Concerned About a 4 Year Old Speech Delay? Start Here

Today I’m talking to Kate, who is the mom of four-year-old Dylan as well as a younger son. We are talking about Kate’s journey with finding my book, my courses, and even high-touch coaching. Dylan has made remarkable strides in the past year, going from not answering questions to being fully conversational, potty trained, and having very little problem behavior. Kate is great at sharing her success and has some highlights that she’s willing and able to share, so it’s a really great episode if you want to take a listen. Let’s get to it.

Mary: Hi Kate, thanks so much for joining us all the way from the other part of the world, Australia.

Kate: Thank you. Pleasure. It’s good to be here. Thanks, Mary.

Mary: I love Australia. I’ve been there three times to present, and it’s been a while since I’ve been there, but we have a lot of participants from Australia and from other countries. We’re going to talk about your son Dylan, who’s four, four and a half right now, and you’ve been with our course and community for about a year now and you’ve had some really great success. Before we go over what Dylan is like now, let’s take you back a year before you found our course and community. What was Dylan like? What were your concerns? And what was your life looking like?

Kate: Yeah, sure. It would have been November, I think 2024, when I started to think his speech was probably a little bit delayed for where he should be at that age. He was three and a few months at that moment. Anyway, I engaged with a speech therapist and we had a couple of consultations, and she said, “Look, I’m seeing a few autism red flags and we would probably need to do weekly speech therapy.” That was the first, “Okay, great, we’ve got to get onto something here,” but obviously in Australia it’s quite expensive to do speech therapy, and one hour a week really wouldn’t cut it.

So I started to deep dive into the research, search, and work out what I needed to do. That’s where I came across your book, Mary, Turn Autism Around. I could not have got the book fast enough; I could not have read it fast enough. I loved the book. As I was reading it, I thought, “I need this. All these different strategies. We’ve got to get onto it now. It’s an emergency. This is the time.” I thought, “This is what I need to do.” Once I finished reading the book, I looked online and started Googling your name—“Who’s Mary, and what else can I do? How can I get more out of this?”—and then I found your course. At that point I enrolled, and again I just gobbled up all the information, did all the different lectures and webinars and what have you on there as fast as I could. The information was amazing. I started to implement all of it. I probably did a month or maybe six to eight weeks of the course on my own, and then it got to the point where I thought, “You know what, I’m needing some accountability, some support—just to be able to ask someone questions,” so I started looking for more.

Mary: When you joined the course about a year ago, in December of 2024—we just passed December of 2025 recently—Dylan was three and a half. What was his language and behavior like? What did a hard day look like?

Kate: He would say two to three words at most. He wouldn’t really answer any questions, to be honest. I was doing things completely differently. I would just read books to him without asking any questions in the stories, because he wasn’t that conversational. He didn’t chat much, so I just thought, “Okay, that’s where it’s at.” Then I remember one day I tried to ask him a question like, “What are you doing?” and there was just no response.

Mary: And you had another baby at that point.

Kate: Yeah. I’d recently given birth to Jordan. He was one at that point—taking me back. There’s a two-year gap between them. I think my focus, to be honest, was very much on Jordan after he was born and in those early days, and I thought, “Dylan’s doing okay.” But it wasn’t until I saw the difference between him and his cousin, who’s three months younger, that I realized something was off. His cousin was really developing with his language and talking a lot more, and I thought, “He’s not really talking much. He’s kind of doing his own thing.” That was a big moment. And then it wasn’t until the speech therapist said, “Look, I’m seeing signs of autism,” and so on, that it really hit. She recommended more. He, to this day, is not diagnosed with autism—no—so we haven’t gone down the route of any diagnosis at this point.

Mary: Back then, a year ago when he was three and a half, you’re saying he had some language but was definitely not conversational and not answering questions reliably. How was his behavior and self-care? Because another reason that people think autism is involved is for those two categories of issues.

Kate: Yeah. There would be meltdowns. I hadn’t toilet trained him at that point; I didn’t toilet train him until I started the course. So he got toilet trained at three and a half. In terms of self-care, there was no dressing. I hadn’t really thought about that area at all. He’s my first child, so I had no comparison. I felt like he was quite immature, just really behind, to be honest, in a lot of areas.

