Why It’s a Bad Idea to Wait and See for Speech Delayed Children

If the doctor tells you to wait and see after the initial assessment, consultation, whatever it is, then it might be a bad idea. And I'm saying might. Okay? But this might actually means that there's a chance and a risk. Right? So let's talk about the first thing, which is language milestones and the definition of delay. So throughout the years, the milestones have been changing a little bit. Okay. And most recently the CDC in America, they reduced the milestones to a much lower standard. I'm not going to go through everything here. All you got to know is that is dumbed down now. And a lot of my colleagues in America are saying like, hey man, this is not cool. And I think the reason why behind this is because there's a whole long line of wait list for speech delayed children, especially the vacuum of services during the pandemic. So therefore we need to lower the language. I'm just projecting here, they lowered the language milestone so that you could say, oh, let's wait and see. It's not too bad. The definition of delay by textbook is that there's a six month gap between what your child is doing currently and what they should be doing now. The should is a big asterisk on it. So should do. This is from data and sampling of throughout the years. And language development has been changing for the last couple of even 10 years. Within my short career as a speech therapist for 10 years, from the very beginning, it was pretty lax, I would say. But then, as you see more and more, more and more schools, their syllabus, right? The stuff that children watch, life's development has become really competitive. Meaning like A is not for apple, A is for alligator. And in Hong Kong, I don't know why. So when this happens, you will start seeing children who are two and they're speaking like an adult. And I've seen it multiple times because I'm at an age where my friends are having kids. Okay? So the definition of delay in the milestone is set in stone. But then the language development is fluid. And I've made a video before. After the pandemic, the whole language development milestone landscape of children has gone down. As an actual fact, it got a little worse. But the whole academic environment hasn't changed. And that's why more and more parents are even more worried about this, because what are you going to do if there's an interview to get into a kindergarten, especially in Asia, where it's super competitive, right? And so the number two thing I want to talk about is reducing risk. When I say might be A bad idea to wait and see, right. When the word might means that inherently there's going to be a risk. Okay? So the risk comes from that if you don't do something, the delay may persist or get worse. All right, so when we're talking about a delay in the beginning, it might be a six month delay in between one and a half year old and a two year old, right? Whereas one and a half is like the around the end of where we can say, oh, if a child isn't using first words yet at one and a half, then they would be delayed because you know, that's how the consensus is in the industry. And then at 2 it would be like, oh, kids are starting to put words together, they know a bunch of words, they have some two word phrases, yada. If your child doesn't develop, right. And I'm not trying to induce fear, like trying to make you scared or whatever. I'm just telling you if the gap between the six months of one and a half to three to two and a half, that one year, like you add one more half, six months is going to be huge. Because two and a half, three is already like full sentences. And if your child goes to a preschool or just kindergarten, it's going to be very obvious, right? And I'm not stressed out. Why I'm saying this is because most parents are super stressed when this happens. They see and they're like, oh my God, other children are doing xyz and then teachers will start complaining to her. A child is not talking yet. I don't know why. Now it's a culture for kindergarten teachers to actually complain to parents about this, become some of one of the culture nowadays. But anyways, so how do we deal with this is that we need to put it into action. Okay, so at 2, if your child is not speaking right, or that your child is slightly delayed, the chance of you getting government services is quite low because there are a bunch of children who are nonverbal, who are much way worse than your child might be. Right? So then it's going to be difficult and even if you do get, there's going to be a lack of intense services to cater for your child's language needs. So what's going to happen is that more and more government services are going to do more of a parent coaching kind of model. And I've heard from parents as well, they get phone calls, they get to send videos and so on. Exactly what we're doing in Agents of Speech, this channel, this program, what I want you to do is to get into action and start teaching your child at home. Because action beats anxiety. So if you put into action, you start doing it. I promise you, nine times out of ten you'll feel better because you actually see them progress and you're like, oh, it's not too bad. I can actually teach my child something. And it's just a matter of time and effort. That's what I'm trying to tell you here. Okay, so the last thing is this. A language rich environment is a key indicator of language development. Something that we saw. And this backed by data. I don't always slap, say evidence based around on this channel. And the reason is because a lot of times when I say that, it turns parents off. I don't like that. I want you to be engaged and listen to what I say. So language rich environment just means that you're talking in a way that helps a child develop language. Now, the evidence tells us that during COVID parents who were working at home, they were working at home, they couldn't really provide a language rich environment. So therefore, that's just the hypothesis here. The whole language development of that era, the COVID babies literally got worse. Right. And they didn't get to go to like playgroups and so on and so forth. Right? So language rich environment is very important. So if you're a provider of language at home, meaning you're talking to your child and communicating with your child, it's very important to know how to do it. And we have multiple videos talking about this. I'm not going to repeat myself here. And also we have a bunch of free courses that you can grab@www.agentsofspeech.com course so that you can learn how to be a language rich parent over there. Especially in the word combiners course where we talk about language facilitation. Okay, so that's all for this video. It's better not to wait and see, is try to spring you into action, do something about it, see some results, and then it will give you the confidence to keep on teaching. And that's how your trouble will catch up. All right?