Does Your Child Need Talk Tools

Hey, so let's talk about talk tools. So talk tools is something that a lot of parents ask me about. And I've had this conversation, I think around 30 times now with clients about what they are, how we use it and why we use it, right. So a lot of people actually rely a little bit too much on talk tools. And if a child is diagnosed with like oral muscle weakness or sensory motor issues or articulation, sometimes people tend to lean towards talk tools because number one, there's concrete things to do. Because the manual itself, I have it somewhere and they covered, I don't know where it is. But anyways, you can download it all over the Internet, you can buy it and stuff and it gives a very solid framework. It's like a, you know those workout plans you get over the Internet, like oh, 10 times this, times 10, three sets of 10, whatever. And then you achieve a certain result, right? Oral motor wise. A lot of people think it's something that speech therapists specialize in. I don't really think so. And I'm going to tell you what my views on it is, okay? What it is, what I learned and tools is the true name, the long name is called oral placement therapy. So whenever you are doing an articulation, you're doing a sound. If you're a fellow speech therapist watching this, then you would know there's a manner and a place for making a sound. So let me give you an example. So, for example, the sound, right, the manner is that it's a fricative, meaning that it creates friction in the air. That's why you hear the sound, right? Or else there's no friction. You can't hear anything like a blow that there's zero friction or less thereof, right? And then the placement is where the tongue, the jaw, the lip, or we call articulators are, for instance, like s, the tongue. 80% of people will put their tongues at the bottom of their mouth. But then where the airflow comes out is between the tongue and what we call the alveolar ridge, which is like the hard bones on top of your mouth, which is behind your front teeth. So the tongue and the alveolar ridge creates this gap. Air goes through and you get the S, right? So top tools by its name or replacement therapy does not really help with the manner of which how the articulators will create the sound. What it does is that it teaches the placement where the articulator should be. And I think a lot of times people, even therapists, they don't really know this A hundred percent. And like I myself, I invested thousands of dollars learning all of this. And even if you learn it, like, for instance, there are levels in talk tools that they create a business out of, and I'm like, level one or two, I forgot. But basically it's $2,000 to take that. And then after that you get into level three, level four, level five, and then you can teach other people whatever. Even if you get the certificate of Level 1 and 2, doesn't mean you really, truly know that meaning behind it. And so, like a lot of times, the oral placement. Why is it called oral placement? Is because it's teaching the end user, your child or your client for that matter. By the way, if you're a speech therapist watching this, don't watch me, go find like me. I found like a 20 year experienced speech therapist to teach me stuff, supervise me and stuff. And that means finding jobs that have supervision. It's quite, it's hard to find. And number two, it's also a hit on the ego because you're a speech therapist and you need to find someone who's smarter and more experienced than you. Anyways, all in all, if you're a speech therapist, go find someone more qualified than I am. Okay? But this kind of information is for parents, made for parents. Okay? A lot of parents ask me, oh, should I use talk tools? Oh, the therapist says, there's automotive problem, right? But the problem is a lot of the times there are dimensions to oral motor deficits. And then we call it like strength, coordination, and range. Those are the three things that we look at. You might take a look at your assessment report and you'll see these few things, right? But then what goes into it is that we all go into a symptomatic approach, meaning, oh, if we don't have enough range, we'll do more range. If we have enough strength, we'll do more strength. If we don't have enough coordination, we'll do more coordination. But the problem is you do not need perfect range, you do not need perfect coordination or whatever to make speech sounds. Okay? And I'll make an analogy here. I'll talk about a story as well later on. For instance, given that people need to learn how to jump, you don't need a lot of strength to jump, all right? As long as it's functional. But if you're gonna have to dump, then of course you're gonna have to work on all those, like, range, motion, strength, coordination, all those. Right? But functionally speaking, if you're just doing like a Small jump or that you're going upstairs, right? You do not need to push all those to the maximum. And similarly, if you're speaking, you don't need 100% range, 100% strength, 100% coordination to make the sounds that I'm making right now. A very good thing that a lot of parents ask me all the time is tongue tie, lip tie. And everyone to a certain extent has a lip tie and a tongue tie. As the degree of which the severity that makes it, that does it hinder speech production. I'm using some words that like professionals use here, but what basically it means is how bad is the speech tie? Does it create a problem for a child or a person to speak? So if you don't mind looking at my mouth, I also have a tongue tied to a certain extent. I also have a lip tie to a certain extent. If you can see that there's this membrane, just yesterday a parent was like, oh, my child mispronounces some words. And then some people say that it might be to do with the tongue tie or whatever. To be honest, I don't think so. Because like, tongue tie only affects certain sounds to do with the tongue going to certain places. And moreover, cha can actually stick his tongue out. All right? If the tongue tie is going to create a problem, most of the problems come from if the tongue cannot go up, make like L sounds, T sounds, N sounds, those ones. If it doesn't, it