Mary: For listeners who’ve been following other podcasts and videos, you might know that I created the Barbera Early Childhood Assessment, which is actually based on page 49 of Turn Autism Around. It used to be a one-page “Turn Autism Around Assessment,” but in 2022 I paid a software company to develop software for it, so it’s now the BECA assessment. Just to give you some context, because I did review some of Dylan’s information, his first BECA assessment had scores in the 40% range for all three areas. So he did have deficits in language, in self-care—including potty training, grooming, dressing, and potentially feeding, I’m not sure for him—and also in problem behavior. He had all three areas of concern. As you can tell from Kate, she dove right in and was immersing herself in the book and then in the course. How was that time? How were you feeling as a parent back then?

Kate: Overwhelmed. Definitely stressed. Probably on edge. I remember seeing a massage therapist and she said, “Wow, your adrenals are just… it’s like you’re in fight or flight.” So there was a lot of stress, and I probably put that on myself too. I realized that I needed to do the work. I remember there was a study that you had in your course and I read the study about how many hours needed to go into these children to see really great progress. So I thought, “I’ve got to put 20 minimum hours in a week, however that looks in day-to-day life, into this kid.” It was a stressful time, but I also couldn’t wait to get started. That’s when I realized I needed support because I didn’t have anyone here in Australia to support me. It’s a lot more expensive to see speech therapists and behavior therapists and all that in Australia, and I didn’t know who to see. I thought, “Well, Mary’s book—I love it. I’ve started the online program and I think this is gold. This is what I need.” The way the lessons are structured, the suggestions are just so targeted. I thought, “This is it.” That’s when I started to dig deeper again and then I came across the high-touch coaching and thought, “That’s the support that I need.” I spoke to my partner and said, “Look, we need to do this,” and he was very supportive.

I remember my first call with Rachel and I just felt at ease. It was the first time that I thought, “Oh goodness, this is what I need.” I can’t recall her words exactly, but it was along the lines of, “We can keep you accountable, we can keep you on track and motivated.” It just hit me. I thought, “That’s what I need. I need that person that I can come back to regularly each month and ask questions, check in, explain what’s going on, but also keep me accountable and keep me moving forward with the program,” because it was quite overwhelming initially, having two young kids.

Mary: Even just with the course—because you’re such a go-getter and dove in—when did you start to think, “Wow, this is working. This is going to work”? At what point did you know? That was before you reached out for more intensive coaching, right?

Kate: Oh, I knew. We did the intraverbal subtest right in the beginning as well, and just everything from how to teach pronouns, how to teach prepositions, the book program, WH questions—how to teach them. I just sped through that first one, the toddler program, quickly and then I started using things. I got the shoebox thing, began that, and I knew it was brilliant because it gave me exactly what I needed to do. I hadn’t seen this being used in speech therapist consults. I just thought, “This is not really being done this way by the people I could find here.” More importantly, I realized I needed to do the work. I was the one with him 24/7, seven days a week. I thought, “I’ve got to do this.” For me, I understood what I needed to do; it made sense. Even simple things like teaching him nouns—he didn’t really know many nouns and couldn’t really tact that well. And then he started to respond pretty quickly, right? Really quickly. That’s super motivating. You learn things and think, “Wow, this makes sense, it’s going to work,” but when the child starts responding, starts talking more, starts answering those first couple of questions, you’re like, “Wow, this is going to work.”

Mary: Right. And in my very long career in ABA and as a mom of an almost 30-year-old, I’ve seen that intermediate learners—learners who do talk but are not conversational—are super tricky. Everything is outlined: we have the toddler–preschooler course, the beginning course, and then we have the Verbal Behavior bundle, where we really teach you how to teach things like pronouns and prepositions. All that sounds pretty intensive because it is pretty intensive. That bit of the program is really for behavior analysts to dive in and program and do interobserver agreement and all this complicated stuff. Yet in a lot of ways, it just makes sense to give it to the most motivated person—being you, Kate, as the parent who’s becoming the captain of the ship. It doesn’t have to be that complicated, but you have to have a child who’s ready for that. Otherwise, you’re building on a pyramid that’s going to just collapse and you’re going to make more of a mess of the language. I’m sure, especially when you got into the intermediate learner course and the VB bundle, you got a sense that this was not for the faint at heart.

