7 Ways to Help Children Speak - Tips from a Speech Therapist

And this video will discuss 7 Ways to get children talking. You won't need to scream and shout. You won't need to repeat yourself over and over again, describing everything that you see. These are tried and true methods that we use ourselves. My name is Ming from agents of speech.com. we help thousands of parents get their children talking at home. So the seven tips are, number one, creating routines. Number two, lead with rewards. Number three, given small quantities. Number four, teach gestures. Number five, stop quizzing. Number six, gasps and pauses. Number seven, less free play and more sequences. So let's get into it. The first step is to create routines. So it could be physical at first, and then you add verbal anticipation. A lot of parents, teachers, and therapists, they tend to go right into getting children to talk. That's not what we want. We want to create a routine that it could be physical or it could be fun. It leans into your child's interests. So if your child likes to jump on the trampoline, I think maybe 80 to 90% of children like that. Make sure you create something that you can. Create a routine that teaches your child to jump with you. Okay. Or is that your child likes to play with bubbles, should she likes bubbles. Create a routine that it's always give, open, blow. You keep on doing it over and over without needing your child to speak. So you always want to keep on doing the physical things first. Right? Do the physical routines over and over again. Right? It could be up. Get your child over. Up, down, up, down, Right? It could be jump, one, two, three, jump. One, two, three, jump. On the trampoline. It could be a bubble. It gives you a bubble stick. You open it, blow, and then pop. Whichever is fine. Create the routines first. Make sure your child likes it. And then you can add verbal anticipation. What does that mean? So when your child is about to jump, you go, 1, 2, 3, jump. Right? You don't wait too long, because what you can do is you can just say it for them so children will actually listen to your verbal anticipation because they know what to anticipate, which is what you've built a physical routine that I've done over and over and over again. Okay. And we'll talk about these routines a little bit later through play. But then start off with funny little physical activities that you can do. Okay. It could be even tickling, right? It could be 1, 2, 3, tickle. It could peekaboo. It could be anything, Right? Create routines and then add verbal anticipation. If your child doesn't talk, save for that. Okay? So number two is Lead with rewards. A lot of times what happens is that parents are very passive. They want children to come to them to ask for rewards. But what you can do is actually be very active, show a reward. It could be a phone, it could be, you know, a snacks. Lead with the rewards first so that they come to you. Like you can ask them to come over. It's not every time when children suddenly want something and then they'll come over to you and you're not ready to teach, right? So then you can lead with it. Start with it instead of calling them over or pushing them or asking questions or whatever without the actual item there. A lot of times what happens is that parents will say, oh, yeah, When I ask, do you want cookies? They'd be to get mad already, but I want you to have those cookies already in hand and actively get them to come over. Leave with it. Okay, so that's a very good tip because a lot of times parents tend not to have the reward in hand and want to start some training without rewards. So lead with it. So what do you do when you have the rewards? Which goes on to the third step? Third tip is that you want to give in small quantities. A lot of times parents, they will get. Their child does like this tug of war at the kitchen counter, right? They want a cookie. Use a cookie first. No, use a cookie first. And then the child doesn't say anything or they get into a tantrum. And then some way, somewhat, you give in and you give the cookie, right? So what happens is that you've rewarded the whole set of behaviors that go into leading up to you giving the cookie, right? All the screaming and shouting, all that you're asking questions and whatnot, all the hand pulling and pushing and using you as a tool and then getting into a tantrum, all that has been rewarded by a single piece of cookie at the very end. I'm pretty sure when your child gets the cookie, he or she just acts as if nothing happened because they believe they had to go through the whole sequence of, you know, that tug of war at the. At the kitchen counter, right? So what you do instead is to give in smaller quantities so you don't give the whole piece. You give a little chunk of a cookie so that you can create a very successful environment for a child. Like tells the child that he or she doesn't need to do anything in order to get what he wants, right? It's just you as a parent, as a provider, giving in small quantities. So when you give the first small piece, the next Time, you can already give the same size, but ask for something a little more because your child knows he's going to get cookies anyways, so that therefore he's going to be more receptive to wait, to anticipate, to think about how they can get more from you. Okay? So give in small quantities. So number four, the tip, number four is to teach gestures. So a lot of times when we want to get children to talk to you, even if your child has words, parents will say, oh, my child is very lazy to talk. They would much rather pull my head. So that's a gesture. Why? Because if a child is delayed or there's. There's some problem with them speaking, they don't talk a lot. Talking might be the hardest thing that you're doing currently, right? Talking might be the hardest thing for, for them to perform at this point in time, right. So therefore it would make a lot of sense for children who don't want to stretch themselves for something that is economically low in value, for instance. So even if for a cookie, they might think, oh, that's too much work because we're trying to do something hard here because we cannot put our hands around the mouth and then like make the articulators, the muscles in the mouth to move in a way that creates sounds. Now we don't have that yet. What we can do instead is to teach a gesture that has the same semantic value meaning, the same meaning of a message. So for instance, if you want to do open, right, if you do this, it's very obvious that it's supposed to open something, like a container, like a jar, like a bubble stick, whatever, to get what they want. And then like this, to put the open palm gesture as we talk a lot on this channel and inside of our free courses, right? The open palm gesture helps a lot in terms of allowing the child to wait for you, right? Asking instead of taking right. Gestures. On the other hand, you can hand over hand, teach the child to do something with you. Whereas talking is very hard, you cannot just get them to talk. It's nearly impossible. So therefore, when you give in small quantities, what you want to do is to teach gestures for more pieces of what they were asking for. And it could even work for screen time, right? So what you can do with screen time is that you can pause, you can teach gestures, you can let them watch again, pause, do gesture, watch. So it's always very structured. They know when they're going to get something and they don't need to think about how to get it because you're already teaching it hand over hand. You don't. You're