Child can Sing and Recite Videos But Won't Communicate

Hello, everyone. Welcome to this Monday Live. If you're new here, this is live that I do on my YouTube channel and also my Facebook page. And the group. And recently the group has been quite cool. There's a lot of parents who are willing to share and ask questions. And this is what and why I'm doing this is because I want you to ask me questions so that I can answer them and become a better therapist for you and your child. And anything I can help right now is a lot because, you know, right now, not everyone is willing to go to therapy. So today's topic is about a recurring theme for the past whole week. And say hi to my cat. Can't turn her. She's going to run away. So a recurring theme? What's the recurring theme? Basically, a lot of parents are asking me, hey, Ming. My child can sing, can. Can talk about some things that they like. They repeat or recite certain videos, but they're not communicating with me. And the question that I always ask first is, hey, can your child imitate? Can your child imitate or not? Meaning if you asked your child to say something, can you get him or her to say under instructional command? All right, if it's not, then that is really the first thing that you should do. Okay? And if you're. If you're saying that your child right now is saying. Singing songs, saying things, but not directed at you, there's no current, what we call a language use, right? Then there's no function. There's no communicative intent with you. Rather, it's more like a way that. To entertain themselves or something. Then you know, this video is really for you. Okay, you better listen up, because I've already been typing so many times the same suggestions, I'm getting quite tired. So this is the best way that I can actually answer your question. Right? So number one, always, can your child imitate you? Why is imitation so important? Why do I always talk about it here? And that's because without like, getting your child to imitate a word, it's fairly difficult to actually teach a child something. Okay? Or anyone, anything. To be honest, if you can't imitate something, that means you cannot follow. You cannot follow. You're not ready to learn. Okay? And when you teach imitation, you might say that, yeah, my child sometimes does imitate me, right? Sometimes when I say something funny or make a silly sound, they will just follow like that, right? That's cool. That's great. That means they have the ability to do so. But you need to be. You need to let them know that when you're talking to them, when teaching your child, it needs to be something that needs to happen every time. Okay? Or else how are you going to teach them? You're going to be like the parents who send me videos, which, you know, I really, really encourage you to do, by the way. And what happens is that there's a barrage of questions. I mean, by barrage, a parent keeps on asking, what do you say? What do you want? How do you say, okay, follow me. All these kind of instructions makes it very like it actually teaches your child not to listen to you. Because every time you give an instruction, he or she can actually ignore you. Totally. Right? If you think about it, if you think about it, right, if your boss tells you to do something and you ignore it like 1, 2, 3 times, what does it mean? Do you need to listen to your boss at all? The answer is probably not right. That's not a really good boss, because the boss hasn't made it clear, Made it clear to you, made it clear to you that your words mean something. And that's what I mean by can your child imitate you when you tell him to? Okay, that's the biggest problem. All right? So when we're talking about children, who hasn't used words intentfully to communicate with you, some might say that they're non verbal. Okay? Sometimes if you go to an assessment, they might say, oh yeah, they're, they're pre verbal, they're non verbal or whatever. Doesn't matter about what the label is. It's just that they're not using right now. They're not using language intentfully. Okay? So that's what we need to teach now, intentful language. Okay? Just today I did an online consultation with a parent and she said, she told me that her child can talk, can copy very well, Very, very, very well. But then every time, every time the child would hand pull the parent towards something that he wants, right? And then afterwards, the child would wait and keep on pulling and pulling and pulling until the parent says, what do you want? After the parent asks, what do you want? The child start to like make sounds like. And then the parent would say like, oh, say I want chocolate or I want ice cream in that child's case, right? So basically you have to understand if your child right now can sing songs, can do whatever routines or follow lang, Follow the language of a certain video, that means they are already using some sort of language, okay? But they have a certain routine to it. And a lot of times if your child is on the spectrum or whatever, Okay. I don't really care about what kind of diagnosis your child has a lot of times because they don't understand the world. What? Well enough. They would rather stick to a certain routine because that's how they know and learn the world, okay? It gives them security. So in that case, about the child I was talking about, you know, the whole routine is pull mom's hand, wait, you know, hang around, and then until mom says, like, what do you want? And then they are engaged. All right? They're waiting for that queue. They take that queue for them to be asked, and then they need to. They know they have to communicate, okay? This is like, it's. They're dependent on you. They're waiting for a starting point for you to start the conversation. They don't know how to start it. Right. And yeah, Aaron says, sorry. Erin says, yeah, my child is like