Ming from Agents of Speech explains why child-led play for home speech therapy is hard: parents need to stay clear-headed, structure play around communication goals, and keep kids engaged. Naturalistic play alone can lead to slow progress and frustration. Parent training matters most for children under 2.
So when we teach naturalistic approach, which needs someone to be so clear headed, being able to play with children, have the communication goals and also upping your child's interests and making it fun for them, naturalistic approaches are great, but you cannot always use it because if you always use it, you won't see results and you'll give up. And I can tell you this because I have data to back it up. Most of the parents in the beginning, if I try to teach them naturalistic approach, only parents are going to give up and say, dude, I don't even know what's going on. Like I'm just playing with the kid. It goes from here to here. And it depends on the child's mood, it depends on the child's capabilities, their language level right now, the behavior. These are all things that we have to be careful about. For children in terms of their ages, below 2 is where you want to learn a lot more. Like parent training. Instead of bringing your child to a therapy center of which your child has like an attention span of five minutes, they sit for five minutes and then they walk off. That's to 30 minutes.
