Why a Five-Star Recommendation Can Still Be the Wrong One

When we first started looking for help for our son, I thought a speech therapist was someone who helped you speak. That was it. That was the whole of my understanding.

If you've never needed therapy for your child, you don't know any better. You Google what's near you. You ask around. My wife asked in some local Facebook groups and we got a few names back. At that point we didn't even have a diagnosis. We weren't looking for someone who understood autism. We didn't know that's what we'd need.

Then the diagnosis came. And everything — everyone — starts telling you the same thing. Early intervention is everything. Early intervention is the most important thing you can do. So you step up. You start looking properly.

And that's when you run into the first wall.

The website tells you nothing

A lot of provider websites look really good. Polished. Professional. All the right words.

But you learn, after a while, that the website was built by a web developer with the business in mind. It's speech therapy talk. It's a badge saying they're a member of Speech Pathology Australia. It's generic, and there is nothing personal on it at all.

None of that tells you the one thing I actually needed to know — does this person have real experience with non-verbal autistic children, and have they done it successfully?

That single piece of information mattered more than everything else on the site combined. And it was almost never there.

You don't always get who you think you're getting

Here's something else the website doesn't tell you. At a bigger practice, you book in — but you don't always get the therapist whose name drew you there. You get one of the team. Sometimes someone straight out of university.

That's no disrespect to anyone young and learning their craft. Everyone starts somewhere. But it's not what you thought you were signing up for, and when your child has complex needs, the difference matters.

We were once recommended a speech therapist with a waiting list of over a year. We thought, brilliant — she must be exceptional if people wait that long. We found others to fill the gap. Eventually her spot came up. And she just wasn't the right fit for our son.

The long waitlist told us nothing either. It just looked like a signal. It wasn't.

The recommendation that doesn't mean what you think

So you turn to other parents. Of course you do. A real person who's been through it has to be worth more than a website.

And they are — but there's a catch nobody warns you about.

Someone says, "There's a speech therapist in Jacobs Well who's fantastic. She worked with my autistic son and he came on so well." That sounds like gold. But here's the question you can't ask: how autistic is your son?

You can't ask that on a community Facebook board. It's not the kind of thing you can type out to a stranger. But it's the thing that decides whether their recommendation means anything for your child.

Because autism doesn't present the same way twice. Speech therapy for an autistic child at level 1 can be completely different from speech therapy for a non-verbal child at level 3. Different goals. Different challenges. Different everything.

So a glowing recommendation from a parent whose child is nothing like yours can send you down a path that was never going to work — and you'd have no way of knowing until you'd lost months finding out.

What actually helped

I'll be honest. Most of the time, the only way we ever really knew was trial and error. Or by talking to someone whose child was genuinely like ours.

Our son is in a special school. A lot of the children there are in similar circumstances — not identical, because it never is, but close enough that another parent's experience actually carries weight. When someone in that world tells you about a provider, it means something, because the context is there. They know what non-verbal looks like. They know what we're up against.

That's the difference. Not whether a provider got a good review. But whether the good review came from a family whose child is something like yours.

That's the thing I went looking for and could never find in one place. And the nuance — the level, the presentation, the specific challenges — matters more than any brochure ever will.

We're still learning. We still get it wrong sometimes. But I trust a parent who's walked the same road far more than I'll ever trust a website. I always will.

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