Kate: Totally, yes. That’s taking me back again, remembering coming across the words tact, mand, intraverbal. I just thought, “What is that?” FFC and all that, the category program. It did take me listening to the videos a few times again to really get that sinking in. But now it comes easily; I know exactly what that all is. It just comes together. Initially you’re thinking, “Oh gosh, what is this?” And even all the different strategies—what are the terms used? Errorless teaching, transfer trials. I was like, “What is that?” I know when I first started the group coaching, I’d ask you questions thinking, “I don’t know what I’m talking about here, I’m not sure what you know,” and where we’re at. So initially it can be quite confronting. But once you get it and understand it, it is, in my opinion, the most effective program for getting your kids to speak. It is brilliant.

And that was the thing when we’ve dabbled every now and again in speech therapy with people who haven’t had the ABA training—it just hasn’t really hit the spot for me. I realized I needed to do this myself. I’m remembering now too: when Dylan initially started the program, he would just say “water” when he wanted water—there was no “Can I please have water?” or sentences. That’s right, and it’s taking me back to those really simple beginnings, teaching him how to mand—how to make that request.

Mary: Right, and how not to push length of utterance too soon, because then you can get rote responding and then you can get conditional discrimination errors and all kinds of things that we usually don’t talk about in the podcasts or even in my book or toddler course. Those media are more like, “Let’s get started. Let’s find out in those three areas where your deficits are. Let’s make a simple plan. Let’s put one foot in front of the other.” I think that is one of the real benefits of the courses and community that I’ve created—we’re not just working on speech. We’re spinning that plate, we’re spinning self-care, we’re spinning problem behaviors all at the same time. Because if you’re just working in silos, it’s amazing how kids make progress at all when everybody’s in their little silos.

Kate: I hear you, Mary. And that’s what I loved again when I started the course. I loved that it wasn’t just speech. Initially I thought, “I’m just going to do speech,” and then I realized, “Whoa, Mary’s got everything sorted here.” We’ve got behavior, sleep, eating, toilet training, grooming. I thought, “Oh, I didn’t even know I needed to teach him how to put socks on and T-shirts on and all this sort of stuff.” I loved that because I could just, yeah, it was kind of all coming in. I think initially I was very language-focused, and I remember you saying, “No, we need to also look at the grooming, we need to look at self-care. Where are we at with that?” I thought, “Oh yeah, okay, I’ll look at that too. I hadn’t thought about that.” So it’s so comprehensive, so thorough, and it all comes together—and it needs to come together simultaneously.

Just even basics like how to put a T-shirt on. I didn’t know how to teach my kid how to put clothes on. I had no idea at all. And then I did the videos again and again, listened to them multiple times, and then I learned, and we did it and it worked. He can pull up his underpants, his shorts, his T-shirt, socks on—yeah. So that really sped it all up together.

Mary: So you did make big gains, and we can talk a little bit about high-touch coaching. Most people don’t have the resources for high-touch coaching and don’t do it, and we can make a lot of progress with just the course and community. But why did you reach out, and what additional things did the coach and I help you with to get to the next level? What did that look like?

Kate: From the beginning, from the first session with Rachel—well, actually from the first initial chat—I knew at the end of that call we needed this. I thought, “This is exactly what I need.” I needed that to keep me moving along but also to ask questions. So every fortnight we’d check in and I could have a bunch of questions and Rachel would give me all the answers. It was amazing. I’d leave my sessions with Rachel actually feeling positive and feeling good. It wasn’t like I came away feeling worse; I just felt, “Yeah, we’ve got this, let’s keep going.” I loved that.

Then the sessions that we had with you, Mary, were just a gold mine—amazing. That was such a relief. I’m so grateful to have found you from the other side of the world, through this book which I just randomly found through Google. Again, it was so comprehensive. Our session was just full of information that targeted every aspect—from dressing to grooming to everything. And also, it was targeted to Dylan—to what he needed.

What was most important, to be honest, was that you could see what was happening. I sent videos to you and Rachel, and any issues that I had would just be on video so you could really see what’s happening, where we’re at, what I’m doing as well. I loved the feedback. I was like, “What am I doing? What’s not right? How can I improve? What can I do?” And they were amazing. That’s what I feel has really boosted him and kept everyone going—kept me going. The guidance—I’ve never had guidance like that.

