Friday Live: Solving a Parent's Problem Live

We are live. We're early today. Sorry if you're catching me, catching us here from Agents of Speech at a later time. I'm so sorry. I have some stuff I need to take care of in the morning and I wanted to make the live a little earlier, so. And today it's a Friday. Happy Friday, everyone. Not that, not that it really matters for a whole load of people anymore because of our current situation, but today I'm going to attempt to answer some questions that I got in my inbox, actually, specifically from one parent. I'm going to go through my answers to it. First of all, I'm just going to read out the questions. I'm not going to tell you guys the name, but the question goes like this. I'd like to ask how to handle my daughter's tantrums. She likes to play outside the house. But these are the problems. One, whenever she sees a bicycle, she wants to use it, even if someone else is using it. I would try to get her, but she is screaming so loud and sometimes lying on the floor because she's upset. Cool. Okay, so the problem here is like a lot of parents, a lot of children who are, you know, they see something they want, they cannot control themselves. Right? They see something, they must have it now. Right? So that's a problem. So that's a problem. So how do you even do it? So obviously I've talked about this before. There are two ways that you can attempt it. Okay. Number one is that you try to prevent it. Yeah, you try to prevent it. Which isn't the best way, you know, that parents want to hear because, hey, I cannot prevent bicycles from being on the streets. Right. And that you're totally correct if you think that way. Right. So what do we do? Well, first of all, we have to think of a reactive way to solve it. So one of the ways that I like to solve this kind of issues is by having some snacks that she loves that you can give her. Okay? So, so what you can do is basically whenever she asks for the bicycle, you give the snacks and see if she would rather eat the snacks than play the bicycle. Okay? It needs to be a trade off she's willing to do. All right? So you need to try that as a response instead of like pulling onto her. All right? And when you pull onto her, don't pull her hand, try to stop her from her shoulders so that it's easier for you to control. I know that she's already. This particular parent is turning four years old. The daughter, the little girl so it's kind of difficult for you to do anything. So when she's on the floor, right, and you stopped her, she's on the floor. What you do is you put her in a corner and you wait. You wait until she gets calm and then take out your snack and. And then tell her, hey, calm down. When she comes down a little bit, give her one snack and feed her water. Because when she's drinking, she cannot scream, right? When she's not screaming, and then you can reinforce. You can reward her by saying, hey, you're not crying anymore. Good job. Here's a snack. All right, so the second part of my answer is actually, to get her, you should do some type of training at home that will help her with this situation. Okay, and what is it is that you can take her bicycle out if you have a bicycle, and then someone will ride the bicycle in front of her. And then whenever she doesn't ask for the bicycle, give her a snack or let her watch some YouTube videos and just kind of desensitize her. Just trigger her to want to ask for a bicycle and just keep on doing it. When she's okay with, you know, you triggering her at home with a bicycle, and that's like, you know, you need to change the person. You might have a few people at home who are using the bicycle and not letting her use it. And every time she stays calm, you give her a snack. Then you can go out with the same system. All right? You can go out, and you can go try it outside. All right, so to recap, the question is, the child cannot. Whenever she sees someone using the bike outside, she'll scream and really want to, like, use it. All right? And this. The technique I told you just now worked on a client back in Hong Kong, where he must eat someone's French fries from McDonald's. So it's pretty much the same. If he doesn't get it, he will get pretty upset, but he's fast, and he's like a ninja. So he grabs it and he runs out of McDonald's laughing. So we kind of solved it by doing the same thing. All right, okay, so number two question from this particular parent is she's going inside our neighbor's house and play there as if it was our house. Right? So, yeah, it's pretty similar to the case I was talking before, right? The one that would. The one that would actually take someone's French fries and run away and take someone's phone when they're using it. And it's the same reason Right. She's going into someone's house and to use it as if it was her own so she has no idea of ownership, all right? Or anything like that. So first of all, if you're going to speech therapy, then, you know, you tell your speech therapist or your ABA therapist and tell them that this is happening. One of the things that we like to do before is to do is to teach the child about ownership, right? Or possess possessives, that is the cup's mommy's, the cup's mine, that is Tom's. Right? Teach ownership first so that, you know, when you say, that's not yours, they don't. Your child shouldn't understand if