that. Yeah. So, you know, it's not only you around. There's a lot of parents who have children like this, Right. And how do you break it? I'm just going to regurgitate what I told the parent today. So basically, whenever your child is very passive, right. Doesn't want to speak to until you ask certain questions or do certain things or, you know, poke the right. Press the right buttons or whatever, then what you have to teach is to. For them to initiate on you, okay? And I've said it many times on this channel, on this page or this group or wherever you're watching it, the open palm gesture is very, very well, it's very good, right? Even for children who are speaking already. And the reason why we're not teaching just the open palm, right? What we're teaching is basically a way of initiating that is appropriate, right. That makes sense. When your child is waiting for you. Well, some, you know, some therapists, some teachers, some parents will say, hey, what's going on, Ming? Why are you teaching someone who can speak and copy something like this, like an open palm and waiting? Well, the thing is, you should always teach about how to anticipate, right? And then when they can anticipate, meaning, they can look at you and wait and put their hand up like that. And then when you give a cue, when you give a certain, like a word for them to follow, it's much easier for them to understand. And from there on, you can easily take away the prompt slowly. Now, you think about it, all right? If every time your child pulls your hands or taps or whatever, or just kind of like this cat right now, just coming over to Me, like, scraping herself onto me. Then how are you going to decrease the prompt of you asking the question? Right. They have to be at the state where they're ready. They're anticipating you to give it instruction on order, not when they are waiting for you to ask a question to initiate that. All right? They need to be at that stage where you ask. It's getting kind of confusing, right? So let me tell you an exact example of this. Okay? So recently a kid, a student of mine was actually. Sorry, I would call coming in, oh, my God. Wait a minute, not now, sorry. So recently I have a student who used to be like that all the time, right? And how we did it, how we did it. And it's not only him, but I just want to talk about him for a bit, right? Let's say his name is like, Kim. Okay. Kim has been doing hand pulling, going, whatever, and like walking around, the mom, circling her, in fact, you know, putting her hand towards that desired item for the longest of times. Okay. He was four when he first came to me. And then the thing is, how we did it was basically through teaching him how to imitate first. Right. First of all, we taught him the open palm gesture so that he's always asking for stuff. And second of all, we made sure all the desired items were in small, small pieces, okay. That they were. You know, if you like the ice cream, then don't give them the whole, the whole cup. Give them spoon by spoon so that they need to keep on practicing how to initiate. Okay? So that aside, when they know how to do the open palm, you give them a little bit by little bit by little bit. And every time they have to do that, they understand that they can actually initiate by putting out the hand instead of pulling a hand. And when you do that, you can also teach eye contact, because when they do that, they're not usually looking, right? But if you up the level a little bit when they're waiting for you and then they're trying, when they look at you, the instant that they look at you, you can actually teach eye contact as well. So actually a great way to teach children how to listen, how to learn from you. And I really think at this stage, if they cannot anticipate and wait nicely for the next instruction, then they don't. They don't have. They don't really know how to learn from you yet. And they don't have what we call learning to learn skills yet, which includes sitting, waiting, anticipating, all that good stuff. Okay? So if your, your child is here right now, And I'm describing your child like word for word. Hey, I've been talking about this kind of children for. For quite a long time now, and I've taught quite a few. Okay. So first of all, you have to do open palm. After that, whether you want to teach eye contact or not, that's up to you. And after that, you want to teach some imitation skills. Okay, so do I start? You might ask. Okay. My child imitates sounds, but it doesn't sound correct. Okay. So sometimes when your child have speech errors, what we call have speech errors, the problem is we don't know whether these are the true ability or not. Okay. So if they always. They always imitate lacklusterly, meaning they don't have. They don't put an effort to do it. And their parents would describe them as lazy. They have a lazy tongue, they have a lazy lip, whatever. No, they just don't know if they are giving 100% yet. And how you do it is basically to let them know it's not about the attempt, it's about the quality of the attempt. Right. That's why we start from gestures, actions, open palms, you know, looking. These are things that you can help them increase the quality by actually physically, you know, taking the hand and doing. Right. I've told about this like in the last live, I think that we were talking about the same old thing. You know, teaching actions first before speech. Okay. And slowly you can go from like actions around the face, around the body, towards your mouth. Okay. Towards your mouth. And when you do mouth shapes, and then what you can do is to bridge towards speech. Okay. And when you talk about like a speech error or speech, like clarity, you would never want to start off with a whole word because you know that they will get it wrong. Yeah. So let's say that a parent told me in the Facebook group, if you haven't, you