probably should be fine. And there's not much of a need to do the surgery to remove that said tongue. But going back to the whole thesis of what talk tools is about, going full circle back now. The reason why we do talk tools is that to teach where the articulators go, and then some parents will say, then why do we do like Z vibe or two sets, like things that normalize the sensory of them. And I was just having this conversation with one of our coaches today. And obviously not everyone, even in our own company, even in our own clinic, going to have their own inclinations about how to do therapy? And this is where the stickiness comes from. Like for me, why we do a lot of these sensory things is because when we talk about sensory motor problems, sensory always comes first, right? I always give the example. And maybe you've heard me say this before. If you go to the dentist and you come back with a numb mouth from the painkillers or whatnot, you can't really talk and you start drooling, why is that? Because you lost the sensory and your muscles don't know where to go. Your articulators don't know where to go. So it's the same with children who are having these sensory problems. Okay? So we have to normalize it. So either your child is too sensitive or not sensitive at all. And therefore we need to do that in order to help them. That's the first point. But the second point is even more important, is that if we're trying to teach the placement of the articulators, if they're too sensitive for us to prompt in any shape, form, or manner, then how are we going to teach anything? Right? So obviously, children don't like having foreign objects stuffed into their mouth. They don't even like you touching their mouth, for that matter. Right? So then by desensitizing the area around and inside their mouth, it would make a lot of sense because it's a stepping stone towards the prompts and the cues that we will use to create the placements. Right. If we don't do that, then it's going to be super hard. It's just going to be like you're going to say without any prompts. And then once you touch their mouth, they get defensive and they don't want to learn anymore. So then this is something that we have to do first to get the sensory to a point where we can at least touch physically their mouth. And some people that I've seen in the YouTube comments, Whenever we show, like us teaching children, they'll be like, oh, my God, you're so in the face if you're touching their mouth. Okay. How else are you going to teach someone the placement and basically showing them where it goes right? By physical. Because if you're going to use language, it's going to be hard. As if you've ever worked out, you're trying to learn to move or you go to yoga, right? The yoga teachers. I'll put your head behind, I don't know, like underdog position or whatever. And then the words only go so far. It's only when the teacher, the coach comes over and like, puts shoved your head down, right? And then you're like, oh, this is what you mean. So it's the same in speech therapy as well. The next point is that a lot of speech therapists out there, especially in Southeast Asia region, they feel talk and the misconception of a speech therapist. Oh, my God. You're going to do some like, oral motor stuff with my child, right? To fix the speech? Yes and no. It depends on what the diagnosis of the speech disorder is. Right. So if you see a therapist that just only does talk tools without giving you a proper reason behind it, then, like, you gotta be careful. All right. I'm really, truly saying it from the bottom of my heart that I've seen many therapists around Southeast Asia. They just. I'm not attacking, right? I'm just saying from my limited understanding and knowledge, I'm sure when people who are like 30 years ahead of me would see me and say, oh, what the heck is this guy doing? And I'm all for learning, man, if you think so, please teach me. But what I'm trying to say is you cannot have top tools to address automotive deficit. A lot of times it's a step down because a child cannot speak. And that's the only thing that we can get a child to do. And that's okay, right? But are there other things that we can tackle upon? Because a lot of times nowadays people want to do like, text, like picture exchange, communication systems, or like they're using an iPad or communication device and talk tools. By all means, it looks like real work, as if you're like working out your child's mouth or whatever. So it gains a lot of popularity that way. So at the end of the day, the reason for all the talk tools and stuff is to get your child ready, sensorily speaking, right. Motorically speaking, to know where the placement is, right? It's a step down. And it's also a cue and a prompt to teach your child how and where to put their articulators, the jaw, lip and tongue, where it's supposed to be, and help as much as you can. So there are limitations to. To talk tools because if we're talking about consonants, we. We have loads of ways to prompt consonants with or without top tools. Because the, like, consonant is just putting the articulators at the right place. You try to teach the manner, as I was saying, right? Just put your tongue below. Like this is the verbal cue for S. For S sounds. Put your tongue at the bottom of your mouth, right? And then blow. I'm trying to translate that from Chinese because I'm thinking Chinese right now. But anyways, like, blow air out and then make a snake or whatever. So put a tongue down, all right? Close your jaw and then hiss it out like a snake like that. So if a child is already pretty far down the line with language, they would take that cue and they would probably be able to do it. There's loads of ways to ask. They've got a butterfly method. There's a bunch of stuff online, if you check it out. So Talk Tools is only one of them. Right. To help. And why we use it is because if a child is non verbal, they can't take the verbal cues. Right. So then using an apparatus or a tool to facilitate them, to make them understand the placement is going to make sense. But where talk tools fall short is teaching. Because they use graded jaw blocks, bite blocks that bite on it, and it creates