Speech Therapist Rant on Parent Education

So I'm gonna go off on a little rant. I know some of the parents who watch our videos like it when I rant, but this is a little bit different because I wanted to get something off my chest and just to talk about it a little bit more. So recently we've been helping parents, recently meaning like nearly two years now, with parent coaching. We've digressed away from just giving courses on the Internet. It's been a wild ride. It's been really fruitful, difficult. And obviously we could have gone to a route where, you know, like, it's just webinars, it's just workshops, it's information. It's like live Q&As, you know, like we could do all these kind of things or like zoom calls to help you or, or telehealth, even where you can just dial in and put your child in front of a screen and we'll do the work. There are multiple ways to make. Make this work, make this into a business. But I decided to do the parent coaching route. And the reason why behind this is there's a few. First of all is, no matter how well we do at the clinic, it doesn't mean that it will translate back at home. Right. And a lot of times to, to get results, we have to change a parent's mind. So I'm going to share a story of how I didn't. I wasn't able to change someone's mind. So we had a parent who came into the. The coaching program. It's an annualized program nowadays. So we, we hope that most parents stay for a full year because it's just that for the past two years or for when I was doing it myself, I've done it for three to four years already. Parents who stay for more than a year tend to have the best results. Right. So the coaching is more for the parent, not for the child. So a lot of parents will ask, oh, does this, what's this approach about? What's this success rate for children? We cannot control that, obviously, because it depends on you doing the work as the parent. So I can only promise that as a parent, you will be satisfied with our work because we care. And you will never find someone who will share their. The instant messaging with parents so that you can go back and forth, ask as many questions as you want. That's something we take pride into. But at the same time, we don't want to say publish the results unless we have a full study. Right. So on back to the parent who I couldn't really convince. She joined the program. She said, oh, my child is already imitating some sounds, some words. She's just getting the speech errors wrong, which is great. She knows what's the difference between speech and language. But then the problem was that she said, I don't want to go back to gestures. I know you're very big on gestures. And I feel like if we go back to gestures, she'll lose the, the, the speech. And I want to focus on speech. And I, I, when she joined, I, I did like a whole hour talking to her, telling her that, hey, man, like, at this point in time, we will have to drop down into gestures. And you still want to do this, that's fine. Because her, her daughter's behavior. She shares some videos with me too, before joining. So that's great. So when I was looking into it, I was thinking, we don't have that tension. We don't have a routine going on to do very mundane speech goals over and over again. So we want, if a child is, has a speech disorder, articulation, phonological, it doesn't matter what, what word we're using. We need a lot of reps, right? So we will have to push on a lot of repetitions. We're talking about like maybe 20 to 30 reps in five minutes, which requires the child to sit through something very boring, right? And that's for the benefit of the child because, like, we're trying to get as many successful trials as possible, right? So when a child is unable to say a sound or just even a vowel, like ah, right? Or, or e, or like a, like a diff, long meaning a blend of a vowel, meaning like it might be I, like R and E together. I. If they can't do it and they get unhappy about it, what do we do? Usually in therapy, right, we go down to an easier task that we can get the successful trials back in, right? So then what's going to happen is that we're going to do mouse shapes, we're going to do some action, imitation, some gestures, some fine motor stuff so that at least we can get the momentum going on. Right? And this is all about speech, by the way. We're not talking about language. We're just drilling down into like a speech. So that's why we do gestures is because we can use it as a fallback, right? And because the child wasn't really looking at the mom a lot of times when he, when she was trying the sounds. So we don't really know if the visual will actually help her Right. And the only way to get her to start looking at the mouth is through some fine motor imitation, some mouth shape imitation stuff, right. And a lot of therapists out there will debunk this and say, oh no, it's not good to do these kind of action imitation stuff. Or like people really don't like talk tools or prompt therapy, so on, so forth. And you have to remember there's all. It's always a decreasing step. That's a very therapy terminology meaning if you can't do something, can you progressively go down? And you see this in a lot of like physical therapy, you see occupational therapy, you see it even in like working out, there's always a decreasing step, right. If someone