Does Asking My Child to Repeat Cause Echolalia

Does asking your child to repeat after you cause echolalia? I've got this question multiple times, and it's usually parents who have a child on the spectrum or suspected. And parents get really worried whether their child is actually on the spectrum or not. If you have the same question, please watch this video. So my name is Ming from agentsofspeech.com we teach parents how to teach their children at home. And so the first thing you have to understand is that echolalia isn't all that bad. That's the first point. Stick with me, because it's actually a developmental sign. All people, including you and I, we all echoed in order to learn a certain language, we had to copy. And this is a human thing that we imitate. When we imitate, we get better at a certain skill. We might not be able to make our own thing yet, but we keep on copying until we're good enough. We have a repertoire of words, of things, of actions. If you're learning instrument, you have a repertoire or licks of riffs that, that you internalize and then you can use flexibly. And that's the same as any other language or any other skill that we have on the on planet Earth. Secondly is that there's a differentiation between the types of echolalia that disordered and developmental. Right. So developmental just means that it's quite typical, happens with everyone. And echolalia does happen a lot with developing children. As the reason I just told you, it's just a part of learning. Right? So there are different types of echolalia. And I've made videos about this before. There's delayed echolalia, there's immediate echolalia, there's like tic, like echolalia, where someone says something, the child must repeat it. So usually the thing that parents are scared the most about is actually delayed echolalia, meaning the child will suddenly say something out of nowhere, with no context about something that they heard before, like a song, something from a video that they used triggered something in the brain and they decided to use it and so on. If you ask your child to keep on repeating, does it cause this kind of thing to happen? The answer is actually not really, because you have to understand the use of the language there. What do you mean by use? What's the function of them doing? Delayed echolalia is because they find it interesting and it triggered something in their brain to think about a certain situation from before, to use it in the situation now. If your child knew that at that point in time, they're not Supposed to say something like that, then they wouldn't do it. But the problem is they don't know what something is suitable or not suitable. Right. This whole world is dictated by small rules and hidden rules that aren't said explicitly. And even if said explicitly from adults, children will understand, especially if they're on the spectrum or if they're delayed. So what should we do in this situation is that we should model the correct response, given that your child already has the interest to vocalize and comment about something in the real world. Right. So in this case, what you want to do is to tell the child exactly what to say in that specific situation so that they can echo what you say, and it would be a suitable response. Okay. So a very good example would be when a child sees a train, they start singing Thomas the Train. Are they start talking about Thomas the Train. Right. At this point in time, parents would freak out and try to say, oh, no, that's not Thomas's train. Thomas at home. The worst thing you can do is to keep on talking about Thomas the Train. What you should be doing is to talk about what the train looks like, how many doors there are. Right. Who is on the train? Who's going onto the train. Right. Who is coming out of the train. Describe as much as you can. Okay. Describe as much as you can about the situation and see if he's. Or her. She would want to copy what you say. All right. Echolalia by itself, like we talked about, delayed echolalia. What about immediate parroting? You keep on parroting after you. If that is the case, then it means that your child doesn't have a lot of language skills. Because when children keep on repeating and looking for. You're looking at your mouth and stuff to look at what they're supposed to say. It means they cannot think for themselves, which is great because they're already prompting, asking for a prompt, meaning that they're trying to understand what word and sentences they should be using in the situation. And they're looking at you, and when you say something, it seems like they're always echoing. It means that they don't understand the situation, they don't want to say. Right. And especially if you ask a question and they parrot the question after you, then it means that you should stop, take a step back, and think about what is the optimal thing for them to say in the situation. All right, So I see a lot of questions. If I say a long sentence, my child will only echo. Will echo and then echo the last few words. I ask a Question. My child echoes the whole question. And it seems like there's no content, there's no back and forth conversation, as a lot of parents would say. And they would say, oh, I just hope that, pray to God, you know, that I can have a back and forth conversation with my child. But. But all I get is just like imitation after imitation. First of all, remember, you're already in a better spot than a lot of people. That doesn't mean that comparison is a good thing. I'm just saying if you're comparing, please compare down. You know, secondly is that it means to you there's a lot of work that you have to do at home at or at the therapy center to increase their base language skills. So if you have a child who is echoing a lot, it means that they don't understand the language that much. So. So what you have to do is go back and break down that language analytically. And I see a lot of parents say about, parents say, oh, Ming, you're trying to teach a child analytically. What about gestalt? I see a lot of speech therapists talking about it, and