Why Speech Therapy isn’t Working for Your Child And What to Do

Is speech therapy not working for a child? Are you stagnant and you're thinking about whether speech therapy is for your child or not, or do you need other services? So let's troubleshoot in this video and think about what to do. Okay? So the first thing is their home practice. Does your speech therapist give you stuff to do at home? All right. A lot of times when I worked in the clinic, we give out worksheets and we teach parents what goals we're currently doing and tell them what. What to do at home. Which brings me quickly to the second point. Are you getting skills transferred? So a lot of times when parents see us work, it looks as if it's easy. It looks like a child is having fun. They're playing, they're getting what they want, they're talking a lot more than at home. But when you try it, it doesn't work. So a lot of times when I used to work in a clinic, what happens is that when I'm doing an activity, I'm like, okay, mom, your turn now. And I sit her down and she does it. And then nine times out of 10, the mom's going to say, oh, my God, I didn't know it would be so hard. How do you even do it so. Because it's easy to watch and it's hard to do most of the time. And when you're paying a speech therapist working, you're paying for the years of experience, Right. And that is if you get to actually sit in the clinic room. So that's something you want to look at if you can sit in the clinic room or not. Okay. And when we're doing skills transfer, very important that the therapist demonstrates. Right. Gives you prompts. Right. Teaches you why we're doing it, the rationale behind it, how to do it better, give feedback, and then maintain a good relationship with you and not trying to piss you off, make you feel encouraged and that you can do it. And just give one goal that you're supposed to do at home, which is the same, which is the home practice. Okay. And then the third thing is your child's age and therapy approach. So yesterday I talked to a parent who had a child of 16 months old, and she was asking, oh, should I let my child go to speech therapy? Is it going to be effective? How's it going to look like? So you have to think about the child's age. If your child is below two, it's going to be nearly impossible to get them to sit on a chair or sit on a carpet, whatever. For extended period of time, children who are below 2 years of age, they're gonna have attention span of a goldfish. Right. The most you can get is one to two minutes of active working. Right. A lot of other times are just like crawling around, being led by the child. You're trying to get their attention through play, being funny, turn on Disney Channel, like literally you're the Disney Channel. You're going. And you have to see what therapy approach you're doing. So if your child is below two or even below two and a half, a lot of times what's going to happen, especially in western countries nowadays, what's happening inside of therapy is that it's very child led, it's very naturalistic. These are all great, but there's no structured component. Right. There's no clear goals about what kind of language outcomes we're looking at. So you have to take a look at what therapy approach it is. So in the last video, the last week's video, I talk about a little bit about what speech versus language looks like. So if speech therapy isn't working for you right now, probably you have to see what the goals are. If your child is doing speech goals, there's literal articulation errors, meaning they might change some sounds or delete some sounds in the word. Like a very good example would be if they say Sam, it becomes am, deletes the S or S becomes a T, we call it stopping, it becomes tam instead of sam. Right. If that's the case and you're doing a lot of play therapy and a lot of childless stuff, that's not going to hit it. Because the goal was to get your child to speak clearer and not to get them to use language more, to give them proper language input or whatever. That's something you have to look into. Is the therapy approach appropriate for child current deficits, so to speak? Okay. And then the next thing is therapy interval. Right. So if you're going to a speech therapy every, every fortnight, bi weekly, two weeks, Right. How is that going to impact your child's language development? Especially if there are no skills transferred to you? Right. So you have to remember that if you're doing it every week, which is the norm inside the whole world. I only think this is the case because of how scarce the services actually are. Affordability of speech therapy. Because one session could be 100 to 150 USD, depending where you're, you are in the world. From where I'm from, Hong Kong, nowadays one session is 200 USD. Inflation is crazy. So then Also, all these things affect the intervals that a parent can bring a child to speech therapy. Because not everyone's going to be able to shill out 200 USD every week. A month is going to be 800, right? So I'm going to rant a little bit about the therapy industry and then you can make up your mind about what to do. The most important thing when you're going to speech therapy is to extract as much knowledge out of the speech therapist. Because you might think this is a done for you service is actually isn't. Because a lot of times what happens is that the kid comes to the clinic, they can talk a lot, they can speak, they're having fun, go home, it's the same story again. They don't talk, they pull your hand, they get mad, they hit you, bite you. In some cases