she doesn't have the concept of possessive, right? So I would teach possessive first and to actually stop her. You know what the best way really is to always keep her under control when you're. When you're outside with her. So you have to teach her to be able to hold your hand whenever you're walking. If you're not holding mommy's hand, no walking. Stop. All right? And it's like training an animal at the beginning. It sucks, because what you need to do, basically, is to train her to be able to walk with you. All right? And this happens with my cat as well. I have to train her to walk with me anywhere that she runs off, she's not allowed. She's on leash. And you. Whereas some parents put the leash on the children. And if it's not very severe, I would rather you just hold her hands, okay? And sometimes when we ask children to hold our hands, we're kind of doing it wrong, okay? We're holding on to the child instead of them holding to us. So you shouldn't grab her or anything, okay? So you should have a firm but loose, like, firm but not like killing her. That kind of holding a hand. If you're doing it right now like this, you're doing it wrong, right? That's going to scare her because she doesn't have a lot of language ability, right? She's a little delayed. So when you do that kind of stuff, when you do, like holding to her and pulling her and holding her tight, it's actually scaring her, and she's actually going to run off and therefore go to the neighbor's house. So there are two things I'm telling you to do right now. Number one is to teach her possessive, all right? If you're going to therapy, try and do it if you're by yourself, then maybe you can. I'll tell you about how to teach possessive in another video. But the best is a therapist does it so that you need to think about it. And the second suggestion is for you to teach your child to only walk and only be able to, like, go around the neighborhood if she's holding your hand, because she's still young, all right? And don't hold her by her wrist, okay? Hold her hand so that she's like this with you or like this, okay? It needs to be soft but firm. All right? And the reason why I'm telling you this is because, have you seen, you know when someone's walking a dog and two dogs meet, right? And then they go, and then they're trying to fight, and then what do the owners do? The owners pull on it. And what happens when this. When dogs meet each other, right? It means that they're scared of each other and they're trying to be a little more aggressive so that they can, like, feel better by themselves. And I actually, actually learned this from the dog whisperer guy, the Spanish dude on the television. And I thought, hey, this makes a lot of sense. So what he said was, if you pull on to the leash, it adds to the anxiety of the dog, and therefore he will pounce even more and try to get away from you. Whereas he demonstrated where he pat his dog and he put him by his feet and just like, you know, protect the dog from the other dog. The dog was still quiet and safe, and everything was fine. And same with your child. If you are right now holding on your child on the wrist just to stop them from doing something, then most of the time they would want to get off you because it hurts, number one. Number two is they don't feel safe. All right? How do you make a child feel safe? Is you hold them by the hand and sometimes block something in front with your body or with your feet. All right, that seems to have worked with me. And what I have talked to parents, that seems to have worked as well. So when they are at a level, a language level, which is not up to par yet, they use a lot of environmental cues, visual cues to help them out. And if you add to it by adding force and holding to them too tight, that actually makes it worse. I hope I've answered second question. The third question is she loves to go to a store near our house and always gets candies inside. Okay? So still it's the same thing. It's all these three questions. Number one, cannot use. Must. Must take someone else's bicycle. You know, run into neighbor's house and Play there. And she loves going to the store and grab candies. These are all very impulsive things. Things, Right. Impulsive acts of a child who cannot have a delayed gratification, they must have it right now. So therefore, obviously, the mom says she cannot explain nicely because of the speech delay. And she also said that, you know, I've learned from a video about prevention, but obviously there's. She's, like, not. Not letting her go out, but of the house, but sometimes she finds a way out. There's a small hole in your fence, in her fence that she manages to go outside. Okay? So she's super smart. She knows how to, like, you know, find ways to get out. Like an animal. If you cage them, find a way. Like my cat back then caged him, caged her, opened the cage. How is. How's that even possible? Right? So sometimes we can't prevent. So what do we do? So. So when your child cannot delay a gratification, it means that they're not used to having something late to their table. All right, so what you need to do to solve the core issue here other than teaching, instead of teaching really higher concepts of possession, not really higher, but, you know, what is a social norm you cannot steal because you know it's someone else's and you go