitation of sounds. So a lot out there, they don't understand the power of speech, right? Meaning children don't understand that if they say a sound or they, like, copy a sound or word, they get what they want or need faster, right? So after that, the next hurdle that we get to is already sentences. So a child might get stuck saying sentences for a longer period of time. And then another hurdle that we get is like answering questions. So children will always, because they've learned to mimic and copy, they just echo questions all the time. So by the time we get through that, the next level would be getting them to think before answering the question. So the why questions, verbal reasoning. And then the next hurdle would be speaking and telling a story, basically, that is coherent and has different story grammar and slash. There's a whole bunch of these goals. And you would see that every time when you're trying to go through to the next goal, you will be thinking, oh, my God, this is going to take forever, right? It's going to be permanent. And I've shared this story many times on this channel, and that's because it's not. Because it's the only one that I know of, but it's something that I didn't have to do myself. I could teach a parent to do it. And that's what Agents of Speech is about, is teaching you to be the agent of therapy, so to speak. So there was a girl who was 12 by the time I met her, and Covid hit and we couldn't continue with the therapy, right? So we went online and I taught the mom to do the therapy. And what happened was like, she was stuck at just repeating sentences and not answering questions like I was talking about. And we had to push because on the language level, the stuckness was at just echoing, right? On the play level, she didn't really play much. So therefore, we scrapped the language part and we focused on the play first. Right. Once the child was a little less apprehensive, meaning she's more open to play with the mom, the language then start to come. Because then what just had to do was to shove different language parts there and make sure that she understands when this happens during play, she's incentivized to correct the mom, ask questions, answers questions so that the play can continue. Now, it sounds like a very high level kind of thing that I'm telling you because it is. I cannot just tell you, oh, do this, do that, whatever, over on a YouTube video. In fact, if you go to agents of speech.com course, you will see that we have courses on nearly every language level that I'm talking about here. I'm sharing this story with you is because the mother was like, I think this will be permanent. That's her. That was her mindset going into it. And at 12 she saw her other friends. She's Indonesian, by the way, her other Indonesian friends. There was a time where my whole client base were Indonesian online during the pandemic. They were coming at me and they were getting some results. And I'm not saying that my stuff works better than others. I'm never going to say that. I'm just going to say during those times, mothers had more of an incentive to like push for something because therapy was basically unavailable because of the lockdowns. So then you have to think because of that there was a huge push, right? And when the mother saw that, she was thinking, if another girl who was around like 7, she was having breakthroughs. Can my 12 year old also have breakthroughs? The answer is yes. And also let me share another story with you. Is a client that I had, he had a real speech problem. So there's a speech and a language differentiation, right? If you've watched enough of our videos, you would know or any therapist out there, speech is the sounds that we make. If you have a speech delay, that's actually the wrong term, actually it should be language delay. Then you would make some of the speech sounds incorrectly. Whereas language is just the words, the sentences, the grammar, the, the general message. So there was a case where the child was 13. He was only a speech case. His language was great, he was writing books, he was doing whatever. But then he couldn't articulate the sounds correctly because he had apraxia of speech. Now I know apraxia is a huge trending term now and a lot of parents are like, my kid has apraxia, right? Just like gestalt or whatever. I don't really care. To be honest. The diagnosis should be left for, for the therapist to care about. It's really none of your business. Because if it doesn't mean that you can. Even in apraxia, there are different breakdown levels in speech and you have to analyze the speech to know what to Work on going back to that 13 year old boy. By doing a lot of repetitive tasks, we could get him to say a sentence quite smoothly. And this came from a lot of practice and it's not permanent. There are people out there who couldn't speak at all and now they're advocating for it. So if you search a practice of speech, there are some adults out there in America that are advocating for this. They were like, oh, when I was six, I was still non verbal. So it is temporary. But then I want to put a big caveat here, is that speech delay, will it ever go away? I don't know because I think at the stage of adulthood it should be fine. You should be functional and no one really cares much of it about it as long as you can do your job in the society. I would think because some of the clients that I had before, one of them was non verbal until like 12, right? And then she's now teaching children and she's totally okay. She's a functional person in the society. Obviously there are different aspects that she will still have a bad time, like communicating with her family members on a very heart to heart level, right. And that's because of her autism, not necessarily about her speech and language delay. But what I'm getting at is because someone has had that speech delay in the beginning of their lives, right? And there is a carryover effect. It's just very simple. If someone had so much more practice earlier in their lives, it would be easier, much easier for them to achieve more later in life, right? So if you lack that, then the starting line, not even, right? So a lot of times when we see a speech and language delayed child, purely speech and language delayed, right. You might see that this effect might spill over into primary school, elementary school, if you're in usa or into secondary school. And you will see that there's like a small gap and the gap gets smaller and smaller. This happens quite a lot. And because I'm a speech therapist, right, I have friends who are like, who used to need speech therapy and they're in their schools and now they're nurses, they're doctors, they're like working white collar jobs. They're totally fine and it does go away, but they will remember what had happened before. And so if you say that, is it permanent? No. And it depends on the extent of that delay or disorder or impediment or impairment or whatever that you, whatever word that you choose to label your child with at the end of the day, you have to understand it's temporary. But then there is an extent of a carryover and it's not fair for them as school and life progresses, like just how the society is built up. That's everyone has to go up one grade, right? Everyone has to learn language this way, right? Everyone has to use language to learn more concepts. So if even for math, you still require language to understand that concept in a verbal way, and you get tested on a verbal level instead of on a mathematical level when you get to a higher point. So if you understand what I'm saying here, then that's great. So the verdict is the word cure doesn't exist, I think for speech and language delays, disorders, impediment, impairment, whatever, but we can use therapy to shorten the gap as fast as possible. So it really is up to you and the therapist and the child, him or him or herself, to have that motivation to keep on striving so that you can improve as fast as possible. Right? In the beginning, it might be vastly unfair because children's brains are developed in different ways, right? They have different interests, they have different. Like they want to do. They want to play with these things, they want to social with these people. They don't want to talk, they want to listen to whatever. Really, we can't choose, right? There's nature and there's nurture. And if you want to dive into, oh, why does my child have a speech? Like, that's besides the point. Because if we knew the reason, it doesn't mean that we can also cure. It's not like it's a disease or whatever, right? It's a developmental problem. It's something that we can get better at as we go along, right? So it's like you're, you're born with it and we have to deal with it. And obviously deal with it, you have to do a lot of therapy. And I hope that after you listen to this video, watch this video, you start to understand, okay? Thinking about it being permanent is wrong. That really isn't. It's. It's temporary. But how long is that going to take is something you have to take into account. Take into account. But that period can also be shortened by your actions and your child's actions, right? I want to leave this message to you. Do as much as you can. Take action. Read up just enough for you to take the next action. Like I've talked about, where children are stuck in different ways, right? Know that your child is stuck here and only read up on the, on that part that your child is stuck on. All right? Deal with it when it's finished, go on to the next level. It'll be much easier for you to digest and take action and not be overwhelmed with a bunch of different theories that probably only a therapist would. Would need. Okay, so that's all for this video. If you haven't, please go to agentsofspeech.com course. We have a whole bunch of free courses for you to watch and learn, all the way from no talking to sentence speaking. All right, so that's all for this video. I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye.