Finding Out the Child's True Ability | www.agentsofspeech.com

All right, so we're live again on Monday. Just a quick one before we head to our bed, if you're in Asia. So today I want to talk about finding out a child's true ability. What does that mean? So a lot of times when I talk to parents, one. One of the things that parents will say is that, oh, he or she can do that. Oh, he can do that already. He can do this. He can do whatever. This he knows already. Oh, I'm sure you don't have to check anymore. You know, you really don't have to. And a lot of times that's what I hear. And when I try out and I show the parent that, you know, like, the kid can't do it, and then the mom would say, oh, oh, maybe he's. He's just a little bit tired. He's not feeling it, whatever. Right? So that you have to think about if a therapist, or shall we say a clinician in that matter, like we like to call ourselves clinicians, right? Because it's clinical. It's a clinical setting in a clinic. That's why it's clinician. But anyways, so if a clinician has been seeing children and doing assessments for children for a very long time, then, you know, usually he or she already has some capability of finding out the capabilities of a kid. Right? And as a controlled environment. So if your child can or cannot say it, you know, like, you have to understand, children like us, we. Our capabilities will fluctuate. You know, sometimes we can do it, sometimes we can't. Sometimes we feel scared, sometimes we feel very calm, and we can perform. It's the same for everyone. All right? So if your child cannot perform during those times during your assessment and you feel like your child's data has been misrepresentated, then, you know, like, that's fine, because everyone has the same chance. First of all, right? Everyone goes to the therapist. Everyone gets the same assessment. So therefore, it's the same as you going to do a test. And that day, you weren't just in a good mood and you scored lower. Right. So is that the test problem? Not really. Yeah. And, you know, like, everyone has a range of capabilities, and it's the therapist's job to try and extract the highest of the capability to know exactly how they are. Like, just like a glimpse, right? You cannot see the whole picture, obviously, from like, one or two hours. And that's what a lot of parents are saying to me. Right. Okay. There are extreme cases where, you know, some people are, like, after one or Two minutes. And then the person will say, oh, yeah, your child has autism. Right. And that's alarming. That's not cool. That's not nice. But at the same time, if your child goes through two hours of assessment and he cries through it, you have to bear in mind that a lot of other kids are doing the same, you know, and the scale is. The scale is put so that everyone has the same chance, right? So what is a true ability? So we can only guess, right? We can only try our best to like, take out the best of a child's ability, right. So what can we do? So usually we make things very fun. We make things what we call obligatory, meaning as making the child wanting to talk to us obligated and naturally wanting to. Right. If that doesn't happen, we start to use, like, rewards and so on, which we talk a lot about a lot. But let me tell you a story up to now, right? So I was writing an email to, like, my email list. If you haven't joined our emailing newsletter, you can go to agents of Speech.com. scroll to the bottom and you can join there. All right. What it is, is that when I was another city doing some consultations, a mother was telling, was couldn't control one of the child, her child, her son. She was like, going around opening all our stuff and just like rolling on the sofa and everything and not really concentrating. And whilst it is my job to. To handle him, the problem was that he was really disruptive. Okay. And when I asked, oh, do you guys have any, like, is he always like this? Do you have any behavioral intervention, like style stuff going on inside of your therapy? Because the mom was the chief therapist at home, which is a good thing. And then the mom was like, oh, no, we did ABA before and I think we've graduated from it. And we don't use rewards. We don't have schedules anymore. And I was like, but at the same time, why wouldn't you want one if it makes the. The therapy harder than it should be, Right? So that's not your child's true. The true, true ability. I cannot say that he can't do certain things because he hasn't shown me exactly what. What he does. Right. It's very hard for me to set a goal that is effective if I don't see that that kid's true ability. Right? So at the end of the day, you need to have. You need to have that. You really need to find, like to. In order to do that, you always need to put behavior first because if you don't put behavior first and your child's always like falling, falling off the chair, you know, giving you faces, always, you know, you're pulling him, you're kicking him, and he moves a little bit, then it's just bad form, you know, like, it's really hard to do any form of teaching if that's the case. So remember, behavior always comes first. If behavior is okay, and then you teach immediately, okay? If the behavior goes down, you do it again. So you need to always manage behavior first. Don't think about other things for now. And a lot of times what happens is like, oh, my kid is not in a good mood today, right? My kid is, you know, like, if he's in a good mood, he can do it, then that means he can't do it. You know, if he needs to be in a good mood in order to do it, that means he doesn't quite respect the time that we're using to teach him. That's first of all. And second of all is that he doesn't really know why he has to do all of this stuff, okay? And third of all, he doesn't see a reward at the end of the day, right? He doesn't feel rewarding, okay? So you have to remember that so many kids just when, when, when the. When the parents say according to the mood, they're lazy, what does that mean? Is actually their behavior isn't well managed. There isn't a momentum going on in therapy. Like, it's always, they do something, it breaks the momentum, they go somewhere else, and that becomes like really hard to get them back. So I'm always a big fan of behavioral management, right? Behavioral modification. Despite many people who are like online and saying, oh man, ABA like ruined