Ming from Agents of Speech explains why repetition alone won't help speech-delayed kids improve. You need high-quality practice: short daily bursts of 5-10 minutes, incremental progress, and backward chaining so the child completes the final step.
Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com in today's video, we're gonna talk about why repetition is key to learning anything or catching up in terms of speech and language and also getting rid of bad behavior and fostering good ones, okay? So the key to learning anything is repetition. I'm sure you've heard of this many, many times that practice makes perfect, okay? And when you think about it practically, practice is really the key to mastering anything. And you have to think about, do you provide enough repetition for your child to actually learn something? When I talk about this, if you're watching this and your child right now cannot use the language and the speech to communicate effectively with you, have you been helping your child by giving them an environment so that they can keep on practicing what they learned in therapy, keep on practicing what they learned at school, and keep on practicing what you've taught them? So when I talk about, like, providing ample, like, more than enough times and opportunities to practice, an analogy I want to talk to you about is, like, girls are usually better dancers than boys, right? And the reason behind it was because girls like to watch TV and pretend to dance. They just had an interest in watching people dance, singing, and pretending to be them when they were young. That's why by the time they get to school, they're usually much better at. At dancing than boys are. It really comes down to intentful practicing. Are you providing enough opportunities, repetitions into your child's everyday life in order to do it? And when we talk about this, many parents say, yeah, of course I do. I drill them. I make sure that they sit down with me for an hour and make sure they do work with me. The second point of this video is that your child needs to do a good quality practice. Okay? Quality is always over quantity. Okay, I'll say that again. Quality is always over quantity. And perfect practice makes perfect, not just practice, okay? Not any old practice. How do we do this? First of all, you have to understand that children have very short attention spans. I mean, you would have known by now if you're a parent. When we're doing practice, it's better if you sit them down for, like, five minutes, 10 minutes in the beginning, doing short bursts of high repetition tasks, right? This is how people learn. It's easier for human beings to catch on to something when it becomes a routine to sit down five to 10 minutes to actually increase their skill on a certain thing, okay? And in Japanese, they call it kaizen, which is, like, if you write it in Chinese, just means Improvement. Okay. And they have this practice in a Japanese business culture. All right. Or just in culture, I don't know. Kaizen is when every day they sit down to have a meeting for like, 30 minutes and talk about how they can improve 1%, 0.1% every day. And as you do that, as you do that, as you do that, it adds up by the month. It becomes a huge improvement in the long run. Okay? So I want you to actually hold on to the concept of kaizen, like, every day, have a habit to sit down with the child to improve that 0.1% at 1% by giving them a lot of repetition on the same thing. So. So the third thing is backward chaining. I want to talk about. And what is backward chaining? Basically, it's like you providing a strong routine, as we've been talking about in the videos on this channel, is to give them a very strong routine and then tell them the exact answers, give them a lot of repetition, a lot of reminders about how things are, how the play is. I remember in a different video, we talked about peekaboo, right? So when we do peekaboo like that, we do many, many, many, many times when they're engaged, and then we can backward chain. And what that means is that leave the last step empty and let them fill in the gaps like pika, just waiting for them. Boo. That's right. Like that. Okay? So backward chaining works wonders. As long as you give enough practice, repetition, they understand the situation, and then you can backward chain it. With that said, this video, I mean, it's gonna confuse some of you. So if it does, I'm so sorry, but you can always comment below and ask me more questions to help me clarify things for you, particularly specifically for your child. Okay? Because every child is different. And here, agents of speech, we've made a checklist for you. And these are all the tools and toys that I recommend to parents who are doing home therapy at home because of the situation right now. You can just go to agentsofspeech.com checklist to grab it over there, and I'll see you in the next video real soon. All right?
