3 Things Speech Therapists Aren’t Telling You About

When you're going to speech therapy, a lot of the times speech therapists or any therapists, to be honest, who are client facing, they won't have enough time to teach you a bunch of things or tell you 100 of everything that's going on. So when I got my first speech therapy job and I had my own room, what would happen was like we had 45 minutes to be client facing. The parent can sometimes be inside, sometimes not, depending on what they want and what I want as a therapist. I want you to be inside every time actually. And there are things that therapists don't have the time or luxury to actually tell you about. Right. And even if it's after a two hour assessment, we cannot go through everything and cover all bases. So one of the things that people miss out and why I know is because from my own practice and I also talk to parents, so when I ask these questions, they're like, what the heck is that? So I realized that there are loads of things that are missed out even more than when I was practicing in the therapy room. Nowadays, I primarily teach parents over the Internet how to teach your children at home by yourself. Okay, so the first concept is what we call language breakdown level. So if you search for that, you probably won't be able to find it is more of a jargon that we use within our community of therapists. So what does that mean? So a language breakdown means what level do they start breaking down? I mean the child, right? So for instance, everyone has a breakdown level for each language. For myself in English and Cantonese, my mother tongue, my breakdown level would be all the way up to like giving a speech, like a high level, as high as it goes, I guess. And I'm thankful about that. But if you're talking about another language, like Japanese and Indonesian, both languages of which I'm trying to learn, my breakdown level is probably like at a phrase, right? And the reasons for it is like, I don't have enough vocab, I don't understand the grammar, and so on and so forth. Right. So what about children who are picking up just the language acquisition phase? And the breakdown level is, should be very clear. So for instance, if a child is nonverbal, their breakdown level would be single word because they can't even get there. We can go down one level. Like if a child isn't verbal yet, we can think about, can they do verbal imitation? Are they at that language level break down, they cannot imitate. Okay, then go down one level. Can they just copy sounds if they can't then can they copy mouse shapes? They cannot. Right. So can they copy gestures? If they cannot do gestures, can they do movements during a song or whatever? Right. They. These are the breakdown levels. I'm not telling you these are the specific ones I'm looking for. But you need to know where your child breaks down and it goes beyond a word level. You can have like a two word phrase level. If a child has difficulty saying like two words in one go and a phrase structure, then that's the breakdown level. Right. And within the two word, you can also look at, okay, what kind of sentence structures can the child do? Is it that he can do a verb plus object? Right. Or can he do like a subject plus a verb? For instance, he can say eat cookie, but he cannot say mommy eat cookie. Right. So the breakdown level is still at two word phrase, but at the same time, a specific breakdown level would be the structure of the sentence. Okay, so that's something that speech therapists aren't telling you about. So if you knew about the breakdown level, it'd be super easy for you to know where to chime in into the whole therapy process. So many times I see parents would say, oh, my child can do that, right? I. I know he can do that. Why are we doing this? And that's because it wasn't shown and proven that the child breaks down at that level. And the biggest thing that I always see is that the parents will say, ah, you can do full sentences. And what happens is that the child would say what we call frozen phrases. If you've been on this channel watching what I say, or listening for that matter, and you've been on our free community with all our free online courses, which you can go and grab@wwagents of speech.com course, is that these frozen phrases, we don't really count as their breakdown level. The reason is because, for instance, there are phrases that I remember by like memory in both Japanese and Indonesian, but I cannot operate at the same level. I cannot flexibly change the words to change the meaning and to use it in different situations. What does that mean? Is that there are some phrases that children are functionally remembering to use. And those sentences or phrases that are from like, I don't know, iPad shows, YouTube videos, songs, or whatever those things are, are not counted because it's not functionally and flexibly used. Okay, so let's talk about how to be specific about language learning. So we don't have time as therapists in the clinic to tell you now we know the breakdown level. How do we be specific about the language learning? So breakdown levels, they exist in both a few dimensions. We have expressive, how much a child can talk and receptive, how much a child can understand, and also how much at the horizontal level, which is like, can they do it in different contexts? So a lot of times we think about the vertical column, which is like, how many words can I speak? I just want to push it as high as possible. But we don't think about what contexts are, are available. Let me just give you an example. So I can speak very well one on one with someone. It gets harder in a group setting. And in the beginning, when I was speaking to a camera, like