a lot of people's lives or whatever. Well, AB is only part of whatever, right? Every type of therapy that we interact with a kid is a type of behavioral therapy. Because behavioral therapy is the level that we use is behavioral. It's between humans, right? You might have something higher. That's cognitive therapy. But that's when you can use language to help a child understand things, right? So there's social, cognitive is higher up there. But behavioral therapy always has its place because everything that worked started there, right? You didn't have biomedical, which is the lower than behavior that you give medicine or whatever. At the end of the day, you still need behavioral therapy to a certain extent. And a lot of people mix like ABA and behavioral therapy. ABA is a specific kind of behalf therapy. Speech therapy is something that we do Behaviorally. At the behavioral level, same as occupational therapy, physiotherapy. Everything that involves interacting, moving around by itself is by itself at the behavior level. All right? So I have to remember that. Okay. So that's why. I mean, when you're doing therapy, it always starts with. With what's the behavior right now? It's enough. Is it good enough for me to go in and teach the kids something? If it's not, think about how to build it up. So it doesn't mean always, like sitting on a chair, doing some structured tasks or whatever. It could be just play. So another parent just talked to me. She's in our membership. And what she asked was like, oh, how about. What's that called again? Dir. Floor time. Right. Dir. Floor time. So Dir. Floor time is very difficult for parents to actually administer because it's not structured enough for you to really know what's going on. And you need to do a lot of analysis on the fly. Right. And it sounds complicated and all. And all that stuff and all that jazz. Well, there are a lot of theory behind it. But when you do it, someone does it in front of you. You feel like, oh, what, you're just playing with a kid. Right. But actually, you don't know is, like, when you need to play with a kid, you need to be quite imaginative yourself, and you need to be. It takes practice. That's what I mean. Right. It doesn't take a certain type of person to do it. You just need to do it over and over again. Right. So for dir. Floor time, it's still to do with behavior. It's thinking about how to create routines. Right. How to create opportunities for communication, which is exactly what we're looking for. It's just in a more naturalistic way on the floor. It's called floor time. Yeah. And that's why it's harder for parents to administer, because there's no main structure for the parent to follow. Whereas, you know, like, ABA is. So. It's so popular because it's so easy for parents to understand as well. Right. It's for. Very easy for you to administer. Okay. So whether a true ability. How can you find it? There are different ways. There are many ways to skin a cat. And, you know, like, it doesn't matter if you just, like, use it in a very structured way or in a playful way on a. Whatever way. You have to make it so that your child wants to communicate with you and feel obligated to do so. Right. And that really depends on you if your child is Always trying to run away, trying to do things, you know, trying to slip off onto the floor, you know, just ignore you when you say something. Then you're. The thing that you need to think about right now is not how to teach him, but how to get him to like or her to really concentrate and be with you. All right? And you can. You can do this by buying a new toy that really motivates your child to like to study with you, to play with you and learn with you. You can also use rewards. Very easy, very straightforward. Number three. You can create a lot of routines that we always talk about, but at the end of the day, if your child has a bad behavior, you need to find someone to teach you. That doesn't need to be me. It can be anyone. So remember that first. Right. Behavior first. And then my behavior is, okay, go teach. Right? Because you don't have a lot of time. It's not always about making them conform and become a robot. Right. That's why people are saying therapy is making my kids so compliant. It's like a robot. Yeah. If it is, then it's great. Then, you know, then you can move on to the next step and make it more naturalistic. Right. Therapy doesn't just stop there, okay? It's a means to an end. You get a person like that, and then you can go to the next level. Right. So I hope this makes sense. Tapping into a child's true ability is very important, and knowing what is a true ability is also important. So let me just recap before I head off real quickly. So first thing is this. First thing is this. A child's true ability will shift. Okay? Sometimes when you see him or her in an assessment, it might feel like, dude, he knows that. How come you're not saying it? So it's a different environment, therefore, that's hard. Right? So if you. If I. I can speak like this on the camera because I've been practicing live for a long time, like, maybe at two years now. But when I started, it was. I couldn't. I needed to write things down. I needed to, like, right now, just think of three points, and I start talking. Right? And if this was, like, when I was, like, during my first job, I can do it with one parent, but when I had to, like, do a talk in front of, like, 10 parents, I started to stutter. I couldn't remember what I was trying to say. You know? You get what I mean, right? So as the stress increases, your language and, like, everything, your performance just decreases. So it's very normal. So don't always think that, oh, no, my kid can do this, but he's not showing. It happens to, even for us all the time. All right? And that's fine because all. All children are put on the same scrutiny when they're at an assessment. So that's taken care of. Right? That's. That's the same playing field for everyone. Okay? And then the second thing is you have to remember that if your child isn't showing true ability because there's a behavioral problem, then you have to deal with it first. Okay? That's the most important thing. It doesn't matter what method you use, whether if it's like strictly aba, behavioral therapy, whatever, as long as it works. Okay? So that's it for tonight. Today's live, and I'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye.