The Real Reason Speech Therapy Isn’t Working for Your Child And How to Fix It
You’ve been taking your child to speech therapy for months, maybe even years. You’re investing time, money, and emotional energy into these sessions. Your therapist seems knowledgeable, your child seems engaged during appointments, but when you step back and look at the bigger picture, something feels off. The progress is painfully slow. Or worse, you can barely see any change!
Here’s the plain truth most people tiptoe around: the magic of speech therapy does not live inside your one-hour session. Progress happens in your kitchen, your car, your bath time routine… after the therapist leaves and real life begins. If there’s no home practice, there’s no lasting change. You don’t need more hype. You need a plan that you can run at home without a meltdown, a medical degree, or five spare hours a day.
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This isn’t about blaming you. It’s about empowering you with a truth that can transform your child’s communication journey: You are not just a bystander in your child’s speech therapy. You are the most important player.
Why Speech Therapy Sessions Alone Won’t Give You Results
I understand you are paying a lot of money for this therapy. I understand that you also have a life. I understand all of this. But please for the sake of your child and also for the money you are investing, let us see reasons why you need to do more.
The 1-Hour Problem
Let’s do some simple math. If your child sees a speech therapist three times a week for an hour, that’s 156 hours of therapy per year. Sounds huge, right?
Now consider this: There are 8,760 hours in a year. Your child is awake for roughly 5,840 of those hours. That therapy session represents less than 1% of your child’s waking life. They spend more than 5,000 hours without the therapist.
See, speech therapy is not a magic pill. It’s a teaching moment (a highly specialized, expertly guided teaching moment) but it’s still just a beginning. The speech therapist’s role is to assess, diagnose, create strategies, and model techniques. Your role is to bring those techniques into the 99% of life that happens outside the therapy room.
The Science Behind Practice and Neuroplasticity
Children’s brains are remarkably plastic, meaning it is like rubber and can expand and form new neural pathways through repeated practice. But when it is not consistent or frequent the pathways can die off.
When your child practices a speech sound or language skill once a week in therapy, the neural pathway begins to form. But without daily reinforcement at home, that pathway weakens. It’s like trying to create a walking trail through a forest by walking it once a week. The grass grows back before you can make a lasting path.
Research in speech-language pathology consistently shows that children who receive therapy combined with home practice progress 2-3 times faster than those who rely on therapy sessions alone. This isn’t a small difference—it’s the difference between your child catching up to their peers in 6 months versus 18 months.
The “But” Syndrome: Why Parents Resist (And What It’s Really Costing You)
Your speech therapist gives you homework. They suggest reducing sugar, limiting screen time, or practicing specific sounds for 10 minutes daily. And you respond with “but.”
“But I don’t have time.”
“But my child won’t cooperate at home.”
“But I’m not trained, what if I do it wrong?”
“But we’re already so busy with school and activities.”
These objections are understandable. Parenting is exhausting, and adding one more thing to your plate feels overwhelming. But let’s talk about what’s really at stake here.
The Financial Cost
Speech therapy isn’t cheap. For example, premium in-home speech therapy with Caston Vienna Tutors can cost between N30,000 – N70,000 per session. You could be spending N4.6m – N10.9m per year on therapy that you will not allow to show because you don’t practice at home.
Without home practice, you’re essentially paying for your child to learn something new each week and then forget most of it before the next session. You’re not investing in therapy, you’re renting temporary progress that disappears when the therapist leaves.
The Developmental Cost
Every month of delayed progress is a month your child falls further behind their peers in communication skills. This gap affects their:
Social development: Difficulty making friends and navigating social situations
Academic performance: Reading, writing, and classroom participation all depend on strong language skills
Self-esteem: Children who struggle to communicate often feel frustrated, misunderstood, and isolated
Behavior: Communication difficulties are a leading cause of tantrums and behavioral issues in young children
The window for easiest intervention is during the early childhood years when the brain is most plastic. Delaying effective intervention by avoiding home practice means missing this optimal window.
The Emotional Cost
There’s a hidden emotional toll when parents don’t follow through on therapist recommendations. You feel guilty for spending money without seeing results. You feel frustrated with your child for “not progressing.” You might even feel angry at the therapist for “not doing their job.”
But deep down, there’s often a nagging awareness that you could be doing more. And that awareness, left unaddressed, turns into resentment and stress.
Why Your Therapist’s Recommendations Matter
Let’s talk about some of the recommendations we give parents.
Reducing Sugar: The Inflammation Connection
When your speech therapist recommends limiting sugar, they’re not being a wellness fanatic. Excessive sugar consumption can increase inflammation, which may affect focus, attention, and even oral motor control. Too much sugar can also affect your child’s gut health, which may in turn, affect their ability to process things, like speech and language. Children who are calmer, more focused, and less hyperactive are more capable of concentrating on the difficult work of learning new speech patterns.
Creating a Screen-Free Environment: The Language Exposure Gap
Screens are passive. Your child might hear language from a tablet, but they’re not engaging in the back-and-forth exchanges that build communication skills. Children learn language through interaction, not observation.
