Is Your Speech Therapist Right For Your Child?

Hey, this is Ming from agentsofspeech.com I'm a speech therapist. Today let's talk about whether your speech therapist is right for your child or for you. In that case, we got this question inside of our community and I just wanted to answer this from my perspective. If you think that way, the best way is to have a genuine conversation with speech therapist and talk about how you can work this through. It's a relationship. At the end of the day, if you don't feel like your therapist is going to help you, you got to voice it out, okay? And you are the end consumer as well. So I don't know how many times parents leave and go when I was working in the clinic and even now when children and parents come to us online, they're shopping. You guys are the consumers at the very end, right? If you're shopping and you're looking for results, you're looking for someone who understands you, then by all means you have all the power to go around and try different things, right? So that's if you have options. And I see that a lot of parents, especially like racist or whatever. I'm just saying that in the cultural setting, parents who are from western countries, they tend to want to stick with a person out of oh, I don't want them to feel like we're not appreciative about their work. Where I'm from Hong Kong, like people leave left and center, they try five therapists for assessment and obviously it's going to be expensive. But then the thought of going through a bunch and choosing one that you feel at peace with is quite important in my books as well. So that's why that's what I do as well. I would try a bunch and then I would stick to the person who I like. So if you don't have a choice, though, what I'm going to say is like, try your best. Absorb as much as you can inside of the session. If you can sit inside. The problem is that most of the time parents are working and they can only make it on Saturdays. During the weekday, the nanny or the grandma, grandpa is going to bring the child. I've seen that multiple times too. And it's more like training the trainer, the caregiver, whoever is bringing to the child to the therapist should be inside anyways to learn. I've taught a lot of grandmas what to do. It obviously is a lot more difficult, don't get me wrong. But the good fight still needs to be fought. So at the end of the day, you really need to know, when you sit inside, can you duplicate what the speech therapist is doing at home? Because if not, then you're only relying on the 45 minutes you have. And if you've learned any skill in the past, right, 45 minutes a week isn't quite enough. You will always have homework. And then so the next question I get as a follow up is what do I think about approaches, different approaches towards speech therapies? There is naturalistic, there's right in the middle, there's like very structured. And I'm going to tell you, and I've talked about this many times and I'm not really too truly a fan of how the therapy world is going into a spot where everything is naturalistic for child lead, that there's something going on, like gentle parenting or whatever it is. I have no idea, man. For me, what is effective learning, Right? If we are teaching a child to play an instrument, shall we allow the child to explore the piano however he or she wants? Or are we going to teach the fundamentals of piano, of music, so that the child will learn the instrument properly and at least be able to play a simple song? Right. So that's my thought. And obviously we will require children to do their own thing, be naturalistic. But if there's nothing to be naturalistic on, we haven't taught anything, then they cannot really do their own thing. You know what I'm trying to say? If you haven't even taught the C scale, how do you think that a child will be able to play the piano their own? Lead the teacher to play something through music. It's the same as in language. I think you need at least some form of a competency. For instance, have some words, right? Learn some words and then we can use it and play. Or a naturalistic setting, right? So if you don't have that, then I should have a little more structured approach. Then it's really up to you, the parent, to do it at home. And I know that it's difficult, it's really daunting. And I've said it many times that if you trying to learn to be naturalistic and do what the speech therapist does, it's going to be really difficult because it takes a long time to learn how to be natural, how to think about how to play toys, how to talk, how to engage with children in a way that makes them feel like you're their friend, a teacher and also a parent is very difficult. Whereas if you start off with just a structured approach, then the structure is actually for you the parent, not for the child. Because then you will know exactly what the goals are, how to implement it, and what means to what end. So if you want to learn that, you can just go to agentsofspeech. Com Course. We have free courses about how to do it, from nonverbal children all the way to speaking in sentences and then more. Okay, so that's it for this video. Real quick, just to answer questions. And that's it. Thank you. Bye.