not waiting. You're not giving something that's too hard for a child at this moment in time. All right, number five tip is stop quizzing. A lot of times, parents will quiz, what's that? What's this? How do you say this? What does the dog say? Whatever. So there's a lot of these questions. When you do questions, it's not really communication. The reason is if you were hanging out with a person and then all they did was just ask questions, trying to apply your knowledge instead of getting to know you, telling you this and that, describing things. And that's the common knowledge in speech therapy. Right. You want to describe as many things as you want to the child so that they'll grasp the language naturally. Right. That may or may not work, depending on what your child likes, but quizzing your child over and over again is a surefire way to get your child to dislike you. Because if you ask me something that I have no answer to and you keep on asking without giving answers, I'm going to get frustrated nine times out of 10, right. Instead of quizzing, you should give the answers immediately so that your child can absorb that part of the question as well. This also is the case for verbal children when they learn the whole question as what we call gestalt or jump or whole. So I'll see a lot of children who fall, and then they say, are you okay? Like that, to signify. To tell you the meaning of I fell down. So instead of asking and quizzing and creating these chunks for children to learn, you might want to give the next chunk, which is the answer, so that they understand that the question. There's a question part and answer part. So then every time you ask a question, just have it inside of you to give the answer right away so that either your child can learn it or copy after you and know the answer immediately. Right. That's something you have to be careful about, because the quizzing part is actually one of the biggest killers of language development for speech delay children when parents are trying to teach something new. Okay, anyways, so number six is gasps and pauses. So this is basically verbal anticipation on steroids. So if you've done routines over and over again, if you play with a child in a way that, like, he already knows what's going to happen next time or whatever, when you gasp and you pause, it creates a vacuum, a silence that is funny, it's engaging, and it creates an opportunity for children to fill in the gap, whatever it is, it could be eye contact, it could be a gesture, it could be clapping hands, it could be putting their hands up, it could be just making a sound. These gasps and pauses makes a lot of sense because as a parent, as an adult, we don't want to always turn on Disney Channel and go, ah, this is going to kill your voice. I know it firsthand. You probably do too. So gas and pauses actually reduces what you have to put as an input. So you can go, and that's it. So let's say if you were just blowing bubbles and then you blow and then you blow so much that there are no more, there's no more bubble juice on the stick. And then so however you blow it, no bubbles come out. And then at that point in time you can gasp and pause and go and just stop and, and just see what happens. So given that you've done the tips above, probably your child will give you some sort of eye contact, some sort of attention because it's something funny, it's something out of the ordinary, there's something wrong, right? So when there's something wrong, you can see what kind of language comes out of your child. Even if it's just a gesture, a point, it could be he's just pretending what you're saying, Go, oh, like that. These are all great ways to, to create a good relationship with your child. The last tip we have is less free play and more sequences. Because of how the whole therapy culture is going nowadays is going toward more naturalistic way play of like child led therapy. There's a lot of free play. But then the real problem is that free play and therapy, if you, you were to do it together, it takes a lot of skill. All right? That's because you have to balance between remembering your goals, remembering how to talk to children, how to interact with them, and also allowing your child to feel like as if they're not being controlled over, right? It takes a lot of skill. So instead for parents, what I recommend is not to do a lot of free play. Free play they can do themselves. You can sit beside them and talk over them and describe things just as a lot of the stuff, speech therapy materials and techniques that are outside. But what I want you to do is more sequences. So remember the creating routines. I want you to create routines with the toys, right? And the first tip we talked about creating physical routines. Now I want you to create play routines. So what play routines are, are such as if you're preparing something to eat with toy food, you could go wash Cut, cook, eat, wash, cut, cook, heat. And you keep on doing it with different. You might do it with a carrot, you might do it with a. With a cabbage, you might do it with a fish, a toy chicken. You keep on doing the same routine in the sequence over and over and over and over again. And you might say, man, he's going to be like, bored. I don't think so. Because a lot of children love watching the same video over and over again. They love reading the same book over, over again. They love listening and singing songs that are the same. The reason why they do that is because it's predictable. The more they do it, the funnier it is. Children love routines. Children love doing things over and over again the same way. In fact, sometimes if you do something different way in the wrong way, they might get mad. So create those routines and use that rigidity against your child, against meaning, making it so that they will do something as if it's out of their own world. But you were the one who are programming those routines into his mind. Okay? So there are many ways to do this. You can do toy foods, you can do anything. Play is basically just simulation of what we have in real life packed into toys. Just like video games, right? We're doing a simulation of something we won't do or we can't do at this moment in time. Just as racing car games isn't as fun if you can actually do the real thing, right? Children cannot really cook because it's dangerous. Children cannot really wash clothes and iron clothes and cannot clean floor, clean the floor, clean, clean the table or whatever. They cannot make bread with real flour, right? That's why they use Play doh. Use those and create routines, steps, if you may, and use different. Just keep on going through the steps one by one. We have loads of examples. If you go to www.agentsofspeech.com course and there's a specific course called Word Combiners, you can go and watch it. It's all free. And inside I have a bunch of demonstrations of how to do these sequential play routines, okay? And all the tips I've talked about are actually covered inside of the micro course, which is also part of the. The free courses and the community that we have right now. There's 14,000 parents inside. Ask questions there, get to know each other, learn from each other, right? And you'll see a lot of parents who are struggling, who are excelling, who are having fun, or they're. They're going through a hard time. It's all about just finding a friend. Okay. So, anyways, that's all for this video. If you enjoyed these seven tips, please make a comment below of which one you think makes the most sense to you. And also watch this video right here. All right, see you.