despite me making a few videos about it already, I still get questions about this. And I feel like, like the rationale behind therapists saying that, oh, your child is echoing phrases and sentences is because they're gestalt learner. Isn't really that the good reason? Because, like, at the end of the day, we do use gestalt phrases in real life, even if we're not on the spectrum or we're not delayed. Simply because it's something that is functional. All right? Simply because it's functional and we remember it that way. So we also go into scripts everyday life. We say, like, how are you doing? I'm good, thank you. These are scripts, these are gestalt. So back to the point. You have a lot of work at home to analytically break down if your child understands the sentence structures, right? Different sentence structures. How flexible can they use these sentence structures with different words and stuff, Right? And then what question types can your child actually understand? Is it that they don't understand the who questions or where questions? And I've said this multiple times on this channel and also in the free community that we have is that the who questions and where questions isn't question is just, who's this? Who is that? Where do you find, like, where do you cook? Or where do you go poo or whatever, or where do you go to school? These things are memorized. You don't have to have those. All Right. It's just an extended what question if you think about it. So the thing about questions is like question types after the what questions and what function questions. What is this for? Was a cup for drinking and stuff? The who and where. It starts to get children thinking. So I think the main question is, how do you get children to think without echoing immediately? And usually we start off with just doing who or where questions or even binary choice questions. It sounds crazy. Binary just means either or these two. Do you want this or that? Like to cut an apple, do you need a knife or a fork? And so these things get your child to use their brain instead of immediately imitating. And so, like, we need to start at that and that's what we need to work on. And also to get them to describe something with their own words analytically and flexibly in different sentence structures. That's how we get a child out of parenting. And so if you're thinking, oh, that's a lot of work, how do we get it now? It's impossible, I think, to get your child to stop parenting immediately. It's a lot of work. I think a lot of times when I see a client and a lot of times when parents, parents come to me online in our coaching programs, it would take around like at least three or four months to get rid of the, the immediate parroting because they're so used to imitating. And it feels. And I had this before, right? There was this child when I first came to Indonesia and there was a, a girl who was on a spectrum. She would literally copy my mouth movements word for word, sound for sound, what I'm trying to say in order to get what she wanted. She thought that all she needed to do was to copy me 100%, right? So it was like a. She was like a mirror of whatever I did. She tried to move. And then when I didn't move, when I didn't say anything, when I asked a question, she would get mad, Right? So for these kind of cases, it takes even longer because they've been so used to just trying to copy whatever you do just to. Just to make someone else happy to get what they want. And so you have to start thinking, okay, how long is this going to take? It's going to take a long time. What skills do I need to target? Why is my child imitating so much so on and so forth? I think that's it. Like for immediate echolalia and delayed echolalia, and most of the time those echolalia are actually developmentally sound. It Means like they should be doing that because they don't have the language to support it. And the delayed part is just that they don't have. They don't know the appropriate phrase or what's appropriate in terms of a social setting that we adults or just in general the whole world made up. Oh, we're not supposed to say that. It's not polite, it's not socially acceptable, so on and so forth. And it's strange, right? Need to be the person to teach what's suitable and not correct. Right. And that's something that will take a long time, especially if your child is on the spectrum and he or she's got a hard time understanding what other people think, how other people think about things. Right? And I see a lot on the Internet nowadays they say, oh, why don't you go to this? So we got to accommodate for people. Why is it not suitable? The thing is, yeah, despite everyone trying to advocate and educate, whatever, at the end of the day, if your child needs to come out to work, right, and maybe he's not going to be in the country that would be, you know, accepting of, of these sort of practices and there are some interests that he or she wants to do. Let me give you an example. I have a friend who loves, you know, who loves to cook. Right. But then the thing is, to get into culinary school there, there's a lot of, like, rules and a lot of whatever. What's going to happen, you're going to have to deal with it. Right. I have a friend who's a. Who's a director nowadays. Right. And the industry is just not accommodating for any type of, I would say, tardiness or whatever. Would someone actually with the industry accommodate for such, such actions and behavior? Probably not, but I digress. Okay, so this video was about Akolalia. I hope this answers your question in a very long way. Please. And this question came from our community. Someone asked it there and I decided to make a video. So if you want to go there and ask questions there, go to wwagents of speech.comcourse and fill in your email there. You'll get a link. We have courses all the way from zero, no words all the way to sentences and up. And a very vibrant community, I think the biggest on the Internet. We have 13,000 people there and I look forward to interacting with you there and seeing you there. All right, see you. Bye.