I am speaking with you right now, it took me some time to learn how to be articulate and speak well. I don't know if I'm speaking well right now. At least people are watching. You're watching this, right? The thing about the breakdown levels is that, okay, if the child can say this with you doesn't mean he can do it in school, right? And knowing this now, you know, there's expressive, there's receptive. Like, there's also speech problems. Like, for instance, if they have sounds or sounds are also like syllables that they're missing inside of what they're saying, then the thing about is, how do we be specific about these levels and how to help your child with language learning? So we don't have enough time to talk about that in a speech therapy clinic. What you need to do is to drill down on what one thing that would push the child to learn the fastest. And this is like the concept of a leading domino, right? If you push that leading domino, it will push other things down. A lot of advice on the Internet talks about, oh, you have to play, you have to follow the lead. But it's not specific about what level of language that we need to teach. So let me give you an example, because this is a huge topic, and even therapists like myself, I'm not very, you know, as experienced as a lot of the people out there. But for me, it's hard also to think. And that's why assessments are used, right? To think about what specific goals should we be doing when we need to be specific, it means that you have to look into, okay, should I be teaching verbal imitation? Is that the thing that will push the child forward? A lot of times it is, right? Should I be teaching yes or no questions? Should I be teaching answering who, what, where, whatever questions? A lot of times it becomes like a symptomatic approach that's all we can say it, right? If you have a fever, put an ice pack, right? So parents and therapists, without knowing the deeper reasons for why the language deficit is here, would shoot for a bunch of goals that may or may not push the child forward and it's not specific enough. After you get the language breakdown level, you need to think about why a lot of times it's not 100% to do with the language ability of a child. It might be because they don't have enough play skills. It might be because they don't understand that there's another way to communicate and it's our job to teach them that. So when we say being specific about language learning, it's what's the one skill that will propel your child above the breakdown level? Right. So for nonverbal children, verbal imitation is going to do that, right? From single word all the way to like sentences. Most of the time, and I'm saying this with a, take it with a huge grain of salt, right? Most of the time it's play skills and learning the language function of answering questions. And I wish I could be more detailed here, but what's going to happen is that this is going to become like a whole hour of me talking. And you can just learn all this for free@agentsofspeech.com course, go there, enter email and then join the community. And we have free courses there. You can learn from start to finish. And the last thing that we don't talk enough with parents is behavioral management techniques. I had so many times where the child was so sweet and nice and talked a lot in my clinic and I'm not tubing my own horn here. I'm just saying in general, children will perform better in schools and also in clinics. And the reason is, is because we have a different place for children to know that there's do they're supposed to do something specific here of which is to learn. And we have. And there's no way they can run, they can't go back on their bed and lie down or whatever. What happens is that when they go back home, the same story happens. They don't talk, they get into tantrums. You know, they pull the parents hands, they cry just to get what they want, don't play with the toys. They try to like the parents try to mimic what the therapists are doing at home without the context of have you built an environment that would help the child go into that mode? Right. So behavioral management techniques go from very specific to very broad. So specific Things are like, oh, what happens if the child runs away? What should you do? Right? To all the way to the broad. Like, how do you talk to the child? How do you make sure that you're incentivizing your child to actually do the work with proper rewards and, like, proper play routines that are actually fun. Right? Building a relationship between you and your child so that I'm supposed to listen. I'm not supposed to just run off and giggle, right? So that's what is missing right now. And you can only build that as a muscle, Right. I've heard it so many times from our community that the techniques don't work. And that's because the parents haven't put in. In the work to make it work. And they think that, oh, if I do this one thing, it's gonna. It's gonna happen. It's not like that. It's like learning how to drive. You can watch videos, whatever, but then the first time you're gonna step on the gas thinking it's the break, it's just gonna happen. Right? All these come down to behavioral management techniques and soft skills and therapy. And because it's not said when home practice is given by speech therapists, setting up the parents to fail. Okay, so if you want to learn more about these things that I cannot go through in one YouTube video, and I don't think you would want to sit through a whole video of me just talking with my head moving and my hands moving, you can go to ww.agentsofspeech.com course to learn more there. Okay, so that's it for this week's video. I'll see you in the next one. Bye. Bye.