Friday Live: Keeping Your Speech Delayed Child Calm
Ming from Agents of Speech shares how to keep children with speech delay or autism calm through prevention, protection, and teaching. Remove sensory triggers like loud noises and uncomfortable clothing, keep them in supervised settings while skills develop, and use gradual exposure, social stories, and role-play instead of punishment.
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All right, today we're going live Friday live. I decided to change from Facebook to actually using Instagram. So the reason why, I don't know. I feel like it today. So gonna use Instagram live from now on for a bit. I'm gonna tell you guys on Facebook if you do see me. But this today, this live, it's about calming your child down. Okay? What to do when your child is angry all the time, especially if he or she is speech delayed. There's not a lot of things you can say to calm a child down, right? There really isn't. So what should we do in this situation? First of all, as I always say, and I try to tell and try to do as well, is to prevent. To prevent anything that will make your child angry. All right, and what does that mean? What does that mean? So, for instance, if you know that if you do a certain thing that will make your child angry, you better stop it. You know, it's just not fun to let your child go through those. Those things that will make them irritated, okay? And it's just the same as any human. Just do not do the things that make them angry. And you might think that the things that make them, like, grumpy or, like, angry are, like, illogical, right? So. But then the thing is, the thing is, if you. That's what you think, you can never understand how a child feels. Okay, let me give you an example. Okay? So one of the child, one of the students that I have, well, obviously they're not coming now, right? But what was happening before was that he would always look at a certain place in the room and he would cover his ears. So we were thinking, what's happening? So basically, it's because of a certain sound over there that we cannot really hear that well. So what happened was that it was actually a vibration on the wall. And because of that, he got very distracted. He got super distracted, and we couldn't do any work. All right, so fast forward till now. And I was like, hey, that's so stupid. I couldn't even hear the vibration. Maybe he did. Maybe I had heard a little bit. Okay, so fast forward till now. I'm sitting here. So what happens at this, at my place is that, you know, my neighbor turns on the aircon, and then it vibrates my wall, and then it gets into my ears, right? So I've been sitting here for, like, hours every day, just working, right? And I realized that, you know, hey, actually, the vibration really irritates me, and it sends some, like, deep vibration into my My, my head. Right. So if you think about it like, I, I am rather sensitive as a person. Meaning like my sensory inputs, they do make me feel tired. Everything. But what if it's a, a child on a spectrum, right? What if it's a child on spectrum where there's sensory, like they're very sensitive to outside information. Right. Then what do you do about it? Okay. So you have to be careful. So when you bring a child to a mall, let's say, or you bring a child to outside, which will be a lot less now. Right. And that's why our parents are saying like, oh, my child's super calm now. Yeah. Because most of the children who are sensitive love staying at home. Right. So what you need to do then is to prevent whatever that will make your child grumpy. And what I mean by that is a few things. Number one, if your child is sensitive towards sounds, what you should do is to put mufflers on the ear, things that block out the sound if you know that he's going to be very grumpy. And most of the time after he these huge sounds, these huge things like huge sensory inputs, people get very tired. Okay? So I don't know about you. I don't know about you. For me, that is actually like huge sounds, like really loud. If I go to concert, my eardrums start to rattle, right? It's literally, it's. There's a vibration. I can hear the bones inside rattling. Apparently it's because my bones are loose or something, I don't know. But it really irritates me. After something like that. I really need to rest, okay. Because it's too much sensory. Okay. For other people, some of my friends, it's actually scent. So some people, they don't like a certain smell and they would go away. Some of them are like light, right? So some of my friends, they don't like going to the beach because it's too bright and they don't like putting on sunglasses. So you need to know what irritates your child. What irritates your child and then stop doing that, okay? Just don't do it. Just try to avoid it. Because when you avoid it, you can actually teach. Whereas if you don't avoid it, what will happen is that they will get so irritated you cannot teach anything. That's why your child, a child, a speech delayed child, actually works better in a clinic because, you know, it's just four walls, it's very quiet, there's usually no windows. If there are, there will be curtains, right? And we try to put no scent on the. In the clinic room. We try to wear shirts where it's not like, very colorful and like, boom, like that. Especially stripes, you