Watch This If You’re on the Waitlist for Speech Therapy

Are you waiting for speech therapy services? Are you in line of a wait list that is like one or two years long? In some countries it might go on to three years. And there's this huge backlog of speech therapy services, especially in the public sector and government services and so forth. The reason is because of COVID Covid has created a two year bubble where we couldn't go out and do assessments for children. And what that happened was like that two year will never get caught up because to be very honest with you, it was already lagging behind before COVID and now Covid hit. All therapy services will be backlogged. And that's why during this wait time, whether you will get services or not and to what extent of service you will get, that should be something that is not controllable to you. And in some places we'll talk about private speech therapy costs and so on later on. But the first thing you need to understand, and I know it's a very hard journey, there's a lot of times that you will doubt yourself and you think it's your fault. And I understand that I cannot totally relate to it because I'm not a parent myself. Just to get it out of the way, I, I will never understand that form of guilt that comes. And to be totally transparent with you, this is what I do for work. I teach parents how to teach their own children at home. Right. And if you go to www.comcourse we have a bunch of free courses there that we use to sell for money and now it's all free just because, you know, there are loads of parents all over the world that don't have a credit card or like they can't process something online. And so it's my way of giving back. Go there and educate yourself first because that's the most important thing that you can do right now. Okay. You need to be the therapist. You know, like speech therapy in general, we put a lot of emphasis in parent training is because most of the time speech therapy is around like a weekly or a bi weekly or sometimes if you're very lucky, you get two or three times a week and it's not every day. And each session session is around 30 to 45 minutes. That's a very low percentage of the day for a child. Right. Even if your child can start speaking in therapy, that doesn't mean when they come back to home, it translates into your start talking. A lot of times there's a lot of bridging between the work in the clinic and the work at Home. The reason why I and our company Agents of Speech like to do a lot of parent training is because then when something happens later, again, right? Or even now, like they're so backlogged and maybe there might be a pandemic later on and in the future, who knows, right? I don't know what's going to happen in the world. At least there's something to educate yourself on. And you need to be the therapist that your child needs because you're the best one, because you have the most time with your child. It's not like you're able to hire someone to follow you and your child like 24, 7, right? It's going to be very expensive, number one. Number two is that you can't even find a speech therapist or a therapist of any kind at any cost right now. Okay, let's talk about private speech therapy. Costs are rising. The reason is a few reasons. First of all is that in a lot of countries, speech therapy requires a master's level education, okay? And that means the number of people graduating is going to be quite low. And on top of that, speech therapy or any type of therapy services, the retention rate of people is low. So like for myself, even for masters, there are a lot of people who dropped out halfway masters. And then when you get to the point of where you start working, like myself, a lot of my colleagues now are moms. 90% are women. So what happens when you have 90% women in an industry, right? They have kids and they want to become part time. And when you become part time, there's even more vacancies in the whole system. So I'm not being sexist or whatever or, or, or in, in any way. I'm just telling you the truth that I see these highly educated mothers who are going to become part time mothers and part time therapists just because they're so sought after, a lot of employers will be, let's say they'll be okay with having them part time instead of full time. So you need to understand the costs are rising because the demand is high, the supply is low. Whenever you have that, the costs are going to rise. But the thing is, in private speech therapy, I used to work in a private speech therapy center. We get very busy and it's just from eight to five, it's just bam, bam, bam, bam, bam. Like parent after parent after parent after parent. And a lot of times we don't have the luxury to sit down with you and tell you a lot of the reasons and the theories behind what we're Doing. And that's why it's very important for you to educate yourself. Because whenever I see a parent who comes into my door, not anymore. I do everything online now, teaching parents over the Internet. Whenever I see parents come into the clinic before, when they already did their homework, they know the terms, they know what they're supposed to do, why we're doing things, I feel it's so much easier to, to get results. Okay, the last thing I want to tell you about is to focus on the training and not diagnosis. A lot of parents will say, oh, I need to find out the diagnosis. So that solve, I know exactly what I can do to expedite the whole journey. First of all, the journey itself. The only way to expedite something is to do more of it. If you focus on the diagnosis, you will get more knowledge on making diagnosis, which is not your job. Your job is to be a therapist at home, be a teacher, be a parent, be a mother, be a father. It's not for you to become a professional and think about, oh, is it mercury in the water? Is it, you know, like the vaccines, whatever people are talking about right now? I know it's important, but it's not your job. You might be advocates of which, but you cannot focus all your time and energy into thinking about the diagnosis. Because to be very honest with you, when a child starts off in a non verbal phase and a nonverbal, a lot of the therapy is pretty much the same. It's pretty much the same. And you can see the videos that we talk about, like nonverbal children, sentence building, whatever. It all comes down to a few principles that, you know, we'll talk about in the next few videos that we upload. But at the same time, I'm telling you, focus on the training, focus on doing, don't focus on labeling and thinking about the labels, because that stuff you cannot control. All right, I just had a parent who lives in Europe and he's telling me, ming, I gotta find out why. And maybe I can add like a vitamin or whatever and I can like make it easier. And I'm like, okay, so what if you found that and you gave the vitamin, does it mean that if you give the vitamin, he'll start talking right away? And he was like, I don't think so. I think we still need to teach him and stuff. And I was like, exactly. So if you need to teach him anyways, right? And you're putting the focus there, how much time are you going to use it on actually teaching the kid? And he was still not convinced. But then I told him, look, no matter what, all the things that we can do right now, especially if you work with us, all we can do is at the behavioral level. We cannot do any biomedical stuff. Right. If you put your child through the biomedical stuff, you will need to find another profession. And that's not me. And so, like, he kind of slowed down and he was like, okay, what can we do here? So hopefully I can do the same for you through this video. And if you really want to educate yourself and put it and get it to the next level, you can go to www.comcourse learn there. Okay. All the courses are free. You have questions. And I see the comments a lot of times are very similar. There's a reason why I made the courses. It's because I've heard the questions before. So I want you to go through those. And the courses are put inside of a community that's very searchable. So you can search and see if anyone has asked those questions before. Right. And if not, you can ask other parents. Ask ourselves inside of the community. Okay, that's it for today's video. I hope you have a great one and I'll see you in the next next video.