should join it. It's really cool. More and more parents are asking around and if you, you know, read around, then you might get some stuff for yourself. Right. So this parent says, oh, there's a suspected apraxia of speech, which is a different topic for a different day. What the child would say was that he would emit omit. Like he would miss out the first initial consonant of us of a word. Sounds complicated. What it means by that, by example, is like if he would say, he were to say. I think the example was bobcat. Right. He would say ob at meaning no B, no C. Okay. So Bob turns up, cat comes at. Right. So would you want to teach him bobcat for the whole thing? No. Hell no. Totally not. Because you're setting up for failure, right? If you know that you will triple at 100 meters, you're not going to train 100 meters. You're going to train for 10 meters at a time. So what we're going to do now is to see if he can do the sound by itself. Or can he say like B + a simple vowel, like for Bob, right? Oh, it's actually. Sorry, my bad. So if he can do like, like that, right? If he can't even do B, then how do you expect him to say Bob? Impossible. So start from the lowest, lowest level. What I always do is I start off with the vowels to see if there's problems. And what I realize is that some of the vowels in English, especially the E sound and the sound, is kind of difficult in Bahasa Indonesian also. And actually these common vowels, nearly every language that I know of has the e and the O is pretty hard. So if they cannot listen to you, that vowel, listen to that vowel and make the same sound out of it, then they have a poor connection between the comprehension of the sound, whether they can hear it, and then to produce it back out. Let me give you an example. For instance, if you're not a native English speaker, right? You might have a problem with the th sound. Like, right? So if you try to say the word thesaurus, Thesaurus, that's three syllables in one go. If your th hasn't been mastered yet, you're going to screw it up, okay? You're going to turn to F. So that's why you should start off with th by itself and then add stuff at the end. For example, I might start off with right, and then I might say this, and then I might add a little bit and say Thailand. That's Thailand. Like maybe let me think of a two syllable word for th. I can't think of anyone, anything right now. I'm so sorry. But this is how I go about it. And something that I cannot do myself is the Indonesian R, right? I can do it alone, but if I do it in a long word, it's impossible for me, nearly. Especially if it's in the middle, right? So for example, if there's a word that has an R in the middle. I don't know, I don't know. I'm just making that up. There's a non word. Okay, I'm just saying nonsense. You see, my R is not very nice. All right? So that's why for your child, you shouldn't start with the whole word. You should update, accept, approximates. What do I mean by approximates? Meaning for the longest times. One of my. One of my students, I want to say my kids. But, you know, one of my students, she couldn't say no, no. It was a he. He couldn't say baby. And I accepted bae, which is. Nowadays, it's kind of okay to say bae, right? I don't know why the Internet is like that, but we accepted it. And slowly, slowly, through many, many practices, he finally got it. Okay? So this is a hallmark for children who are speech delay, okay. Or language delay per se, if you want to get technical, is that a lot of the times they cannot say the right. They cannot say the right words or the right sounds, even after a lot of exposure. And, you know, some studies actually ask. Don't ask me where, okay? If you want to, I can try to find it for you. Okay? So some studies say that it takes a speech delay or language delayed child 3 times more exposure to a sound or word in order to kind of master it. All right? So that is something that you need to remember, okay? Do not take your child for granted about the sound, okay? Even a typically normal developing child, child, when it comes to, like, certain sounds, words, they will like, they will be hiccup. You know, there are places where they will get stuck, all right? So let's get that out of the way, all right? So when you're talking, when you're asking your child to repeat after you to teach them words, keep the sounds and the words simpler, okay? And that's one of the reasons why also your child doesn't want to communicate with you that much, right? And one of the reasons, one of the reasons why is because you always talk too fast, too, too complicated. They don't understand you, right? It's something that is intimidating for them to do, okay? You don't never want to do that. You never want to speak in a very. In a very complicated way. I remember one time on Instagram, a parent said, oh, I was taught by. I don't know who, someone that I should describe everything very meticulously to very detailedly. What I mean, like, in a very, like, deep detail to my child so that I give them 100% language exposure. So for instance, this mic, he would say, oh, the metal black mic is hanging from the table or something. Or like the lazy cat is sleeping on my table or something. So that's super long. Imagine yourself if you don't know, don't understand half of the Things that someone says and they keep on describing to full detail. How are you going to pinch out which is important one? What's the important information? Which part you should copy because it's impossible to copy the whole thing. So I was giving an example to one of the parents about why this is the truth. Right? About why this is not really the truth. But you know why, why this makes sense, right? So if I told you about, like, the same thing. The same thing. All right, this thing, a black metal mic, right? In Chinese and Cantonese, my mother tongue, this would