can't do a push up, we make them go on their knees and do a push up. Right. We don't keep on trying to make them do a push up. All you're going to do is just muscle failure and you're not going to get anywhere. Right. You need to go progressively up. So I told her that and then she, she sent one video into the coaching program and then she decided to cancel. Right. Which I'm okay with. And I only got a little bit like heated and annoyed, I would say slightly is because I spent a lot of time trying to convince her that gestures is a way that we can use, right. No matter if it's a decrease decreasing step or later on to know what the nature of the speech disorder is, that gesture is going to actually help to prompt and cue a certain sound, right? So a lot of times we will see that the use of gestures like for instance this one, if the, if the child does this, it actually helps the child to go e. If they go like ah, right. If you go online and search speech like a practice of speech gestures or you know, like prompt method, right. All these, they use gestures to prompt speech. It brings it over. It's a bridge between. Right. So a lot of times why I say this is because, look, if I want you to say I want a child to learn for instance a word like a word like bam. Let's say this non word, right? Bam. Right. So how would I do that? Every time I will need to get the child to imitate me. That's not really nice because the imitation is a lower level than spontaneous. But spontaneous means a child can say the word by, by him or herself, right? So imitation is like say it with me, right? Say it after me. So if, if you learned a foreign language, right. You will know if you got to, to say a word after someone, you'll always get it more correct than you trying to say it yourself from memory. Right. So let's, let's say that this is true across all human beings and, and, and populations. That's the assumption I'm saying here. How are you going to, in between imitation and spontaneous, that gap, what are you going to do? Well, you can use writing, but how many children who are speech and language delayed or disordered are going to be able to read? Right. And the pathway for reading, and I've talked about this before, this bores the heck out of a lot of parents. And frankly, I don't think a lot of therapists think this way unless they do adult cases. Right. Is that the pathway for reading and saying spontaneously is going to be different as well? Right. So it goes through two different systems, two different pathways. Okay, so let's say all this to be true, and I'm just throwing out this assumption here. Right. Then the best way we can do something is to use gestures, because gestures have meaning behind it. So if I go bam, I can go bam, like that, and I can systematically remove my mouth, my mouth shakes, remove my sound. Right. And only use my gestures. Right. To help. Right. And obviously these things need to be not, not all cues and prompts we use to teach anyone something. It needs to be developed. It cannot be like, oh, they already know what this means. Right. It's impossible. And plus, why are we doing gesture imitation in the very first place? It's because we want to direct attention to our hands, what we're doing. And then when they imitate it, they, they know, oh, this is part of the drill. And so that when I use it, they're going to attend to it and at least they will see it. If not, they, if not decoding it, they wouldn't really take it as a cue just yet. Right. So that aside, I was saying if you, if a parent coming in will say, I don't want to use whatever, I don't want to go down a level. Right. I don't want to, like, if you can't do a full squat, I don't want to go down to a blank press, that, that lingo is a little bit too hard maybe. It's like if you can't do a push up, you know, I don't want to do a push up on my, on my knees, I must do a push up. Right. Then you're setting your child up for failure. That's why I was trying to tell her in the best way possible. And you know, like, I could just slap, we could just slap an online course and try to convince people and convince parents and do like Q and A sessions as such, right? But it's gonna not, it's not gonna help. It's not really isn't gonna help if I can't change your mind. And this brings up into another question. So when I talk about aac, like alternative augmentative devices, right, like iPad for whatever, sometimes I get comments from, from fellow speech therapists and say, they say like, oh, you, the data says, the data says that oh, verbal children, they should use aac, right? And the stuff that I'm saying is totally not correct, right? So I, I want to tell you this, right? The data is the data and I'm not going against any of it. And it's the same as the gestures. There's loads of data that says gestures will help verbal children to, to get to, to understand language better and gestures will help speech delayed children, speech disorder children to say the words. And there's a bridge between the sound and the concept in the head, right? And the same as the fact that the AAC will do so as well. I'm not taking away that fact, right? What I'm doing all the time is trying to say in the lingo and everything that I say echoes what parents, parents gripe, gripes are with speech therapy, right? I'm trying to voice it out