know, Stripes. Wearing stripes is a big no with children on the spectrum. And I try not to do it because you never know what they're. They're scared of. You never know what triggers them. Their sensory needs, Right? So try not to wear stuff, especially those, you know, like the people who wear, like a visual illusion on their. On their shirts. You know what I'm saying? Like a spiral. And then when you move your head, it changes the thing. Hey, don't do that. If you're with a child who has, like, who's on the spectrum, all right? At the very least, you need to know if they're okay with it or not, right? Or else they're gonna look at it for, like, I don't know how long, and another one is like, you know those shirts where, you know, you can go like that, and then it turns in a different pattern when you swipe it up and you swipe it down. Those are actually big nose as well, because back then I had a female colleague who had those, like, blingy blingy shirts, right? And then the kid would just, like, keep on playing with it. And then one day it broke and the child was angry and the therapist was angry because, you know, the. The shirt is owned by the therapist. And then the kid doesn't get to play anymore. Right. Hey. Yeah, so. Hey, man. Thanks for joining. On Instagram, usually I do this on Facebook, but I realized that I don't know why Facebook isn't putting out the live action as much as I want to, but Instagram, I get a little bit more. So I. I guess I'm just going to do on Instagram from now on. So. Yeah. And why, like, after you prevent all of these things, right. After you prevent all the sensory needs, and then you have to start to prevent and protect your child from potential threats. Okay, so what I mean by threats. So for instance, social is a very big one, especially if your child is already mature saying that they're like, in primary school, secondary school, if you don't protect your child, no one will actually do it. Hi. Good morning, Tiorina. Did I get it right? So I'm actually doing on YouTube as well. You can go check it out. And I've got a new video up as well, so it's Agents of speech. That's the YouTube channel. Cool, cool. So if you don't protect them, then you're making them vulnerable to a lot of things that they don't know how to handle. Okay? So number one thing I always tell parents to be careful of is do not put them in the situation where they will fail. Okay, let's give you example. So for instance, back in the day in my first job, we were teaching a child how to like be okay with criticism. And the problem was the dad kept on giving him criticism, thinking that it will numb the child or they will learn from mistake or they will feel okay from now on. But the problem is that little boy who was in primary like three at the time, now he should be very old. Yeah, he should be like secondary or something. But anyways, if you do that all the time, it's not going to work because most of the children on the spectrum, they don't learn from their mistakes because once you get them angry, they're pissed off, they don't listen to you anymore, right? So what you. The number one thing about like training a child who is, who needs like special help, right, is that you don't make them. You don't let them allow them to fail. All right? Once you allow them to fail and you keep on doing it, they're not going to want to do it with you anymore. They would rather just stay alone, right? There's no reason why they should listen to you because you're not helping at all. Okay? So don't let them fail. Do not let them fail at all. So let me give you an example of that. That boy back in the day, he was actually having quite some. He couldn't take criticism, right? So his dad kept on saying him, hoping that he will learn. And whenever he got angry, the dad just kept on criticizing the kid, right? So that never works. So what we did instead was to systematically. The key word is systematic because you need to remember all children on the spectrum or speech delay children, they don't understand things that well. They cannot put things into rules, right? They cannot learn things by just watching, right? If they did, they wouldn't be delayed. That's just the end of it. If they understood why they needed to do things, they wouldn't be delayed at all. So that's why you have to teach things systematically or else they won't understand anything. Okay, so back to that story of that primary school kid who is now in secondary and he's pretty cute. So what we did was first of all, we let him know that we tell him a structure. We tell him that, hey, if you don't get angry, we tell Him a social story first. Hey, so there was one day, there's this kid called Tom. And then someone said that, Tom, your hair looks messy. It's ugly. Tom got mad and kicked the classmates. And then that's not cool. Because, you know, it's not the same degree of violence, right? It's not. Someone just said something. Doesn't mean you have to punch them, right? And we can say that to a lot of adults in this world too. But anyways, so we tell them a social story. We let the child identify whether it's cool or not cool. And so the kid says, oh, of course it's not cool, right? You're not supposed to kick someone because someone criticized you with words. That's just crazy. So once you do that, he can identify, then you can move