a bigger jaw I got. So it's basically just like a wrench or whatever, just to keep the jaw at a certain height, certain, like a size. And then what you do there is that for instance, if you do, ah, you make the biggest block on it here. But the problem is, I want to tell you, vowels are dictated by the tongue, not really by the jaw. So obviously when the jaw drops, your tongue is going to drop as well. But it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be the same sound. So I'm going to demonstrate. If I do E like that, E, obviously the jaw is clenched up and then you spread your lips and go e. But I can also do E like this, right? And it sounds similar. And obviously if you do like a vid, like an audio graph or whatever, it's going to be a little different. But I didn't need to put my jaw at the highest position, like here, right? Like clenching it, like biting down. Right. I didn't need my lips. In fact, I could do E like that as well. And when we talk, we don't really do that. Why? Because our tongue does most of the work for vowels. So then Talk Tools, where it falls short is that it's pretty difficult to prompt. And that's not a bad thing. Like that's not like a jab to Talk Tools. It's getting as close to what we can do for the child for vowels already. Right. Because at the end of the day, what can we do? Can we put a device in someone's mouth? Like a senior speech therapist who taught me the talk tool said, ah, I wish that there was like an item that deals with tongue positions for vowels or whatever. Just shove it in and then they'll go, that'd be awesome. So we don't have that just yet, I believe. I don't know if anyone's doing any of this kind of work, but at the end of the day, this is me trying to tell you, and this is my summary here. I know I've gone on a whole tangent trying to teach you about something, is that Talk Tools is really oral placement. Therapy, right. Oral placement is about like, when we're teaching a certain sound, there's the place and the manner of how we create the sound. Once we know the place and manner, usually person will be able to do it. So let me give you one more example. For instance, the tongue thrill. A lot of people don't get the placement, putting the tongue up there. But then the manner of letting your tongue relax and flop like that is the problem. So talk tools cannot really teach you the flopping of which the manner, but it'll tell you where their tongue should be. So other than that, I think a lot of people focus on like oral motor as a way to get a child to speak. You don't need perfect oral motor to create, to do stuff like, to talk. In a lot of cases, I've seen children who have like tongue ties, lip ties, whatever, they speak totally okay. I've seen like children who have or weak oral motor. They speak. Well, it's. It really depends on what's going on. And a lot of times, like speech disorders, there. There are two facets to it, if you're into it there phonology and phonetics, right? So phonology is like the understanding of the sound. So if a child cannot really tell between if they got the sound right or wrong, then it's more of a phonological thing because they cannot perceive it the way that is supposed to be. And phonetic is more on the oral motor, the articulation side, where they don't know where to place, don't know the manner of the sounds. So at the end of the day, if you're watching this and you're thinking, should you use talk tools? I think, why not? But it needs to be a specific thing paired with a specific outcome, which most of the time is a speech sound that you're targeting. You shouldn't do talk tools just based on I want to get my child to talk, it needs to be paired with a speech sound. If you're doing like biting up and down, like with your child with the chewy tube, what kind of speech sounds are you pairing it with? Right. You cannot just do it just because it's good for you. But, oh, I'm doing a 10 squats a day for what? Right? Oh, I'm training to do what? I'm training to be able to stand up from a chair. If we're talking someone coming out of rehab, then a physiotherapist will tell you, oh, you need to do these squats because it targets this, that, this, and so that I'll help you to get up from the chair. And the same as speech therapy, if you are doing like tongue elevation, stuff like that, why are you doing oh, because your child cannot do the L sound. And I'm, I'll be okay with it. If you're blowing into the tube without a clear speech sound. If you're blowing into, I don't know, recorder or whatever, usually we're trying to target like some aspiration, like those sounds or K sounds. When you blow, the base of your tongue goes up. Right. That's just how the physiology works. Right. So the hope is that once they and prime them doing the same thing over and over again, then when they do the real thing, it'll help them. It's just like when someone learning how to do a pull up. Sorry, I know 90% of you guys are female, so I'll just try my best to give you an example that you might understand. So if like before I go on the pull up bar, I do a few of these to activate the muscles. The think about, oh, I'm supposed to pull it this way, right? I'm supposed to pull it towards my chest and then when I go up, it may help me. It was priming me to do it. It's helping me to understand, oh, I'm supposed to do it like that. Okay. So I think that's all the rant I have about talk tools. If you have any more questions. And these questions come up a lot. And the reason why I do these videos is because like people talk about it inside of our community. So if you have questions you want directly addressed, go to agentsofspeech.com course you'll get a link to join the community with 15,000 parents inside. You make a post, you ask about it. If I need more time to explain something, I will make a video about it. And usually other parents will answer questions too there and point you towards the correct direction about how to do things and stuff. We have loads of courses there. Do a search. Most probably 90% of the time your questions have been answered before. Okay, so that's it for now. Thank you for tuning in. If you want to please watch the next video here. All right, bye.