to have the same kind of language with parents and whilst like therapists are saying like oh no, you have to educate, you know, like the, the, the greater population and tell them, oh, it's okay to bring a tablet out, right? Well I, I want to tell you it's, oh, it should be okay with bringing a phone out and maybe use it to, to talk. That's right. But a huge tablet for a four year old, I mean, yeah, it might be language is good for language development and it's nurturing, whatever, but have you seen a full on tablet on a four year old? You know how ridiculous that looks? You know how difficult, how heavy it is, right? I'm just saying it like that. I'm not saying, I'm not discounting the whatever. And when I'm saying what parents don't want is to go down level when children can talk already, right? So because I'm saying that it reels parents in, right? I'm, I'm trying to repel speech therapists from watching my videos. I don't want any of that, right, that there's loads of great courses and programs and mentorship supervising programs out there for, for, for, for speech therapists. Those are, you know, I've been through loads of those. I pay like thousand to a thousand dollars to learn about prompts, to learn about talk tools to learn about Hannon program. All those that I pay and speech therapists should go ahead and pay those and do their own dues, man. And you know, like, but the whole thesis and the, and the mindset behind these videos that I make is to speak a language that parents can, can relate to, right? So if I flat out tell all the parents like oh, you should use aac, right? You use, you should use iPad, right? Or I say oh, your child can talk but I want them to press buttons, I want them to use sign language. How would the parent feel, right? So I understand when I say that like what I was trying to convince the parent about going down in a gesture is sounds exactly what I'm describing. What, what, what, what I'm trying to get across with parents, okay? And stick with me here, okay? Just, just for a little bit more, right? The reason why parents come into agents of speech, the reason why we have the biggest online community for speech delayed parents, right, where we have like 15,000 right now as of this recording, is because I speak in a way that you can relate to and it's no fluff. I don't say oh, the research, the data says this, therefore we're going to do that, right? I'm saying as a parent, I know you feel like this. I know that you like when I shared in the video about the aac, I've listened to countless parents talk about how In Australia and UK and USA parents had to spend like thousand to $2,000. Some people even said 5,000 to get an AAC device just so that they wouldn't use it. And it's collecting dust at home and when they use it at school, it's too big for them to handle and that, you know, it's, people think that it's a little bit weird and they treat them different, differently and stuff. I'm speaking the parents language, right? If I'm coming, coming in as, as a therapist on top and telling you dude, whatever, whatever, whatever, right? You use 80s, you know, like use pecs, right? It's, it's, it's evidence based, right? How would you feel about it? You would feel that I'm not very empathetic, right? And once I speak your language, you come into our world and we try to teach you guys some stuff that's super practical and we don't go into like stuff like, oh, follow Charles lead, you know, you know, we have to do this and that, a whole bunch of theory stuff. We're not going to throw that on you. That's for therapists. That, that's for therapists to learn what agents of speech is all about. Is to give you one practical thing to do at home, right. And when we build that trust, then I can say the things that might destroy a relationship from the very beginning, which was what I was trying to tell the mother, right. If you want your child to be able to get better at that speech, we have to use gestures, right? Well, it's, it's not a matter of should we or should not. Is there a different approach or whatever? At the end of the day, there's something called effective learning, right? So there are two facets of this. One of them is the gesture part, which is what prompt cues are we using. What, what do we decided to be, to, to be using? You know, it could be anything. It could be gestures. It could be like using talk tools. It could be using. And I'm sure that mom was actually looking for talk tools, looking for instruments to put around the mouth and do oral motor stuff or whatever to help with the speech approach. Whatever is one thing. The other side is effective teaching. So if you don't have your child's attention, right. And you don't have the basis of learning to learn skills, okay. And that, you know, like you don't have 100% of your child's, you know, attention when you're working, especially with speech and you have to do so much repetition, it's not going to work. That's just the end of it. So this is not an Asian concept. I'm telling you, the founder of Talk Tools. I've heard this from a senior of mine, a very senior, very, very senior Hong Kong speech therapist that I've, I've learned from. I've paid her money. I've, I went there and learned. I paid like 2003 that or 3000 USD. I went there and learned. And then she, she told me that stuck with