Online speech therapy and parent coaching for families in Australia

Keep talking to your child, and make it deliberate. While you wait for an appointment in Australia, the most useful thing a parent can do is build language into ordinary moments: narrate what you are doing, pause and genuinely wait for a response, and repeat the same handful of words many times a day. Nothing here needs a diagnosis first.

Things that help almost every waiting family, whatever the eventual diagnosis turns out to be:

• Get hearing checked early. Repeated ear infections and glue ear are common in small children and quietly flatten speech. Ask your GP rather than assuming.
• Cut the questions, add the comments. “You found the red car” invites more language than “what colour is it?”
• Wait longer than feels comfortable. Count silently to five after you speak. Many children answer at second six.
• Pick ten words worth having — more, open, help, milk, up, finished — and use them dozens of times a day in real situations.
• Write down what you notice, with dates. It makes the eventual assessment appointment far more useful.

Our everyday ways to encourage talking sets these out step by step, and what early intervention actually means explains why the months before therapy starts still count. On a call we watch your child play through the camera and coach you in the moment.

No. Speaking Urdu at home does not cause a speech delay and does not make one worse. A bilingual child’s vocabulary is counted across both languages together: if your child has ten words in Urdu and six in English, that is sixteen words, not six. Mixing both languages inside one sentence is normal and is not a sign of confusion.

This matters in Australia because the advice often runs the other way: switch to English only so the child copes at school. When a family drops the language it is most fluent in, the child usually hears less rich language, not more — and the grandparents on video call from Pakistan fall out of the conversation altogether. Speak whichever language you are most natural in, and speak plenty of it.

So when we count words with an Australian family, we count both languages, and we listen for what any assessment listens for: does your child understand more than they can say, do they point and show you things, do they take turns. Our guide to raising a child in a bilingual home covers what is genuinely typical and what is not.

The first consultation is free, and it is a conversation rather than a test. We ask what worries you, what your child does on an ordinary Tuesday, and what a GP, nurse or preschool has already said. We watch your child play through the camera. You leave with a plain answer about whether this looks like the calendar or something to work on — and if we think it is nothing, we say so.

What changes first is usually not speech. It is requesting: a child who used to scream at the fridge starts pointing at it, tugging your hand, or handing you a picture. Parents often notice fewer meltdowns before they notice new words, because a child with a way to ask has less to be furious about. Words tend to follow, and clearer words later still.

The clock is friendly here. Sydney and Melbourne run roughly five hours ahead of Multan — about six during daylight saving — and Perth about three, so a mid-morning call after school drop-off is still a normal working morning for us. Your child gets seen at a good hour, not a tired evening one.

Do not wait for the next review if your child loses words or skills they already had, stops responding to their name, has no words at all by around 18 months, has no two-word joins such as “more milk” by around two, or if you have any doubt about their hearing. Take those to your GP or child and family health nurse now, and say plainly that you want them looked at.

Online parent coaching has real limits, and we would rather name them than sell around them. We cannot examine your child, test hearing or diagnose, and nothing we do decides NDIS eligibility. If something on a call needs hands-on assessment — possible hearing loss, feeding or swallowing difficulty, seizures, or a sudden loss of skills — we will tell you to stop and get it seen locally, and help you word the request.

If your family moves on, as many do, the coaching moves with you: we work the same way with families in the United Arab Emirates, Qatar and India, and we keep going straight through a long visit to Pakistan. When you are ready, message us on WhatsApp at +92 314 6040262 or get in touch here — your child’s age and what worries you is enough to start.