We’ve dabbled every now and again with a couple of different ABA providers here and a couple of different speech therapists, and they’ve been great in their own right. But the guidance that you’ve given me and that I’ve passed on to Dylan, with your experience and expertise, has been second to none. We had a gap of about three months from the high-touch coaching, and in that time I was like, “I need Mary again; how can I get back to Mary?” I was still doing the course—we still had the course subscription and were obviously still doing all the work—but I needed another consultation with you. I thought, “I need Mary to look again, to see where he’s at.”

It does get intricate. It does get tricky at this intermediate level. You get stuck, and it can happen every few months where you kind of go, “Okay, we’re here now, how do we get to the next level? How can I get him now answering why questions?” Or you have different behavior starting to change and pop up.

Mary: And he really, Dylan really has improved. From the 40% on the BECA, a year later he’s at like 80–90% in all three areas. The behavior area still has some issues, but his behavior issues are not big meltdowns. They’re more like, I remember the last time we did a coaching call, he was asking a lot of questions that he already knew the answer to. We identified what we call defective mands for attention and gave you some techniques to get out of that, and some perseveration and some rigidity. You’re doing a good job reading books, but we talked about going to the library and getting different books so that he wouldn’t get into this perseveration of talking about the same things and so that you could vary the topics.

He is excitedly starting a pre-kindergarten program in another month from now. Right before we hit record, I said, “Is that still the plan?” and you’re really excited about that and you feel like he’s ready, right?

Kate: Absolutely, yeah. For me, it just feels really exciting because he’s got to the point where he is fully conversational, can ask questions, can request anything he needs, is toilet trained, dresses himself—all that kind of thing. I’m going into this feeling confident. Obviously, there are still areas of development and we’ll see what happens there as well. It’ll be great to get their advice and see how he does go in a group setting and more structured environment. But yeah, I’m feeling a lot more at ease. If this had been a year ago, it would have just frightened me—the thought of this scenario. But where he’s at now, after all the work we’ve done, he’s definitely at a place where I think this is going to be the best thing for him right now. This would be the next step he needs—to really immerse himself in a more real, structured environment and follow instructions from another teacher and sit down and listen. So we’ll take it from there. I think it’s a really good point for him.

Mary: He’s four and a half; a structured preschool or daycare—even if it’s a couple days a week—is appropriate. In his case, it’s five days a week, right?

Kate: Yeah, five days.

Mary: They can give you feedback on things—maybe little holes that you haven’t prepared for, maybe little holes or little differences that come up that you weren’t thinking of. I think it’s very good that you’ve enrolled him and that you can see where there are holes, and I think you know that if there are things you need to put some more time and effort into, you will.

Kate: Yeah, definitely. Absolutely. I think it’ll be good to be able to see how he does in a group setting. There are two teachers to twenty children, so the ratios are still small but not as small. It’s nice before he starts kindergarten, which in Australia is one teacher to twenty or so kids. This will just be a nice little intro where he can get the support he needs. He can have a nice amount of freedom throughout the day, but also some structure as well.

More importantly, I feel that this course has got him to the point where he’s ready for that. He’s wanting to engage, he’s wanting—he’s needing more than I’ve been able to now give him at home. He’s four and a half as well, so I feel like just being that age will be a lot easier with the transition into this environment. He understands when I say, “Look, I’m going to be dropping you off and I’ll be going back home and I’m going to come pick you up.” He understands that now. That will make it a lot easier for him.

Mary: Well, you certainly have really rolled up your sleeves more than many people, and you can see the benefits of it. It’s not just that you raise the bar up and then you’re done and you can ride off into the sunset and have a quote-unquote normal life, which is I think what we all wanted. When you were saying how you wanted to focus on speech—everybody wants to focus on speech. I wanted to focus on speech, but I was told by some very wise people that you have to focus also on these other areas. Otherwise, if he were four and a half and still wasn’t toilet trained, that would be a deal breaker for most schools besides the very special-needs schools.

So is your plan to pursue a diagnosis of autism, or are you going to wait and see?

