A YouTube monologue by Ming (Agents of Speech) discussing a global shift in therapy for developmentally delayed children toward parent-training and clinician coaching delivered remotely. He outlines benefits (scalability, caregiver importance) and key problems (lack of structure, vague goals, parents unsure if they are helping, potential blame, rising costs and lower-quality providers post-COVID), and advises parents to try one consistent approach and persist if it shows improvement. The clip ends with a call-to-action to visit agentsofspeech.com/checklist for home-therapy tools.
Chapters
Hey, so let's talk about the new and problematic child therapy trend. And it's been global and I see it in developed countries more than developing countries. So I say this because I've been talking to parents all over the world and I'm a speech therapist. So I teach parents now over the Internet, coaching them what to do. And I'm more like a consultant now. So let's talk about what I've been looking at. So first of all, the therapy for delayed children has changed and maybe it's for the better, maybe it's for the worse, but it's certainly problematic. And hear me out on this. The reason why is now therapy is skewing towards parent training and there are few reasons why. Obviously I'm one of the first people to ever do like parent training, like hands on online at a bigger scale, at least I think so on the Internet. But anyways, the thing about this is that there's more and more data and data points saying that, oh, parents are the most important person, caregiver that will affect the, a delayed child's development. Fair enough, right? Whether the child's developed, delayed or developed or, or typically developing or whatever the, the problem is, it's always if the parents are doing a better job, it seems like the kids are gonna have a better time. Right? So therefore nowadays, especially in like Australia, New Zealand, uk, what's happening is that the clinicians, the therapists, so to speak, are looking at how to teach parents what to do at home. Like what I'm doing right now. Teaching you. Right. So what's happening is like they put the parents inside of like this classroom that they cannot see back out one way mirror. So what, what happens there is that the parents are like interacting, playing with the child and then the, the therapist, the clinician will give feedback and tell them what to do. This is largely unstructured and sometimes the goals are very vague. So the reason why it's problematic is because a lot of parents, they actually tell me that they don't know really if they're doing something that is helping the child or not. That's why it's problematic. I myself, I can sit there and do something very structure free, very naturalistic, with a child in my brain and feel good about it because I know and I've seen it happen before. But for a parent it's not going to, you know, like if you are just like throwing balls with the kid and whatever, and it's not necessarily teaching, so to speak, then it's going to be very difficult for parents to actually go through with it, okay? And therefore the results will go down. And then when the results go down, the therapist will actually tell the parents and say, hey, did you do the work? Oh, you didn't do the work. That's because you didn't do the work. And then there's another type of like blaming going on, which is not nice in my opinion. So this parent directed and clinician coaching, this type of model, there needs to be a slight change to it, meaning that there needs to be a little more structure. And the reason why it's difficult is because all these things, they start in the terms of like an early intervention program which starts at around one and a half upwards. Okay. I, and why this is a new trend is because one clinician can serve a lot more people. Whereas like for me as well, right, if I were to see students, they come to me and every day I see around like, like five to six children and like, and, and it's really going to burn me out. Okay, that's first of all, second of all is like if I see parents only, I can see a lot more cases. And we can see this as a huge problem because like after coronavirus, right, after a pandemic that has been a huge, a huge backlog of cases because for two to three years no one was able to go for a speech therapy assessment or like for any type of assessment or therapy, right? So that's why it's been, it's been a huge trend. The other trend is that the done for you solutions like the aba, the Applied Behavioral Analysis has gone up as well and the prices have gone up as well. And the reason is the same because more people are trying to get services and it's very difficult for parents to actually get. It's nice supply and demand, right? If the, if the demand goes up and the supply goes down, then it's going to be more expensive. So therefore like all these ABA and done for solutions are getting more and more expensive. And what's going to happen when this goes up is that more people are going to join the industry. And when there's such a high demand and we don't have enough time to train properly train and give proper guidance to new therapists, what's going to happen is that you and your child's going to suffer from the lack of quality at a high price, which is kind of crazy. Okay, so we need to wrap it up and say something about this, right? The whole trend about this is good, right? But the problem is the implementation because Most therapists, they, when they teach a parent, they need to be good teachers to adults, not just only like good teachers to children. Okay. Those are two different skills. Okay. Trust me if when I say this because I've been with some very good senior speech therapists and also like ABA therapists, but the problem is that I need to learn from watching more than from their oral what they tell me. Right. Which is like very. When they try to like tell you verbally, it's actually harder to understand than watching them work. Right. But nowadays because of this trend, you're not going to be able to see the therapist working that much anymore. And they will give you a bunch of stuff to do at home and they require you to send videos and whatnot. So I had a few clients, one in the Bahamas, they had to take a ship all over, like because Bahamas are all islands, right. So went to the main island and then they. For a regular checkup. But otherwise it's all on zoom and it's all videos and stuff. Right. And we also had a, had a parent, had a mother in UK and in uk it's basically the same. The parent would send the videos over, they would give, it would tell the parent that it's some jargon target. For instance, increase joint attention. And that's actually easy word. I forgot the word that they were using already. Right. And even I'm like, wow, what does that mean? What am I supposed to do? Like what, what are the key observable things that we're supposed to like mark down? Right. What are we working for? So at the end of the day, there's no one way that is the right way. Yeah. It's only more suitable ways. Because if we think, oh, this is wrong, this is not good, there's what. That will never get anywhere. We need to take action. Right. So my suggestion to you, if you're right now you're very, you don't know what to do is always to do as much as like just take, just say yes first. Just say yes to everything. See which ones are actually like making a difference to your child and then stick to it. Okay. And when I say stick to a, stick it to a T and don't think otherwise. Because what I think hits the hardest and has the most like effectiveness for children is that you use the same method over and over again. If there, even if there's a slight improvement, you must keep on using it. Because the worst thing you can do is like, you can do like five different things in one go and different approaches and different things. And then parents say, oh, you. Have you heard of Sunrise? Have you heard of, like, whatever? Oh, my son that seems like he's got, like a. Like a heavy metal intoxication. Maybe I should do some medical stuff. But at the end of the day, do one thing and do it. If you see that after trying, it's actually helping, okay? Because at the end of the day, if you try everything, the most confused person isn't you as the kid. So you need to think about that in that way, if you try something, you see something works, go for it. Do it to the extent where it's, like, finished already and there aren't any more benefits to reap, and then you can move on. But do not try to do all things in one go. That's the biggest problem, right? Many parents are like, oh, I'm trying to teach some math. I'm trying to do some. Some counting, abc, some phonics, whatever. And then when the biggest thing that should be working on is language, right? Or behavior, okay? And, yeah, that's pretty much the end of this rant, this video, and hopefully you got something out of this video. And before we leave, please go to agents speech.comchecklist for a list of tools and toys we recommend you getting when you start home therapy. All right? So thank you so much. I'll see you in the next video. Bye. Bye.
