Speech Therapy vs ABA

Hey, guys, this is Ming here, speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com today this video will be talking about speech therapy versus ABA. Okay? So both of these therapies are considered as behavioral interventions. And what I mean by that, there's no cognitive aspect of it. There's no medical. There's no biological aspect. Everything that we do is behavioral, meaning, changing my behavior to change your behavior. Okay, this might be a little bit abstract, but let me go on. Okay? And ABA is shown to be effective for ASD children, whereas speech therapy. A larger range of the population will benefit from this service, even children and adults. So the objective of speech and language therapy is to teach a child to communicate with you effectively or the world effectively. Right? So that's why we cover two main aspects, which are language and speech. Language is any use of symbols, gestures, words, sounds, eye contact, whatever, a coded message to. To communicate, to get our message across. Okay. Whereas speech is the sounds that I'm making right now that you understand. Speech is a medium of language. We use speech to convey language, so to speak. Okay? So these are the two things that we use the most, that we teach the most, language and speech. This means speech therapy will teach everything that contributes towards communication. And that's under the big, big umbrella of communication. There's mainly speech, language, and then there's also social play skills, so on. And within speech sound abilities, we have articulation, phonological skills, all these jargons. And also language we have, like, expressive, receptive, you know, storytelling, verbal reasoning, all these kind of things inside. Okay? And speech therapy also includes feeding and swallowing, meaning if your child has problems eating something, you can also consult a speech therapist like myself, although that is not where I try to put my expertise on. And the reason why for this is because feeding and swallowing just uses similar muscles to speech. It uses the same mechanisms around, like, around the neck area. All right? So therefore, if you go to a hospital, if you're maybe your father, your grandfather, or your grandmother, whatever the elderly have, has a problem with swallowing, is most probably a speech therapist who does the swallowing assessment. Okay. And apply behavioral analysis. That's aba. Okay. And people might call it behavioral therapy or whatever, on the other hand, uses the behavioral approach approach to teach all kinds of skills, not only communication. And that's why you will see a lot more goals than speech therapy. There might be like a whole book, a whole booklet of ABA. There's like 30 plus goals sometimes that are being put into some categories and all that just to achieve something. And that's because they take the behavioral approach to a whole new level, a very detailed level where they break down every type of skill into its very, very smallest parts that they can teach. Whereas speech therapy, we also do that, but our goals, we probably only have three. And we try to do those, finish those first and then go on. Okay. That's a little bit different between ABA and ST, as we call it, ST for speech therapy. The biggest difference is that ABA deals a lot with disruptive behaviors or problematic behaviors, as we call it. And that's why ABA is more suited for children or people on the autistic spectrum because they do have some behavioral problems that need to be addressed if they have to survive in a world with mostly just us neurotypical people. Right. So therefore ABA addresses these behaviors head on, no matter if it's violent tendencies. Right. You know, I've been bitten by autistic children a lot, and that's probably my fault for annoying them so much. I've seen children who cannot line up, they cannot take waiting, basically, they cannot wait and so on. And they. There's also like toilet training and also their rigidness, like ritualistic behavior, meaning lining up toys, putting up puzzles nicely or else, you know, if you put it in one way, they don't like it. You sit one place, they don't like it. You know, that kind of stuff. ABA has a systematic way to help them remove or not actually remove, cope with being okay with not having their way in the, in the life. Right. So Ava is good for that. And also their focus might be to help a child to, to be okay living in our world. So stuff like stimulating, stimming, what we call self stimulating activities such as tiptoeing, you know, hand flapping, this kind of stuff, anything that might look weird to us, socially unacceptable, maybe can be treated, intervened with aba. And how they do it is not to reduce it, or we do reduce it sometimes, but to find a replacement behavior that can give them that particular sensory need. And it's like a little bit more socially appropriate. That's why, you know, back in the day, fidget spinners were such a big thing because that's what we used back then to help children with stimming. And I think till this day it still has an effect. And I think people are still using like fidget spinners or whatever, fidget toys as a replacement for stimming. All right? So ABA finds a way to teach most skills what people, us, the therapists, the consultants deem important. So it might be academics, it might be a lot of stuff like being able to ride a scooter, being able to play something, being able to line up in a corridor, being able to withstand a lot of noise, take instructions under, like a certain condition, play games without getting into a fit or whatever. Right. ABA would be great for that. It also provides a structure for children to regulate their own behavior. Whereas, you know, ST is more on good communication. Of course we're going to work on regulating the behaviors, but we're trying to increase the communication, the skills, so that they, they have an outlet to tell you about, oh, I don't want that. This is how I feel when someone cuts my line. This is how I feel when I cannot finish that puzzle. You know, I feel frustrated. But ABA is the way to actually help them cope. Okay. And systematically practice until they're okay with, with those things that happen when the rigid behavior occurs. Right. All right, so let's talk about their intensity, their durations, and their pricing, which is the most important thing for all of us, right? So first of all, AB is a lot more intensive than speech therapy. And ABA is like five days every week. And each session is around like two and a half to three hours, which is pretty intensive. And some ABA centers even go as far as to asking you, hey, man, you cannot go to like, other therapies, you cannot go to school, you must come here, whatever. And that's because research by ABA therapists say that it's three hours a day is the most effective way. So on our side, on the speech therapy side, we typically see a child at least once a week and each session would be around 30 to 45 minutes. So you see, the discrepancy is huge. Right? So why is it like that? Because it is more of a done for you service. It's like, I will do it for you, and you have to do it under my rules and our research backed up, whatever. An SD is more like I'm doing with you. I'm going to teach the parent, you're going to sit in, I'm going to tell you what to do. This is my rationale, why am I doing this? And so on and so forth. I'm working with other professionals. Whereas aba, whilst they do work with other professionals, but they much rather have their own team around one child, okay? Have their own methods and own behavioral approaches towards a child, okay? And ABA is a lot more expensive because, well, per hour is cheaper, okay? But when you add up all the days and all the hours in a month, it's a lot more expensive than ST and speech therapy obviously is more expensive per hour because everyone needs to get a master's degree outside of the uk, I believe who needs to become a speech therapist. Right. So therefore, you know, the, the labor cost is going to be higher because the qualification needs to be higher. Not saying that the quality of therapy would be higher. That's what I need to tell you because I have been an ABA therapist in the beginning of my career and then I switched to being a speech therapist after taking a Master's degree. But I would tell you that either side has loads of qualified really good therapists. And about aba, maybe you've heard bad things about it. We'll talk about this in a different video. Okay, so that's pretty much it for this video. If your child is still pulling your hand to get whatever they want, I've got a free five minute activity that you can get now. You can go to agentsofspeech. Com handpooling to grab it. And that's pretty much it. I'll see you in the next video soon. Bye.