to jail or something like that. That kind of stuff you don't need to think about yet. What you need to think about now for your child, if your child. If any of you are listening and it's also. Your child is also impulsive and grabbing people's stuff, then what I want you to do right now is to tell them that they cannot do that and they have to work for something. So judging from what's happening now, right. It sounds like she's never actually been working on a table and had any type of training. Okay. If a child has any type of training, especially in ABA or like a special needs. What's that called? Early intervention groups. Right. They would have made them, like, sit down and do tasks and listen. Okay. And obviously, this child is very, very impulsive. Like, once she grabs it, she runs away, and then if you don't let her, she goes in a tantrum. So what you should do at home is basically control the environment at home first. Okay? Let her have the candies only when she listens. All right, and how do we do this? Very easy. It's very easy. You can do it at home. Your grandma could do it at home. And actually, I'm going to a client's house later on who had the similar issue, he couldn't stop. And how we did it was basically we took out the thing he wanted. He would say like, baby bus, baby bus. Or like another client would go like candy, candy brownie, you know? And then what if he didn't have it? He would get a little angry. So what we did was we held it up, we waited, and then we had to teach the open palm. And I've said it a million times now, like, open palm, like that. And give it to him, right? So it puts him on the receiving end, all right? And why I've been such a great proponent of using the open palm gesture is because it's easy to do and it keeps the child on the receiving end. And when you can do that, when you can do that, your child will listen to you much more, all right? It puts them and stops them and makes them think how to get that item instead of grabbing it, all right? And hopefully once you do that, it will make them generalize towards other things inside her life. And usually that is the case. And after the open pump, you might say, like, aming is still happening. All right? So we need to add more work in between getting stuff, okay? And let me tell you the psychology behind this. What I believe, this is not in a textbook, right? But what I believe from seeing all these children who are super impulsive. So the rationale behind the reason behind children get angry are impulsive, and when they don't get it, they go in a tantrum is because they think everything is for free. They think everything is taken for granted. For they don't understand how the world works. They don't understand that there are rules in the society that we cannot just tell them because they are language delayed. And even if they weren't, they are still small and they cannot control the impulses, right? So what we need to do now is to teach them that everything, there's a price. There's a price tag to something, okay? So open palm, that price might be too low, okay? So if they do the open palm, they don't get it. They will get even more mad. So what do we do then? We start to add tasks in between. And what I like to tell parents to do is to put out five fingers and you count 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, finish, and then they can have it with the open palm, right? So you have to do this over and over and over again. So, so they understand whenever they want something, they have to do something first. All right? So once she's got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, you need to add some tasks in between. So maybe it needs to be according to your child's level. Maybe your child is already speaking, so you can tell them to say a sentence or something like, what's mommy doing? Mommy's touching her nose. That's right. Maybe it's that your child isn't talking yet. Then you can actually tell them to do some easy movements, like touch your head, please. Oh, good job. Stomp your feet. That's right. Can you clap your hands? That's good. And then you might do something the hardest at the end. And then you say, oh, follow mom and say hallelujah or something, I don't know. And then finish and then let them play that thing. So after they know the rules, they need to listen to mom or dad for extended period of time, and then they can have it. They will be much less likely to run up to someone and grab someone else's thing. Okay. And because they've been successful, especially this mother saying that she's been successful getting out from a hole and doing these things without supervision, she thinks that it's the norm, all right? She just doesn't know better. And the more you can do something, the more likely it will happen again. So that's why I was talking about prevention. But prevention really happens when you're able to control your own child. All right? So just to recap. Just to recap what I would suggest to parents who have children who cannot hold their impulse. They see someone playing something, they want to grab it and do it on their own. They would use someone else's thing as if their own, you know, like take someone's french fries and eat it and run away. And also stealing stuff from. From the store without knowing what they're doing. Right. Number one is to always