on. You can talk about more about. You can talk about. Do some role plays, right? Do some role plays within the context and make sure that you have rewards in place. That's why we always talk about having rewards instead of punishment. Rewards work a lot better, just like 100 times better. So when you use rewards as a way to help your child calm down, that's the best, right? So number one is always to prevent. Remember that if you can prevent it, prevent it. Number two is that you cannot trigger your child without having some system in place, okay? What I mean by system is that you have to teach them. You have to teach them first. You cannot trigger them and hope that they will learn from the mistakes. It's just impossible like that, okay? So what you need to do is, number one, you might need to do some social stories if your child already understands language. If not, you have to systematically increase the amount of trigger so that they don't feel overwhelmed. All right? So one thing you can do, one thing you can do is, let's say, let's say right now I have a client who doesn't. Who didn't like. I had a client who didn't like cutting his hair off, right? So I did like a whole video about it, I think. I don't know where I put it. But anyways, so what was the problem with cutting the hair was that every time when the dad and the mom would cut the hair, would cut their hair, use a razor, right? They would, like hold the child down, right? And like squeeze them and get it done. Because the child was like, ah, and it's dangerous with like the razor, right? So what happened was that every time he had to cut his hair, the parent would like, lock him down, okay? And we have like, Actually, I had two clients like that, right? We solved one of them in my clinic room. But it wasn't really generalized towards like. I hope so. The problem was that. The problem was that it was too much. There was. It's not systematic, okay? So how I solved it was that I slowly increased the demand for the him, okay? So I didn't trigger him instantly. I told him that, hey, listen, just touch the razor, all right? Just touch it. Put it on your hand, right? Go put it on a cat, on a doll. See, it doesn't do anything. Put it on me. Put it on my hair. See, I'm not screaming. You put it on your hair. And you systematically move up here and then you go up here. So you see, it's very systematic. You cannot think that. Oh, it doesn't matter to me because remember, everyone has different sensory needs, right? To me, something might be too high pitched. To you, it might be okay. And it might as to do with your age as well, right? As you age, you are less sensitive towards sound. So for the child, you have to understand that once they get sensory overloaded or they get scared and it becomes a trauma. And what happens is that they try not to. They try not to experience again. That's why they're running away, okay? Same as those my friends who cannot swim till this day at this age, at my age, because they had a drowning experience. So something did make them traumatized the whole situation. They don't want to swim anymore. Same as your child. Is there anything that you bring out, like, I don't know, like a beating stick and they would get very scared. Yeah, because they're conditioned to be scared already by you. So you have to be careful. You have to systematically decrease the sensitive sensitivity. And it's called desensitization. You can check it out and it works on any one, to be honest, because you're just systematically increasing how much they can actually like tolerate at the situation, right? In psychology, they have a thing called flooding. Meaning instead of systematically doing it, they. You do it in one go. Let's say you're very scared of rats. You put yourself in a, in a cage of rats and you stay there for a bit. That's cool. But you have to remember, remember, flooding doesn't work that well in the long run because you, for a child, it's not that it's. It takes some, you know, it takes some courage to do it. So it's very difficult. It's very difficult. So the, the point of this live today is to tell you if there's anything that makes your child angry, try to avoid it to your best of your ability. Avoid it, prevent it, protect your child. Sometimes it's like the sounds in the mall. Sometimes it's like children who bully your own child, right? Some of them are like social situations. When you put your child in a situation at the risk that they will get criticized. And that's why most of the time, not because I'm a Christian or anything, I say that, hey, put your child into like a cell group instead of putting them in kumon or something where they are like in a sports game where it's super competitive and children do get kind of nasty to each other. If you put yourself, if you put your child in a cell group or like a child's group for a church or something, or whatever religion, I don't know. At the very least there are rules and people who are supervising, who are, who have a set of morals that you're comfortable with, who won't make fun of your child and it's a safe environment. So if you can do that first, then you know, that'd be great. And you might ask me, hey, Ming dude, you're putting your child in a greenhouse. How are they gonna thrive and you know, and grow because you're so protective? Well, the thing is, if