Ming from Agents of Speech shares three strategies for reaching speech-delayed kids who resist listening: drop the therapy voice and talk normally, use small gesture-based prompts instead of repeating yourself, and lead with rewards in a distraction-free space.
Alright, this is what you should be doing if your child is very stubborn. And whenever you're trying to teach a child, he doesn't listen. So here's three tips that I will talk you through here. Number one is to stop using a teacher or a therapist voice when talking to a child. We've talked about this before in previous videos, but it's really hard to do to catch yourself. The best idea is actually to film yourself when you're trying to teach. And you can hear that when you go in a higher pitch, hey, those things are a telltale sign you're trying to teach your child to something. And most children don't like it because they know what's about to happen is, oh, she's talking like this again, or he's doing that again. I should just get out of here, right? It's because there's salesy pitch. You hear that sales on in front of, I don't know, Sephora coming up to you with, with a free sample, right? What's about to happen, you try to get out of the situation, right? Be careful about that. And therapy voice is something that is a little bit demanding for children. They know that you're about to demand something out of him or her, right? Try to speak as naturally as you can as you would with other people. Because when you have no expectation about what a child should and shouldn't do, they tend to listen to you a lot more. Okay, Second tip is this. When you are asking your child to do something for you, or like you're trying to get him to imitate or whatever, do it in small chunks. What do I mean by that? There is a reason for a child wanting to talk to you, imitate you or whatever. So a lot of times is that parents will always say something as a verbal cue. Like verbal cues are always the hardest to fade out. So when we're doing therapy, it's very important to fade out certain cues of prompts. So let me give you an example. If I give you assistance on something, right, for instance, glasses is something I cannot fade out. I cannot just take it off and I can see properly because it's a physical assistance. What you want to do in therapy, in any therapy in the world, is to give you the tools, give me the prompts, give me the models of how to do something and slowly fade it out so that you can do it yourself. It doesn't matter if it's like marriage counseling, doesn't matter if physical therapy matter if it's like speech, which is what we do. Or occupational therapy or ABA or whatever. All cues and prompts need to be faded out. If you give a, say that verbal prompt, it's nearly impossible to fade out because what are you going to say? Right? If you want the child to say cookie, you can say cookie or. And then what we get is like the child only filling in the last syllable. You say cook, and it's a key. And they never get cookie. Right? So what do you do instead is to do it in small chunks, Chop it up. Like, for instance, if your child wanted a cookie, crumble that cookie up and give it little by little and every time increase the demand a little bit until your child can actually say the word without much help. This might sound hard to do, but you can even do it with a phone. You can, like, pause it, you can turn it off, whatever, so on and so forth, right? Other than that, you need to find other types of prompting cues that are able to be faded out. For instance, a gesture is a very good way to prompt the child. Why? Because I've taken away my verbal element. I don't need to use my vocal folds. I don't need to raise my voice or say anything in order for the child to act upon it. So I was talking to another parent the other day where she was like, I've tried the free course stuff on agents of speech. And she was like, yeah, I couldn't get my child to say it more than once. But the problem is this. She kept on using verbal cues. So I said, did you introduce any gestures that you could later on use it as a way for him to say the word? And why a gesture is good is because later on when a child learns that gesture, they will use that gesture out. And inadvertently they're cueing themselves to talk. Just like how I'm using my hands right now to illustrate my point, right? It's very natural for human beings to use their hands and the face to make gestures to tell you exactly what I'm thinking in my mind, right? As a way to cue myself to speak properly, smoothly and coherently. So why not just allow children to start learning gestures as a way to do it? The third tip I have is a story that I wanted to share with you. Again. I was talking to another parent over the Internet. She told me that her child, her child was not able to sustain on the chair and would run away. And she was thinking, what the heck was going on? Because a lot of times when she went to speech therapy, it was more like child led. The child would run around and they're super engaged and could get him to do anything. You get him to say a lot more sentences than he would have at home, right? When at home he's just running away, running off. And very stubborn, basically. Well, listen to the mom again, the tantrums and so on and so forth, right? The thing about this is to lead with the reward and think about what the behavior is about. So when he escapes, when he goes away, what can he do? And the mom was like, oh, he goes on a trampoline. No, of course everyone's going to run away from work and go jump on a trampoline, right? Or he might be like climbing up and down a sofa or he might go outside to the park or go outside to the yard and do something. So you think about this. The reward to work ratio is non existent. Therefore you need to get rid of everything that he can do. Instead of working, a lot of times you have to get a corner, right? Make another room, empty that room and get your child to actually work with you without any much distractions. That's why clinic works, because it's another place. They don't know how that room works, they don't know how that center works. Biscuit division venture forward anywhere else, a therapist knows how to catch the attention with new toys, new rewards, new whatever. And it's much easier that way, right? At the end of the day, if you want to start home therapy, that's what you need to do. You have to have it in your mind because it doesn't matter if your child can say all these things in their therapy room. And then when you go home, it's like just the same story all over again, right? So that's why you're watching this video. Okay, so these are the three tips again. And if you need more help, you can go to www.agentsofspeak.com course and there are free courses from Zero Words all the way to sentence building and so on and so forth. It's also inside of a free community with over 1200 parents inside like yourself. Alright, that's all for today. Thank you so much. I'll see you in the next video. By.