Kate: Yeah, wait and see, Mary. I still have hope that we can just really support him so well that we won’t necessarily need a diagnosis. I kind of look at things as: look at the symptoms, what’s happening, and as long as I can keep supporting him and making the difference, we won’t necessarily need a diagnosis. But if we need it for something, then we’ll go down that route if we need to. Some days I look at him and I think, “Okay, we’re doing so well, I wouldn’t even see any red flags at all.” Other days I’m thinking, “Oh gosh, you know, it might…” So we’re at that point where I’m going, “Okay, if we just keep at this and really work on helping him with that focus and everything, we could hopefully maybe even get away without having to go down that route.”

But if the label or the diagnosis helps to get extra funding, then we’d be going for it. If we don’t need it, then for us it’s more, “Let’s try to do the work.” I was with him full-time, so I thought, “I’m going to get in and do this.” The Turn Autism Around book gave me hope. That gave me hope. I’m still on the hope train. I’m not anti-diagnosis. If it would give us something extra at some point, we’ll do that. So maybe in a year’s time we’ll see where he’s at at the end of pre-kindergarten, coming into kindergarten, into a really, really structured environment. I’m hoping again this year with what he’s getting from the teachers and the support that I give him at home, and if we polish off any issues if there are any, that will mean he can start kindergarten the following year with no support, potentially. In that case, a label or no label makes really no difference to his long-term outcome. But yeah, it was hard at first. It was quite confronting and heavy.

Mary: Do you think there’s a certain amount of courage to read information about autism—to read a book called Turn Autism Around or join our course and community—without a diagnosis? I mean, 50% of our toddler parents don’t have a diagnosis when they join.

Kate: I did. Yeah, for sure. I think when that speech therapist said, “You know, I’m seeing…” and I said to her prior to that, “Look, I’m seeing that too.” Right now though, because I know a lot can change from the age of three to six—so much can change—and I’d read the studies and the success stories with ABA. I thought, “We can, you know, let’s see what we can do. If we need a label at some point that’s going to help him, we’ll do it, but if we don’t, then we won’t.”

Just buying that book—and I was buying a lot of books. I was like, “Any book, let’s get it all, let’s read everything.” I know even my partner Alan at one point said, “Look, put the books away,” because it was, you know, quite confronting. It’s scary. It’s “Oh gosh, is this where we’re at?” So initially, yes, it does—it can be quite hard, quite heavy. At the same time, I think if the label or the diagnosis helps to get extra funding, then we’d be going for it. If we don’t need it, then we won’t. For us, it was more, “Let’s try to do the work.” I was with him full-time, so I thought, “I’m going to get in and do this.”

The Turn Autism Around book gave me hope. That gave me hope. I’m still on the hope train. I’m not anti-diagnosis. If it would give us something extra at some point, we’ll do that. So maybe in a year’s time, we’ll see where he’s at at the end of pre-kindergarten, coming into kindergarten, into a really structured environment. I’m hoping again this year—with what he’s getting from the teachers and the support I give him at home, and if we polish out any issues—will mean that he can start kindergarten the following year with no support potentially. In that case, a label or no label makes really no difference to his long-term outcome. But yeah, it was hard at first. Definitely.

Mary: And I really appreciate you coming on and agreeing to share your first names and share your story to give other people hope. Even within the videos—the videos of me teaching actual kids how to dress and how to put the T-shirt down a certain way and how to pick them up—those are all because parents were like, “You know what? Sure, you can take videos of my kids and share them within a protected course,” and parents like you have given success stories, sharing hope. So what would you say to that person like you that’s out there overwhelmed, stressed, whether their child’s not talking at all, saying a few words, or almost conversational? What would you say to them?

Kate: “Start now” is probably what I would say. Get help immediately. Start now. Don’t delay. Go with your intuition. Go with your gut. If you feel like something’s not right, don’t just wait and see how things go. I would say this is the course. This is where you can do it all yourself. Even if you do get support from an ABA clinic in the city that you live in, or speech therapy as well, that’s fantastic. But to get funding from the government here in Australia is quite hard—and obviously overseas too. We need to be doing more as a parent as well. That still won’t cut it, I feel like that still won’t cut it.

So my advice would be: just get the support that you need. Do this course. I’d say, “Do the course. Jump on, learn about this, do this,” because then you can do it all yourself. And yeah, start now. The words from your book that have stayed ingrained in my mind—“It is an emergency”—because it’s such a crucial, vital window of opportunity to really build them up and develop them and support them as much as you can. Intermediate learners too, and just any child with any kind of delay.

