Meng from Agents of Speech breaks down three mistakes parents make during speech therapy practice at home: over-exaggerating mouth shapes, speaking too fast, and giving unclear feedback. Stick to 5-10 minutes daily, speak slowly and naturally, and praise effort without demanding perfect sounds right away.
Hey, this is meng here from agentsofspeech.com I'm a speech therapist and in this video I want to talk about how to teach your child to speak clearly. And if your child right now has some like sounds that are missing, you are actually going through speech therapy to help them correct those speech sounds. This video will help in conjunction to that therapy and help you teach your child at home or like your daily interactions and, and actually help your child to speak more clearly when they're next to you. The first thing I want to talk about is not to exaggerate the sounds or the prompts or the cues that you're using to help your child to speak. So for example, if your child is having trouble to say the F sound in the beginning of a word, you don't want to go next to your child or like you don't want to teach your child to speak it like this, like, like that. Certain exaggerations actually make it hard, harder for them to generalize towards like words. Because to be honest, like when we talk naturally, we do not suddenly put our lips, tuck our lips, or bite our lips and tuck it right under our teeth. We don't go like facts, we don't do like that. We don't say like fox. We don't say that. If you teach a word or a sound, do not exaggerate it too much. Just do it as naturally as you can so that it's easier for your child to learn how to say it within a conversation and a sentence. Okay? And this goes for all the vowels as well. So if your child is at a level where they're doing like vowel imitations, you don't want to exaggerate your mouth shape too much. Okay? It's gonna throw them off. And I think that every time when they need to do it, it's gonna be like that. Secondly is to speak slowly and clearly. Okay? There's nothing more important than your child understanding where each sound is within the word. Alright? I've been suffering from this actually, because I'm right now in Indonesia and people are talking to me in Indonesian Bahasa. And sometimes they speak too quickly and they slur speech and sometimes like they get rid of some sounds which is acceptable within their language. And it confuses me with your child. If they are like suffering from a speech disorder or like a speech delay, then if you do that to your child and talking fast and not taking care of them, then it's gonna confuse them even more. Okay? And I'm talking about correctly pronouncing every word like I am right now without exaggerating my mouth shape. Okay? So if you can do that for your child, it'll be excellent. Number three tip is to give feedback correctly. Okay? To give feedback correctly. So let's say your child right now is learning at speech therapy, at their speech therapy, learning how to do the, the S sound. So whenever you hear that your child says the S sound, you can give a feedback. You say, oh, good job. Nice putting the S in the word stop. Or like, nice saying the S word when you're calling your friend's name, Stephen or something like that so that you heighten the awareness. The holy grail. The best thing ever in therapy or teaching is to create a good self awareness for your student so that you can actually retire as a teacher. Right? So that they can now give themselves correct feedback and they will learn themselves. Making them hyper aware of the sounds that they speak will help them improve themselves so that you don't need to like constantly give instructions and feedback to them. And when you're doing this, don't. You don't need to force them to say it correctly. So I've seen it multiple times in a kindergarten or with a parent. Therapists, much less parents think they have to correct the child right here, right now. Okay. Sometimes you just need to give the feedback. Not everyone's gonna get it totally correct. Okay, let's say that you're having troubles doing the th sound in English like, like that. So if every time you were talking in English with a native speaker, you would screw it up every time, the guy would just keep on hammering you to say the word correctly on the spot, you would be very discouraged to say it. I've seen clients who have been actually thinking in their brains how to avoid to use those words. Okay. This is also one of my clients back in Hong Kong. She was actually a voiceover person who would read out scripts for like TV shows and reality TV shows. What happened was that she was missing some of the sounds inside the words when she was writing the script because she was becoming more aware of it. She would check for the words and try to avoid those words and cross it out. And that is the worst thing. That's just avoiding it. The best thing is to make them aware of it, not pushing them too much so that they know next time they can do it better. And therefore it will help them in the long run. Because if your child is already going to speech therapy, they're getting enough practice, right? Setting aside some time every day, five to 10 minutes to tackle those words on the table and to use these three tips. And everyday conversation is going to help your child get there much faster and without the frustrations. Okay? So if you enjoy this video, please consider subscribing liking the video. Comment below about like what kind of troubles you are dealing with right now with your child and tell me about the wins as well so that you know you encourage other parents who are seeking for actively seeking for these kind of information online. And if you haven't, you should go to agentsofspeech.com checklist to check out a bunch of tools and toys that I recommend parents to get that are great for home therapy. Okay? So with that said, thank you so much for tuning in. I'll see you guys in the next video.