be. Right. So you don't know which one. If I ask you, what's the word for mike? Well, obviously you can deduce out of it because, you know, some kansi is actually English. So what about black? You would never know which one is it? So long. If you speak even faster, then how would you even know? Right? So keep your language input as simple as possible to the level of your child. If your child's speaking at two words, then, you know, keep it at two words. If your child's speaking at one word, then keep it at one man. So keep it only plus one. Okay. If your child speaks two, the max you can go is three. If you really want them to understand what you're saying, add more gestures as well. Add more gestures. So Errolyn has a question. Let me put it on if I can get to my mouse. Okay, cool. She says, I always practice my son to phonic sounds, but he can't say P, F and D. Cool. So the phonic sounds for P, F and D are P and D. Right. So for the P, it should be kind of easy. So what you should do now, Errolyn, for instance, P. What you can do is, I don't have any tissue here. I'll use this thing. So ideally, you want to use, like, something that's lighter than a glass. Like, you know, a cloth for wiping glass. It might be like a tissue. So, you know, put in front of your kid and go, make sure it moves right. It moves right. Make it fun. When it flies off, it gives them a visual visualization of the sound. You go, try it and then tell your son to do it. And one thing that you can do, adding to it is a prompt. What is a prompt? A prompt is something that can help them, does more than the sound that you give them. It might be a tactile, like a touching. A visual like this one is also a cue. A question might be a cue as well. But, you know, I divert. Yeah, I talk too much. So What I do usually for P is like, I go. And then I give them like this, like that. Two fingers on the lip, fast release, okay? Doesn't matter if they don't understand it. It's something that you have to build up. Okay? Something like guilt build up. And F sound. I've done it a thousand times nearly now, probably F. If you're on this live before. You know, F sounds are very easy to do because it's basically a blow, right? You're blowing out, but you put. You retract your lower lip like this. There you have the F, right? You blow, you press on the lower lip, and then it becomes F. Never. That's something I see some teachers or parents do, is that they exaggerate the F sound too much. In the beginning, it might be still acceptable. But we never. We never, never, never go like this. All right? How do you even say something fast like that? Like, if I say fast, okay, that's. That's still okay, right? But what if the F is in the middle, right? Like Stephen, right? It would say Steven. Steven every time. That's actually a V sound. My bad. But you get what my point is, right? We never. We never speak like that. We speak very like, you see, like, we speak very fast by just putting the lip up a little bit to create the F sound. So when you're teaching the F sound, Everlyn, make sure that, you know, you teach your son how to blow. The P and the F are also like plosive sound. Sorry, The P is a plosive sound. The F does have some wind in it, you know, you need to blow it out. So teach him a blow that's F ready. Very easy. D is harder. Okay. I don't know how old your son is, Erlynne, but if I were teaching the D D sound, I would start with T first. See if they can do like that. Why? Because the T, you can. It's. There's more features to it because it explodes air out right after you teach, like you teach with the. With the. With the. With like a tissue, then it's very easy for you to change it into D. All you need to do is to make it even is to teach that the D is actually, like, here. It vibrates more and that you're using more. More. More strength on it. More. More power, basically. So I would tell if the child. You know, you do this when your child is a little older, that that's the problem with speech sounds, is that if you do it early, then you can correct them of the behavior sooner and the behaviors don't stick. But if you do it like later, then the problem is that the behavior has stuck already, but they understand totally about what you're saying. So if I were to tell a five year old kid who's doing D sound, I'll say, oh, it's just like the T sound without the air and a little stronger. So let's do it to get like T, duh. Like that. It'll be much easier. Okay, so for the D, I don't know how old your son is, Errolin. I don't know if there are other sounds that can help him. So I'm not gonna give any recommendations because I do not know enough. Okay, so that's cool. All right. So if you have any questions, you can always put them in the comments. I'm, I'm reading them. Just tell me, just ask me anything. And if you are someone like a parent who's trying to help your child to learn at home, what I really encourage you to do, especially if your child is still at the nonverbal phase, is that you go to agentsofspeech.com nonverbalguide with dashes in between. I put it in the description. Just go click it and download it. It's a whole process, a three step process that I've been using for online clients. Basically, I never see them. Right. I only teach the parents. Yeah, only teach the parents. And it's very easy for them to go through these three step processes. Obviously if you come to me or if I'm doing my own thing, I wouldn't use those because it's too elementary. If a therapist saw that three step process, they'd be like, what? You wouldn't. That's too little. Right. But for a parent who's learning, it's always good to be like encouraging to give something easier for them. So if your child is what I described in this video, you know, they can like sing or whatever use words, but not at you. What you need to do first is to get them to imitate on instructional