Mary: What do you say to people that—because we do get a lot of emails—and they say, “Well, I read the book,” or “How is this different?” or “I’m good with just the book.” And it’s like, “No, really you’re not. There is so much to learn.”

Kate: There is so much to learn. You are not good with just the book. The book is amazing, but no. And I knew when I read the book, I was like, “Oh, this is fantastic. I need this,” but it would not cut it. It would not cut it. There is not enough. The book is brilliant, but it does not go into everything that the course does. The course has the gold mine. The course is the depth. The course is the information. It’s all the videos, Mary, of you. It’s all the different chapters, the modules—oh, it’s brilliant. There’s so much more in this online course. That’s what I loved. I remember when I logged in the first time I was like, “Wow, where do I begin?” I was jumping around and jumping here, going there. That probably wasn’t the ideal thing to do—you need to go in order—but that’s just my personality. I’m going over to this part here—“We’re starting here, we need a bit of that, we need that”—and then kind of coming back and going, “Let’s go from the beginning.”

But the online course is so in-depth. It is so structured. It has everything you need. It’s brilliant. It’s so comprehensive. A speech therapist, in my opinion, wouldn’t give me everything the course gave me, ever. I can’t even imagine how many sessions I’d need with them, and they’re not even trained like you are, Mary. This is your stuff. And we even did go to an ABA clinic briefly here in Sydney, but we just couldn’t keep affording it. It was like four weeks, one session a week for two hours. It was nothing really. And one of the ladies there actually said that she knows about you, knew about Mary and said, “She’s brilliant,” and I was like, “Yeah, she’s fantastic.”

That’s the difference. Not only is the course brilliant, but the techniques that you use, that you recommend—they work. They’re fantastic. Even just a pronoun lesson—just how to teach pronouns—you watch you do it and go, “Oh, wow.” Otherwise, you’ve got no idea what you’re doing. You’re just fluffing around; you’ve got no idea what’s going on. So I’d read that, got to write the notes, and I’d have to go back again because it does take time to really get that instilled in your mind and then teach that to your child. But then eventually it becomes so easy. It just flows.

Mary: It’s just like learning anything. I’ve taken courses on Facebook advertising and they’re talking about the pixels and this and that, and it’s like, “Oh my gosh, this is so…” But anything you can learn—absolutely. And it’s so cool because you’re on the opposite side of the world. I have never met you in person. I have never met Dylan. A lot of people are like, “Oh, I need someone local that can put their hands on and eyes on my child.” And I’m not saying that you don’t need anybody local—that you can’t—especially for kids that have a lot less language and have problem behaviors. But that’s the beauty of having the course and community, and especially with the high-touch coaching, to be able to actually look at videos and say, “No, you know, I know I said that in the video, but now we’ve got a problem with defective mands for attention,” or something very specific that very few people in the whole world would know that term or that problem.

Kate: Absolutely. And because they change as well. As they’re developing, different things start to emerge and you think, “How do we…?” As far as you being on the other side of the world, Mary, what I’ve loved is that you get Dylan. You get him. Just with the videos, just with the intraverbal subtest, all the information that we passed through prior—language samples, before we have the sessions—and then you come on and say “defective manding,” and I was like, “That’s exactly what it is. Oh yes.” You nail it. Hit the nail on the head every time. So yeah, it has not made any difference you not meeting me in person or Dylan in person at all, although that would be cool.

Mary: Yeah, it will. It will be cool and it will happen one day.

Kate: We’ll be coming over there one day. But that’s what I’ve loved—being able to have found you.

Mary: And in 2026, in addition to still serving parents, especially of the little kids, I am going to make—not that I haven’t been making an effort—but I’m going to make a concerted effort to reintegrate with professionals. Because you hear you and me discussing all these advanced topics that every behavior analyst in the world needs, and very few behavior analysts really have this kind of holistic view that can train parents and help parents wherever they are in the world. So that’s also a goal of mine.

So I so appreciate you coming on, Kate, and sharing your success. Dylan is doing great because of you and your commitment to learning, and I know that this episode will give others hope, and that’s always my goal. Thank you so much, and I look forward to continuing on your journey and continuing to support Dylan in the long term.

Kate: Thank you so much, Mary. Thank you.