that happens, right? So it's actually done with you. What you need to do is to take as much knowledge from your therapist, because the value of the therapist is to find the cues, prompts, activities, ways of communication that works for a child, right? And then all you got to do is to copy and paste that at home and keep the therapy going. Because if you're using the same result, same methods at home, you'll have the same results. The reason why you get different results inside of the clinic room is because there are therapy techniques that are different from how it's done at home. Okay? So you have to make sure when you're spending that money, you need to take as much notes, as much knowledge from that person. Copy and paste that. Make sure you get your skills transferred or else you're not getting your money's worth. Okay? I always tell parents this when, when they used to come to the clinic. I'm like, I'm not here. This is not extra curricular activity, right? You're not going to drop your child down and walk out the door. In fact, if you do that, I'd rather you don't come. And I can only say that because of the huge wait list, right? If I needed money, I worked in the, in a private clinic. If I needed money and I've needed the clients, I wouldn't have done that. I would actually feels better just having the child and I obviously, because I can close the door and no one knows what I'm doing, right? As a parent, to get your money's worth, you have to get in the door and learn more. Okay? And the reality of therapy, why it's not working is this. If you look at me, I'm not going to be like when you search for this video, most probably when it popped onto your YouTube feed, you were most likely expecting a white lady dressed nicely, has a kid and and so on. I'd be the least of what you expected, right? That's what I'm trying to say. So a lot of times what happens in the therapy industry is that because 90 something percent of us are women and they're really passionate, loving, caring and stuff. So what happens is that they get into their careers around like 30, 40, they get married, they have kids, they turn into part time and this cycle happens over and over. That's why we have a shortage in therapy. That's because when we get out of university, get out of college, when we get our licenses and whatnot, we're not actually that useful. It takes us a few months to get into the working. No one gets us ready to see seven clients a day. And back in the university or whatever, we do have placements, we do have stuff to do practically. But then this is never about the volume, never will never experience the same volume as working. It's just a lot of work. And therefore the turnover rate is high in therapy world, right? So that's why there's a shortage. Of course not everyone's going to are graduating from speech therapy or ABA therapy or whatever therapy there are. But then the nature of how things are like majority women, majority of them love kids so they will want to have kids, they turn into part time, later on they go into non frontline things like teaching, supervising, whatever those are essential, right? Even myself, I'm not frontline anymore, right? So it's just how it works. And because people like us, the therapists, we need a master's degree in most places, some places just a bachelor's, maybe a nausea. In the UK you just need a bachelor's. But those are also four year to five year programs. We're highly qualified doing a one to one thing with children. So then the price of it is going to be high. And then when government, like where I'm from in Hong Kong now there are less jobs for therapists because the government isn't giving a lot of funding to us because we're not life and death things, right? There are more things to fund than child development, so to speak, even though it's quite important. So when this happens, people go to private settings and private settings, the pricing is so high, sometimes we can only see a child bi weekly and that's not going to work a lot of times. And that's why we're teaching parents what to do. Right? And that's why there's Agents of Speech, this channel. We have a great community of parents like yourself. Just go to agents of Speech.com course. There's 15,000 parents inside of that community. We have courses all for free for you to learn. Then you don't have to spend that money. Go there and try to extract the knowledge from a therapist there. Okay? So that's all for this video. Thank you for listening to me rant about why I think it's broken, why it isn't working for your child. And this is what you should do. You should start home therapy. You need to do it anyways, right? And if you're doing it anyways, it's best that you educate yourself on how to do it. It doesn't need to be for me. Doesn't need to be from Agents of Speech. Just go do something. And we always say in therapy, it's a dynamic assessment. You don't do an assessment. And then we're like, okay, this is how it's going to be for your child in the next six months or whatever. We do think to see how receptive child is to those therapy techniques and then reiterate. It's called dynamic assessment. We keep on doing it and we keep on thinking about, oh, how can we change this? And that is it that they like this more. That's why it's not a cookie cutter a lot of the times, but the concepts are are a cookie cutter. If you learn the concepts, you'll be able to use it flexibly. Okay, that's all for this video. Thank you for sticking with me for so long. If you want to this, please watch this video next. All right. See.