me, which was, oh, when I work, worked with the founder of Talk Tools, I thought that, you know, Americans, Westerners are going to be more laid back. And therefore during my practicum, and mind you, she was 40 something when, when she went to get a practicum from someone. So, you know, it's humbling to see someone so senior to be, to be asking for help from someone else. And that's why I try my best. Like I get I get things wrong all the time. Okay, I'm not saying that I'm a saint. I don't know much. I'm just here to. To test do things right. Anyways, back to the story. She. During the practicum, the child left the. The table, the chair. In Hong Kong, we don't allow that. We're like, ah, dude, we gotta finish it. Because we only have X amount of time. We have like seven clients or eight clients every day. And so, like, in extreme cases, if we're doing half. Half an hour. Sorry, yeah, half an hour blocks, we're gonna have like 15 cases a day. So we cannot afford for children to leave chair because we don't have enough time. So then, because that senior therapist thought, oh, let's let her leave. Let's let the child leave. Right at that instant, the founder of the talkles said, you already lost that kid. This is over. You know, you fail. You failed. And then she tried to reason and tell back to the founder, and she was like, well, you should have known better, right? So at the end of the day, especially when the whole story was to tell you and ingrained in your mind that effective learning, effective teaching, especially for speech cases, needs to be. You have to get your child's attention. You have to have a structured approach in order to get the reps in. Because if we don't get the reps and we don't know the true ability of a child, we don't know how far they can go, how deep they can do. Go with different speech sounds. Um, and we don't have a true assessment of what's going on, right? And I don't need to bang this with. I don't need to tell this. Bang my head with. With speech therapists who are watching this video. Um, Frank, frankly, if you're watching me talk about this, I'm a lot. Probably not. Not as senior as you are. So, you know, like, go ask someone else, right? But what I'm qualified to do and what I've been doing and I'm good at is to talk to parents at a level that they understand, at the very least. A lot of people who come, they say, oh, the videos that we do. I do. Parents understand exactly where I'm coming from. And it's practical, right? So to all the therapists who are watching this video, go away. You know, like, don't. Don't watch my stuff. This is way below your pay grade. Go learn with, you know, pay money. Go learn. Go get a mentor. Like I did, right? Go find People email them, cold email them, right? Read a book, Read textbooks. The reason why I know a bunch of this stuff is because I asked a senior therapist, my boss, and I'm like, how do I treat apraxia? How do I treat dysartery? How do I do this? He gave me a book. Gave me a book slapped in my face, and I read it, right? That. That's just how it is. As a professional, as a mother, though, you don't have to go through the whole damn book because you only have one client and you only have to deal with that client. So, you know, like, find someone that you're comfortable with. With working. Doesn't need to be online, doesn't need to be us. It could be in person. It could be a local speech therapist. And follow what they say. Because we. The principle of therapy is just to find activities, prompts, cues, and target levels that are correct, and we just blast at it. And as long as your child is sitting down is effective, you know, we're not using a lot of time running around chasing them, doing whatever. We're actually doing work. Then it's just a matter of time and effort, okay? And I say this all the time, okay? A lot. A lot of therapy is actually trying to find approach, okay? And once we have the approach, because I've seen a lot of cases in my day, right? I'm not saying that I'm the best. There must be loads of people who are better than I am if, you know, like, who are right now in universities, colleges, being like, senior speech therapists, teaching other. Other. Other people, you know, and all you got to do is to find someone to give you an approach and stick to it and stick to it until a point where you feel like, oh, it doesn't work anymore, and then, you know, change your approach. Okay? So I think that's all for my ranting. It's a little bit why I want to do this kind of video is because this whole thing, this agents of speech thing is getting bigger, right? And I want to be mindful. I don't want to become one of those. Another of those online course stuff and another of those, like, work, parent workshop stuff. I don't want to become. I don't want Agents of speech to become a place where parents pay a whole bunch of money to learn at a workshop with a senior speech therapist with. No, not much of a practical takeaway. I want you to have the confidence that you can teach your child something at home, right? And then, you know, you have professional guidance from us and you see, it's a movement throughout the whole. The whole world that everyone's trying to do this. All right, so that's it for this video. And if you like what you're hearing, just watch the next video. All right? See you.