you don't protect your child, who's going to protect, right? And if, if once you don't like, you put them out there, it's very difficult to control what's going to happen to them. All right? And the reason why we want to do that is because even though we don't want to put them in a greenhouse, right, it's not forever. We need to systematically, slowly make sure that, you know, they don't, they don't dysfunct, they don't like, they don't do anything wrong outside. Hey. Good. Good morning. REDXX19 hi. Yeah, yeah. So the rationale behind it is like for instance, if you're taking a species of plant, right, you're taking a plant that's not supposed to be like planted, let's say in Indonesia. What do you do? What do you do? You put, it's in a greenhouse, right? Where? Hi. Hi. Ira. Christy. Hi. Sorry if I get your names wrong. So you put them in the greenhouse so they don't die in the climate outside. And you should do the same with your child until they get used to it. They evolve, right? That's how plants do it. They evolve and then they get used to the environment. Whereas plants, they take forever but us humans, we take much faster, right? And you have to understand that if your child right now is on the spectrum or is delayed in any shape or form, they don't, they don't have the tools yet to do it themselves, okay? You have to help them. You have to protect them from the sensories, the socials, you know, the awkward situations, the bullying, the bullying. And then you will have to teach them slowly, systematically increase in a way like how I talk about teaching, like cutting the hair, right? Going to the toilet. You don't let them fail. You keep on teaching them and helping them so that they know. So that they know that in the long run, mom, dad or a therapist is going to help me with all these problems, all these difficulties. And they get shielded from a lot of the things that will make them fail. Because once they fail, they don't think anymore, they get mad, right? They get mad and they don't think with their brains anymore, right? And they get very emotional. Okay? So that's all I wanted to share today. Okay? Number one is always to prevent it if you can, right? Protect your child. Number two is systematically increase what you want to teach your child, okay? Do not trigger them too much in one go because that never works. That never, almost nearly never works, okay? You have to slowly increase and see your child as you know, don't use your own ruler to measure your child. You should use their ruler. You know what I'm saying? You cannot measure a child with what you think. So right now if I'm teaching a kid, I would never, you know, like for 30 minutes, for an hour if you watch me work, right? I'm only teaching like one or two things. I'm not even trying to teach anything. I'm just, I'm just really just trying to teach one thing at a time, right? And for that whole 30 minutes, I'm doing one thing only. And this is a mindset that you need to have, no matter if it's your child. Is mainstream school, like in the special needs school or, or whatever school, you should make a focus focus for a short period of time, sprint teach them. And that's cool. Yeah. RedX asks, what's the topic today, Mr. Ming? Is it about the put the environment prevent protect system? Oh, yeah, yeah. So I'm sorry, I'm not very good at Instagram. So next time I'll pin it. What's the topic? So the topic today is actually just to calm your child down, right? So I know that a lot of times children get very angry, right? And the Reason why is because most of the time, you know, we don't take care of what children are scared of, what they're sensitive about, what makes them angry. So that's why I was saying, like, if you can prevent it, prevent it as much as possible, you know, so that they're always calm. Once they're angry, you can't do. You can't teach much. You can't talk to them much. You can only be beside them, hold them and speak to them. Right? That's all. You don't even know how much they can hear you. Yeah. So the topic today is calming your child down. Right? And after that, you have to systematically increase, slowly increase the thing that makes them angry the most. Right. For one of my students is actually like, the parents cannot sit at a certain position. You know, it's that strange. So, you know, I'm talking about questions I get from parents who say, oh, my kid doesn't like it when I, you know, sit on the floor. And I'm like, just don't do it first. Then, you know, and then another question is like, oh, my kid doesn't like it when I, like, hold the cup in a certain way. Then, you know, don't do that first. Right. And then teach them slowly to decrease their rigidity. Okay, so this is the topic today. Sorry it took so long for me to say it. I don't know how to. I'll pin it up on Instagram next time. Okay, so that's it for today. I gotta go, gotta run. Thank you so much for hanging out with me over here on YouTube and Instagram. I probably will not try not to do any more on Facebook, maybe. I don't know. But yeah. So let me know if you have any. Any questions or what you want me to cover. You can ask me more. Yeah, so you can just DM me if you're on Instagram, on YouTube. You can also email me@mingts of speech.com. okay, cool. So I'll see you guys probably on Monday morning. And that's it today. Bye.