command because if you can't, it's very difficult to work on their speech sounds, meaning their errors in their like when they talk. And, and also it will be difficult to actually teach them some language. Okay. So I would encourage you to teach them imitation. And how you teach it is basically you can go to agentsofspeech.com Nonverbal guide with dashes in between. Description box has the link. Okay, so Erlynne says back, okay, this is three years old already. Thank you so much. Oh, you're welcome. No problem. And she says she. He can't see. Say the D sound, but he can say, like. Okay. So you can say. Okay, he's. She's. Whoa, wait, let me get this straight. So he can say daddy as Addie. Are you. Is that right? Because Daddy has the D sound in the. In the front and also a D sound in the middle. So it would be impossible for him to not have a D sound. You know what I'm saying? If he can. If he. If she's. Sorry. If he says daddy as Aggie, you know what I'm saying? That means he has the D sound. Just doesn't know how to use it in the front. Yeah. Well, let me know if that's the case, Erilyn. If that's the case, then it's easy. Some easy stuff going on. Okay. Yeah. So yes. Okay. Erlin says yes. Right. So meaning if your child. Listen up. So this is. This is a great example. So he can't say. Let me put it up again. He can't see the D sound, but he can say Addie for daddy, meaning there's a D in the middle, but there's no D in front. All right. What I would tell you to do right now, Erlyn, is to see if you can do da. D Do. Right. D. He must. Because Dad D already is a D. Yeah. And the reason he can't do the phonics of D guessing is that it's too abstract for him. Okay, so I would start with, like, chopping the daddy into two syllables, which it already is, by the way. I'm just. What I mean is making it separate. Okay, so separate the two syllables. So you go da, like da and D. All right. Which is not the right vowel, but try that first. If you can say da and D, then you can go on to say Dee. Right. See if you can follow. See, this is why you need your child to really imitate what you say. Because if you can't, then how are you going to get your child to focus on this? Right. Yeah. All right, so try that. Separate it. See if you can say da and D or de and D, depending how you pronounce daddy in your. In your place. Okay. It was. If it was like United, United States of America. It's like da. Right. It's a different vowel. If it. You were in the uk, I would guess it would be like da. Right. It'll be a little bit D. Like that, A little different. But anyways, just do whatever what you're comfortable with how naturally you do with your kid. We're not here to talk about phonics or whatever, like linguistics, whatever. Not talking about that. Talking about practical stuff, how you can teach your child. All right, Ireland, no, no problem for English. I understand it totally. You know, if, if, if I could, I would only speak Cantonese, to be honest. But, you know, English is the language that most people do kind of understand. Okay. And, yeah, you know, most of the parents who watch me because of where I am. What's that called in terms of geographical location, do not really speak that language. My language. English or Cantonese or Chinese or whatever. Right. So it makes me very happy that, you know, despite our language barrier, there's still a lot of parents who, you know, reach out to me and ask me, and we speak in the language that, you know, you might not understand 100%. Right. There was a parent who is in Indonesia who tells me, oh, I need to use Google Translate to help understand some of the stuff that I say or I type. But since then, she told me that there's a lot of progress following some of the stuff that I say, which is humbling because I'm just a guy in front of a webcam or something, so. Hallelujah. We're getting to the last two minutes of our live today. We're only going for around 30 something minutes nowadays, but do let me know if you have any questions. I will stay for a little bit more. Okay. If there aren't, then, you know, that's cool. I'm just gonna end it here, but I just wanted to say thank you, everyone, for hanging out with me on this Monday night or Monday morning if you're in the U.S. right, or I don't know what ungodly hour is in the. In Europe. Okay. Oh, Erlin says, I'm in the Philippines. So, you know, she. This is what she says. Usually call our father's papa, but he can't say the P sound. That's why he calls Papa Addie. All right. Very easy, Pa. Should be very, very easy. If you just follow what I said just now about the P with the. With the tissue, it will be very easy to teach. Okay? P sounds are one of the earliest, earliest, earliest sounds that a child, a human. A human being will learn because it's very visual. If your child looks at your face, he will see that you're using your lips. If he doesn't know yet, use them tactile. Use some visuals. It should be fine. Tell me how it goes, Erlynne. Okay, so that's the end of our live tonight. Thank you. Thank you so much everyone for hanging out. If you have any more questions, just put it in the description or sorry, not description in the comments. If you haven't joined our Facebook group, which is I forgot the title, something like parent, like support group for parents with speech delay or something along those lines. And it says buy Ming phone or something. Okay, so that's all for tonight. Have questions, do let me know. This is how I do my life. And if you haven't, if you need to, if you need to teach your child how to imitate, you can go to agentsofspeech.com Nonverbal guide with dashes in between. It's right in the description box below. Go click it. Go download it. Let me know how the format is. You're very welcome, everyone. If you're saying thank you like erlynne and have a good night or good morning or afternoon, I don't know. Bye.