Treatment may last a few weeks, a few months, or a few years. If you have speech problems, the best advice is to practice, practice. Find time to work on the skills that the therapist has taught you. Many children who need speech therapy have an articulation or phonological processing disorder.
The typical time to correct a difference in speech is 15 to 20 hours (Jacoby et al, 200), and the typical frequency for joint treatment is twice a week for 30-minute sessions (ASHA 200). Based on this information, it could be assumed that if the disorder were mild to moderate, if the child attended treatment consistently and families did their homework between sessions, the total duration of treatment could be about four to five months. The actual treatment time will also depend on the number of sound errors that are being addressed in the treatment plan. The more sounds that are wrong, the longer the treatment lasts.
It will usually take at least a couple of weeks for the SLP to establish a working relationship with your child and develop a routine. After that time, the therapist should inform you of the high-priority objectives and give you instructions on how you can help and reinforce the progress achieved in the sessions. This estimate relates only to speech clarity and does not apply to improvements in expressive language or fluency. This question could be one of the most important questions you ask when you take your child to start receiving online speech therapy.
Another factor to consider is whether the objective is to eliminate the speech deficit or achieve a significant improvement without achieving absolute elimination. I'm not familiar with the Speedy Speech program, but if we take a quick look at the website, it seems to follow the same premise. For example, a speech and language deficit can also justify learning, neuropsychological development, and behavioral evaluations. The answer to these particular questions will allow you to better understand the speech therapy process that you are subjecting your child to.
I started using the 5-minute program for children, but recently I bought Speedy Speech and I think it's much better because of the way the words are grouped into groups of almost minimal triplets. A 2002 study concluded that significant advances in speech clarity require approximately 14 hours of therapy, on average. However, you should still research the specific therapist you've chosen, especially if your child has a more serious problem. I think the way these therapists did it was to go to the classroom and take the child who was right outside, to the hallway, do the therapy quickly and send him back to class.
The better you understand the factors mentioned above, the better you can manage your expectations about the duration of your child's speech teletherapy. When working with a language processing problem, one therapist can teach strategies to improve the problem, while another focuses on finding a cure. I just spoke with the owners of “Speedy Speech”, which is another program for shorter individual speaking sessions. First, you should be clear about your child's main speech or language problem.
When choosing an SLP, rest assured that as long as the therapist is certified by ASHA (the American Speech, Language and Hearing Association) and licensed in your state, the doctor is competent.
