Speech therapy, worth while? *See special circumstances

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May I suggest you contact some other parents in the same country/area?
I do live in a country where public services for ASD are inconsistent, but was able to find private professionals who are doing their job and they are not extremely expensive too (they have an ethic side and avoid becoming cash machines on the shoulders of parents).

But do contact February, maybe she can have contacts with other colleagues in the area you are living.

I would avoid the speech therapist you met, suggestion that I see is pretty much shared by anyone who has read the post.

Your son at 4 sounds very similar to my son at almost 4. He will turn 5 at the end of October. The only real difference is he would occasionally use words maybe 6 words in a day, on a good day, but never to get his needs met. Our guy didn?t speak in his sleep but we would catch him in his room practicing quietly. We are in the US and have insurance that has a robust autism program and our school district has a good autism program as well. I say this because both the speech specialist who had a focus on kids with autism and the school district both told me separately speech should wait until he was starting to speak and that his time would be better served with ABA and shared attention. They both separately gave me the similar instructions about reading to him, speaking in two word sentences at eye level and narrating everything, all of which I was already doing. He is now talking which I credit to a mix of him being ready, being around other kids in the language rich HFA preschool and ABA really focusing on shared attention and rewarding his verbalizations in a really focused way(I feel that it made it click that was what we wanted from him).

Minus the preschool, you could do all these things yourself and for free. I don?t know your son and am not a expert, so I can?t say for sure, but I do trust and agree with the assessments made from my son. Save speech therapy for when he starts to speak. My own experience as well as plenty of studies makes me a believer of early intervention, but I have learned from this forum that a bad therapist is worse than no therapist. Also a dedicated and educated parent with a lot of discipline and patience can become a great therapist.

Once my guy started to speak we started with speech both in school and private once a week and it really has helped. I think it is valuable, but not if they aren?t ready for it. We didn?t use PECs but others have had real success with PECs starting kids to speak. It is worth a try and you can download them free from the internet with some searching.

What Setai said.

You could, in theory, do everything yourself, but I wonder about the impact that would make on your own mental health and well-being, and if it's worth it to stay in a place without the right kind of help to the detriment of your family life. Some people can do it, but I think it would be hard for many to take the place of teachers and therapists day in, day out. Autism programs can help children so much, and well-trained teachers remove the emotional component that a parent naturally has. They are not doing the projecting into the future and the what-ifs that most parents do.

I am not specially trained to work with young kids with autism, and an ethical therapist won't offer anything that they aren't trained to do. The ideal situation would be the situation that Setai outlined. However, an accurate diagnosis is still the most important next step.

The most highly regarded speech therapist in my big city told me that she and they in general don't really know what to do to get autistic children to speak, esp. non-verbal instead of verbal who just need work on pragmatic speech. She said they throw s**t at the wall and see what sticks, if anything.

I don't wonder about the impact...I live it every day. I'd say, if you have a choice to find someone or a program to that would benefit your son do it. If there's no choice, then yeah, your own mental health and well-being and that of the family is heavily impacted. Some of us don't have a choice, whether we think we can do it or not. I was under the impression that the OP was in circumstances where the choice was either nothing (nothing meaning do it all him/herself) or utter crap services.

I am an early childhood special education teacher in the US. I have had lots of success in teaching children to communicate using IPad app Proloquo2go ($219). It is an expensive app, but it is well worth it. It is like a picture dictionary. A child points to a picture of a desired object in order to communicate. For example if a child wants an apple they point to a picture of an apple. The Ipad says "apple". I have the children verbally try to imitate the words. Using the app a child can even make requests (in ABA talk that is called Mands) using sentences. For example, "They could say, "I want more juice." The app is great because it combines pictures and words (it's in English - they are supposed to expand to Spanish). Children's behave improves once they learn to communicate. I have also taught children to communicate using paper pictures. With Mayer Johnson Board Maker program for the computer (it also is expensive) you can print out pictures on the computer (available in many language) and a child can use the pictures to communicate. The downside is soon you will end up with a very large amount of paper pictures. I usually laminate the pictures and organize them into a notebook using Velco (the notebook has different sections - food, colors, toys). It is called PECS (Picture Exchange Communication System). the In the US special education evaluations and services are free starting from birth. In NY you can call 311 and they will connect you to the right people. I recommend looking up Proloqu2go on the internet and get started in teaching your child to communicate (no expensive speech services needed). Of course if free speech services are available they should be used.

Thanks guys, I was leaning toward it was sounding like a bad deal but my wife was kinda for it.

To clarify she had heard of autism, but she asked if that meant he was mentally disturbed, which sounds like she knows little of it.

There is also a stupid local cultural thing with talking down to children and treating them badly, this nonsense caused me to have a meltdown and storm out of a place with my son while my wife started crying and saying I always do this. At that point I took greater control and told her I would not allow him to be tortured like that again.(it was a uneeded routine blood test, and the phlebotomist kept insisting on doing things HER way. I said look I will hold his arm and you can quickly draw it, NO she insisted on him sitting by himself. FINE, well after about five seconds of a meltdown screaming arms and legs flailing child she asked me to hold him in my lap, but still insisted on holding his arm! She also insisted on having a cart full of blood samples within kicking range of him even though I asked her to move it, he almost knocked it down multiple times. I sat there holding him for close to ten minutes while she held his hand and kept getting the needle close and then pulling back, this whole time my social mask is slipping from my kid in terror and watching her cart, eventually I screamed enough we are through here this is torture if you had done it my way you'd have the damn sample. My wife gets mad at me and then I pound a desk and walk out with my son to let both of us cool down with some ice cream around the corner. She told my wife it is because I'm white

Local people just insist autism is brattiness, and then when they cause a disaster because they don't listen to me they throw up their hands, it just repeats again and again.

EDIT:I think the price issue with the scant services is that they cater to foreign worker's children whose employer is paying for the visits, so price is not an issue for those parents. Housing for foreign workers is also astronomical for the same reason, their employer is paying it. I'm not employed by a foreign company.

I am assuming based on what you said that your wife is from the country that you are in, and that she will not want to leave? Is the whole country like this or just the area you are in? (Not the prices, but I mean the culture) Sometimes different areas of a place are more open to less old fashioned ways of thinking.

I don't know that I would want to raise a child in a place where no one gets it and everyone assumes it is brattiness. He might internalize these feelings.

While I agree with you, let's not forget that most of us who are over a certain age were raised that way - AS didn't exist as a diagnosis until the 1990s, and Asperger's 1944 paper wasn't widely circulated until the 1980s. Not saying it didn't suck; I certainly wouldn't go back and live through it again - but at least this child has ONE person who gets it, and who has access to resources, and who can counteract the self-doubt so many of us had to live with.

One person makes a big difference.

You are right about how many of us were raised, but I think being completely isolated from anyone with a clue is a big problem. I live in a part of the U.S where by and large the general public has a cynical/ignorant outlook on autism. Even here, when medical professionals see my son is not dealing well with something, like a blood draw, at least they know to back-off. One person may make a difference, but is it is not enough, IMO. As bad a time as we have had, I can't imagine if I couldn't even take my son to a doctor, where my child and I were treated that way. School would have been unmanageable immediately, as opposed to me being able to get my child through 4 years of it.

In addition, it is demoralizing to the parents and it makes it harder to do what your child needs you to do when everybody tells you to do the wrong things.