3 Reasons Why You're Teaching Your Child to Ignore You

This is Ming from agentsofspeech.com we coach parents on how to do home therapy for their speech delayed children. So here we want to talk about three reasons why your child is ignoring or more so that you're teaching and training your child to actually actively ignore you. The reason number one is that you're repeating too much. So yesterday I went to a friend's place and he really wanted his daughter to speak Chinese to us because they're from Indonesia and they want them to want their children to be able to speak Mandarin Chinese. And the child didn't really want to because they weren't warmed up enough. The father just kept on going, hey, you say ni. Ni. How do you say hi in Chinese? This is largely putting off. And it's when you repeat so many times and cueing that speech when your child doesn't even want to speak. And the first question is that why do you want to prompt something when your child already mastered that word? Your prompting isn't helping. But to force someone to do something you want them to do. So it's actually, it's very distasteful in anyone's mouth, to be honest. Like whether you're an adult or a child, it creates a bad feeling that I don't want to hang it with you. You're just twisting my hand in order to make me do what you want. Because the first time was enough already and you kept on repeating and you started prompting for something I know how to do already. So when you repeat too many times, there literally is no end to it. And even if your child wants to do it, you repeating so many times, actually there's, there's a lack of trust. I mean, you think I didn't hear you the first time? And so whether your child knows how to do it or doesn't know how to do it, if you repeat many times, your child is trained to ignore. Because like for me, when I was younger, my mom would ask me to, to eat dinner and she would like say 20 times until it came out. Reason why was because when she kept on repeating, I knew that it wasn't the real thing. And it wasn't that the dinner was ready, it was just, she's telling me to come out so I can just ignore her. And she trained me to ignore because the dinner's not truly ready. Not, not everyone's at the table, there's no rush for it. And by repeating so many times, the repetition actually made the word mean less. It's like an inflation of words. So if I Keep on saying something, it will become background noise and I'll just say whatever. It's not even my problem. And the second reason for ignoring is that your child doesn't even want to do it. So it's the same. But when a child doesn't want to do something, when we keep on asking, we keep on pushing for it without having a. A sort of reward going on. Why does a child want to indulge in social activities when there isn't rewarding at the end of the day? So there are some children who are super social, right? They. They derive pleasure from seeing other people's faces, their. Their mannerisms and whatnot. But there are some children who just want to be left alone. And then some parents will say, oh, I think my child has some social anxiety. And like, they might be autistic or whatever that parents and moms start to think about, but at the end of the day, who doesn't have social anxiety? When they were young, there must be a point where you had social anxiety. So if your child doesn't want to, don't force. Think about what you can do to increase the likelihood of them doing it. So if they don't want to do something, right, think about what they do want and go from there. Instead of pushing your agenda, you can do something that they want to do to show. Show you something else. Say words that are. Say words. Do play with toys that are actually rewarding. All right, so let me give you an example. Long time ago, when I just started my therapy work, one of the children there, my first ever client, he would go in a tantrum whenever he saw me. He just hated my gut, like he was not taking it, because whenever he saw me, he knew that it was therapy time, it was learning time, and he would, like, bite me even if he didn't want to do it. What my supervisor said was like, okay, if we go up to him and say something, he gets mad and we walk away. Then it's training him to know that shouting and screaming works, right? But if we go up to him, we keep on talking, keep on requesting, and he still doesn't need to move. Then we're training him to ignore all the commands and sentences that we're saying to him. But what we want to do instead is to grab something that is of value to the child. And I don't mean like snacks and screen time only. And what I mean is, can we have something that's fun that we can show the child? Like, we have something. It's like a gift. Yo, Check this out. Like a car park, just stickers or whatever, and we start playing it and we invite the child over. And that's the same as any type of interaction out there. We always lead with value. And that's why, like, a lot of stuff that we do is free. Because I want to lead with value to you. I want to show you, hey, just check this out. This is all free stuff. Just like our courses@ww.agentsofspeech.com course. All the courses are free. You can go there and check it out if you don't want to. Like, I just put it back on you. If I keep on talking about stuff that you don't care about and I keep on repeating myself and you don't want to learn, then you will learn to ignore all my videos and we will have zero views. All right? The last reason why we're training children to ignore is that there's no consequence when they actually do something. So a lot of times parents will give consequence when children are ignoring, right? And what kind of consequences are there? Are you didn't listen. Hey, hello, Excuse me. Then say anything, right? Hey, you're a bad boy. Whatever. Those are negative consequences, right? Those are like just telling them negative feedback or they increase the volume. So when you increase your volume, increase your tone, what you're teaching your child is that the other times, just like my mom when she was asking me to come out for dinner, all of the times that were normal toned or like soft, those can be ignored until the parent starts shouting, then I should listen because afterwards they might beat me. That's a cue. It's like, it's just like in the, in the airport when, when that announcement goes off, you don't really care about it. But then when the fire siren goes off, you're like, oh, my God, I gotta run, I gotta go. So you have to think about what you're training your child to absorb. So if you need your child to move and then every time you have to raise your voice, then your child will learn. Oh, I can. I will only move when my dad raises his voice, right? So what kind of consequences should we have instead? Whenever your child does something correctly and listens to you and pays attention, you should praise you say, ah, thank. Thanks for listening this time. That's really good. You know, give them a little hug, little tickle, a little whatever. And that goes a long way. Because then, especially in Asia, where I'm from, obviously what happens is that the, the child says something and then the, the mom or the dad is just, oh, okay. It's, it's taken for granted for the response and their attention. So at the end of the day when this happens, children will start to learn. Ah, I don't get anything out of this. You don't really care if I say it. It's as if I was born to listen to you. And, or like when you say something like, then I'm supposed to totally obey. If I don't obey, then you raise your voice. That's. It is a very Asian culture, I would say. And at the end of the day, if this happens a lot, what happens is that there's going to be a flip, that a switch that happens inside of the child is, I don't want to listen to you anymore. I get nothing out of this and they start just ignoring you. I've seen this multiple times. No matter if it's a speech and language delayed kid or just a typical developing child or even an adolescence, we're talking about teenagers and stuff. This switch, when flipped, very difficult to unswitch, I would say. So those are the reasons why you're, you're training your child to actually ignore you. And, and this is a behavioral thing. It's a very psychological thing that you have to learn to switch how you talk to your child. Because at the end of the day, the reason why you're like this, why we, me included in the beginning, why we're doing all of this stuff, training our child to ignore us, is because we were treated that way as well when we were children. So to break that, you have to. What you're doing right now, watching this video is great. You've learned. Ah, so now let me try this new way this Ming guy is saying about all this stuff that you, I can try at home. So try it. I'm not saying that it's going to work for you. I'm saying that this is what has worked for us and you can try it. Whether it works or not, I don't know. Share it later on. Go to ww.agentsofspeech.com course. There are much more things and courses out inside of our community and you can search according to your child's ability and so on and so forth. If there isn't anything, you can always ask there. All right. There are 11,000 parents in the community and it's really a great resource for anyone out there with speech and language delayed child. All right, that's all for today's video and I'll see you in the next one.