Why Your Speech Delayed Child is Not Special

Hello, this is Ming from agensofspeech.com today I'm going to talk about why your child, your speech delayed child is not that special. And this video is going to be a small rant for me. And this, the reason for this is because there's a lot of parents who email me and comment in the videos and stuff, DM me and whatnot. They would say that, oh, you know, like the stuff you say is great, but my child, I want to talk about my child because every child is different. You are right, every child is different. But at the same time there are like, children can go into buckets and it's the same as everything. And I want to challenge you to think about your own profession. All right? When you are working in your profession, when someone, a customer or, I don't know, someone asks you a question, you just know that it's that kind of a customer or a person or something that you're dealing with, right? And whatever that is, the solution in the beginning is fairly similar. When you go into those buckets. And that's the reason why we have diagnosis. We're literally putting children into big buckets. Obviously inside there's individual differences, but we're putting them into buckets. So that's easy to handle. To think we put our headspace into that bucket and we can go from there. And I challenge you, just think about it because I did a bunch of consultations with parents before and maybe I'm going to open up consultations again, but who knows? One of the parents who was a business consultant, she works in the I bank and she was like, oh, I was a little offended when you said that. But then the more I thought about it when you were doing the consultation is as if you knew what I was going to ask next. And the reason is because I've done like 400 something consultations, man online. You're not talking about the ones offline. It would account to maybe thousands. And those parents, when they talk at, you know, makes it just, you know, like I know what kind of child you're talking about and I can describe it right away better than you can. And because I've done it many times now and, and she was saying like how I was very methodical and then going into like, it was like talking to an AI, right? And she was like, oh, I just kept on asking questions until I got to a point where I could describe, oh, is it like this? Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Is it like this? Is it that your child is like pulling your hand and doing whatever and doing this and doing that. When, when this happens, it's like, yeah, how do you know? Well, yeah, because your, your child is like that. And it's very easy for parents to think, oh, my child's a special snowflake. Everyone's is, is different. But you have to remember we don't have to take action and, and provide intervention when we have perfect knowledge about how the person is. Like, we can go ahead already when we have a general direction about what to do. So what, what you're doing, actually asking, is that you want a plan that is custom made for your child from top to bottom. And what you would be realizing is that if you go out to therapy centers, if you go to kindergartens, a lot of times the IEPs are copy and pasted goals, right? And it doesn't mean that it's like 100% dissimilar. It's just because now if a child needs that, I will put these three goals in, right? It's like giving you medicine, right? Oh, you have a cough, you have a fever. I'm going to give you these as the same as doing an IEP or doing like a speech therapy goal stuff. Oh, if you're like, you have these things, I'm going to put in these goals. And obviously when you look at the whole thing is going to be like customized and individualized, then the goals are not that different. Are not different as the same. When you go into this and you look at it, you think about is, what type of bucket is my child in? What can I teach at this point? What are the goals that are gonna cover all bases for this type of case right now? And I need you to take a step back as a parent and think, oh, my child is actually not that special. And that should actually give you some sort of a relief because someone must have done something similar to some child on this planet. And thankfully, because of this Internet era, I am in Asia. You might be watching in the USA and Britain, in Malaysia and Singapore. I don't know where, where you are. We have parents, clients that we coach all over the world. Just the other day I was speaking to a mom from Dubai. The thing about it is there must be someone across. When we know this, across culture, across geographic locations, these things, there's a pattern to, to how children behave when they cannot talk very well. So you don't need to know exactly, oh, they will do this. When X happens, they will do Y. It's going to be a variation of Y. It's like you get my. When they do something, it's going to be a variation of these things. It's going to be easy for you to guess for me to guess, for any speech therapist to guess, as long as they've had some sort of experience with children. So once we can guess, our goal is going to be big. We try it. And then when you try it, what you need to do is to look in, into how you are doing it, how the child is performing, and then make the small tweaks there. Because if we just go in and say, oh, look, I need this goal to be perfect, that's never going to be the case, right? I need the intervention plan to be so tailored to my child. That's also not going to be a thing. Because intervention assessment, believe it or not, comes in a dynamic format. We keep on changing our hypothesis, our thoughts. Children change as well. They change from person to person. Like if the instructor changes, the behavior changes and the behavior changes, the goal has to change. And the goals at home are going to be different from the ones in the clinic. Okay? So what I need you to know is that your child is not that special. Even if your child has a rare disease or a genetic disorder, the communication profile is going to be similar to someone on the planet. It's going to be similar, right? And you see this on our community, someone says, oh, my child likes to do this. And then like a bunch of parents answer, yeah, me too. This was what happened. Whatever, whatever. And then when they try things, even for like the toilet training workshop that we have in, in our community, the link to join is, is below. The thing is, there will be a buckets of responses that will happen. That's why in our brains and the therapist brains, we can say, oh, when this happens, you can try this. When this happens, you can try this prompt, this cue, right? So on and so forth. Try to look out for these, right? Because we already know that these bucket of events will happen given your child's profile. Okay? So don't take it the wrong way when we respond that we don't do the consultations anymore. And we wish that you go through the free courses first. And it doesn't need to be for mats. By the way, you can go ahead and read the books from the Hannon center, which is a great read. You can go ahead and learn from other speech therapists on Internet. They're also saying similar things in a different way. You don't have to listen to me, all right? I'm just saying that, remember, there are millions of children, actually billions of children out there. Billions, I guess. And there will be similarities. Okay? There will be people who have done the same thing as you. There will be. When you do things right, when things happen, you're not going to be alone because it will have happened before, you know, it would have been hap. It would have been something that someone has dealt with before. And you just need to find that person and ask. We might not always have the answers, but, you know, given how on the Internet you can at least know what worked before. Okay, so that's all for today's video. I just small rant just to let you know how I feel about this, because a lot of parents are like, my child's different. My child's like, it can't be like this. Well, it's not that special, my friend. This is that. That's how it is. If your child is truly special, then that's actually a bad thing because then we will have to start guessing from the beginning again and trial and error and stuff. So that's all for today's video. If you haven't, go to agentsofspeech.com course this is where our community lives with a bunch of free courses that we have to teach your child to go from no words all the way up to sentence level and up. Okay, that's all for today. See you in the next one. Bye.