Every hour spent on screens is an hour not spent in conversation with you. An hour of missed opportunities to practice sounds, build vocabulary, and develop pragmatic language skills.
Research shows that children under age 3 who have much screen time limits show significantly delayed language development. For children already struggling with speech, excessive screen time is gasoline on a fire.
The Practice Activities: Muscle Memory
Speech sounds require precise motor movements of the tongue, lips, and jaw. Like learning to play piano or shoot a basketball, these movements need to become automatic through repetition.
When your therapist gives you specific exercises, they’re not busywork. They’re carefully designed drills that target your child’s specific challenges. Practicing them daily—even for just 10 minutes—creates the muscle memory and automaticity your child needs to use these sounds in natural conversation.
How to Actually Make Home Practice Work (Without Losing Your Mind)
The good news? You don’t need to become a speech therapist. You just need to become a consistent practice partner. Here’s how:
Integrate Practice Into Daily Routines
Don’t set aside a formal “practice time” that feels like homework. Instead, weave speech practice into activities you’re already doing:
- During meals: Target vocabulary words for food items or practice specific sounds
- In the car: Play word games or sing songs that emphasize target sounds
- During bath time: Use foam letters or toys to make practice playful
- At bedtime: Practice words in bedtime stories
The goal is to make practice feel invisible like it is just a part of your natural interaction.
Start Embarrassingly Small
If your therapist recommends 15 minutes of practice daily and that feels overwhelming, start with 3 minutes. Seriously. Three minutes of consistent daily practice beats 15 minutes done sporadically. Build the habit first, then extend the duration. Success breeds motivation.
Make It Fun (Or Your Child Won’t Cooperate)
Children don’t practice what feels like work. They practice what feels like play. Transform exercises into games:
Use stickers or small rewards for completed practice
Let your child “teach” a stuffed animal their new sounds
Create silly voices or characters that use the target sounds
Turn practice into a competition: “How many times can we say this sound before the timer goes off?”
Document Progress (For Motivation and Accountability)
Keep a simple log—digital or paper—of what you practiced and for how long. Take weekly video recordings of your child speaking.
Why? Because progress in speech therapy is often slow enough that you won’t notice day-to-day changes. But when you compare a video from this month to one from two months ago, you’ll see undeniable progress. That visual proof is powerful motivation to keep practicing.
Communicate Openly With Your Therapist
If an activity isn’t working at home, tell your therapist. They can modify it or suggest alternatives. Your therapist is your partner, not your judge.
If you’re struggling with compliance—from yourself or your child—that’s valuable information that can help your therapist tailor their approach.
What Happens When You Commit to Home Practice
Let me share what I’ve seen in my years as a speech therapist:
I have worked with two different families at one time where we made huge progress with one child and we slowed down with the other, even though we started at the same time.
Family A were always available for their child’s therapy sessions. They never miss a day. But they never practiced at home. After one year, their child still couldn’t make full sentences. The parents were frustrated and they stopped working with us. We tried to let them see that they needed to practice at home, but they couldn’t. Both parents are full timers. Once the nanny picks the child from school, the child will be by herself almost throughout. There are days when we had to go to the child’s grandmother’s house for the speech therapy because the parents are not around and they had to leave their child with their own parent. They basically did not have time for their child.
Family B had the same diagnosis and started therapy at the same time. They practiced for 10 minutes daily, sometimes messily, sometimes inconsistently, but they showed up. We know that the mom had to change her work schedule, and God, they are all hands on deck with discipline for this boy. I kid you not, after one year, their child had met most therapy goals and was nearly caught up to his peers.
The difference wasn’t the therapist. It wasn’t the severity of the speech delay. It was the practice.
Children who practice at home:
- Achieve goals 2-3 times faster
- Generalize skills to real-life situations more effectively
- Build confidence and motivation
- Often need fewer total therapy sessions (saving money long-term)
- Experience less frustration and behavioral issues
The Bottom Line: Stop Wasting Money, Start Seeing Results
Speech therapy is an investment, but only if you complete the equation. The therapist provides the “what” and the “how.” You provide the “when” and the “how often.”
Without home practice, you’re not investing in therapy. You’re paying rent on a service that can’t deliver its full value.
Your child’s speech therapist isn’t withholding a magic solution. They’ve already given it to you: consistent, daily practice of the skills learned in therapy, combined with lifestyle adjustments that support communication development.
The real question isn’t whether home practice matters. The question is: Are you ready to stop making excuses and start seeing the progress you’ve been paying for?
Your Next Steps
If you’re ready to finally see the progress your child deserves:
- Schedule 10 minutes daily for speech practice. Put it in your calendar like any other important appointment.
- Implement one therapist recommendation you’ve been resisting. Just one. Start with the easiest.
- Ask your therapist for 3 simple activities you can do at home this week. Write them down and commit to trying them.
- Join a parent support group for families navigating speech therapy. Accountability and shared experiences make consistency easier.
- Track your progress. Take a video of your child speaking today. Set a reminder to review it in 30 days after consistent practice.
Your child can make incredible progress, but only if you show up as their practice partner. The therapist opens the door. You walk through it together.
Are you ready to stop saying “but” and start saying “yes”?