prevent it by holding onto your child's hand at all times. Teach them to hold. Unless they hold you don't move. All right? Always on the hold. All right? Hold them and hold them nicely. Nice, firm and soft. And only when that happens, your aid, they're able to move. That is something you must teach them, especially for children who are throw tantrums and get into trouble all the time. Second of all is that you need to do some training at home, right? You need to use some food. And for instance, if they like the bicycle, use the bicycle to trigger her whenever she's, like, not touching it. Then you can give her a treat. Right. Third of all is that you need to bring the treats outside just in case when it does happen, when she's upset and Tantruming on the floor. You need to have something that will soothe her and calm her down. So what I like to do is when a child is screaming, I give them water. Because the water actually like when you're drinking, you can't scream, right? And then you say oh nice, you're calming down. And then I give her like some treats. This works for non verbal children quite a bit. So you need to do it over and over again, right? So number four, the last one was what I talked about. You need to use, you need to teach the child that not everything in life is for free and not everything is yours. So how we do it is basically we use open palm gesture to do a bunch of things. Number one is to put your child on the receiving end. Number two is to build anticipation. Number three is to use some form of gestures to communicate instead of grabbing. Number four is for them to wait, right? So we're doing a whole bunch of stuff. And once they can do like the open palm and then you will want to increase it so that they de gratification. You do five fingers or maybe just three, or maybe just two, doesn't matter. So in the beginning it might be just 1, 2, 3, 4. And then you let them put it down. I and then when they finish, they can have the item with the open palm, of course. And that teaches them a bunch of things. Number one, it's not only to listen to one thing, they need to listen to five things, right? And every time they do something, they finish, they have something in return. So they don't need to go out to grab. They have a way to work now. They don't need to go out and get freebies. They have a way to get a salary now. And you've taught them through, you taught her through using open palm and like the five fingers. And also like just doing play and tasks at home. And obviously this is a very like, it is a very unnatural way in the beginning, obviously, because this is if you know what is aba, this is pretty much hardcore ABA over here, what I'm talking about. But at the same time we're going to make it so that it'll be natural later on. All right? So don't worry about it. You must solve your problems first. That's what I mean. Okay? And I am a person who doesn't compromise on using extreme methods to achieve the goal and then make it less extreme later on because you need to show her a behavior so that you can reward and then that behavior will become the new normal as they Say it right nowadays. Right. So yeah, that pretty much wraps up my answer to this particular parent. If you have questions like her, then you can go on to my Facebook and PM me or you can just email me mingagentsofspeech.com with questions specific to your child so that I can give some good feedback and some action tips to you. Okay. And this is what I do on a daily basis, by the way. And usually what I do is I reply. But I realized that why not just use the live videos to talk about it. So if you have questions like this mother here, just send me the questions, describe it in full detail. Doesn't matter if it's very long. I have Monday, Wednesday, Friday mornings to talk about whatever I want. So I'll talk about specific children problems to share with you so that you know just in case that you have some similar problems at home as well as well for your child. Okay, so that's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in. I know the live is a little early today. I'm so sorry, I need a run. And Lena says how to tackle a child not communicating, not commenting on people in public. Yeah. So Leena is actually my child, is my client too. So I'm just going to really quickly answer this and I'm going to head off. Okay. So when commenting about people in the public, usually it's like insensitive comments. Right. And how we stop it? No, no, no, I'm going to answer it. Yeah, how do we stop it? Is basically using a bunch of methods. You don't know which one is going to work. And a good one of the usually when this happens is like ASD child is gone up to a level of language that they're able to be naughty with their language. Right. And one of the examples that I, I've seen before, right, when I just started work was this kid from secondary school who loves to like talk about stuff to put people down and say that they're dumb because they don't know the word hypotenuse. Right. If you know, like your math, hypotenuse is like the longest side of a triangle or something. But he likes to put people down because you don't know what's hypotenuse. You're so stupid like that. Well, it's kind of similar to Lena's case here. Okay, so how do we stop it? Basically we have to do a bunch of role plays to see if they can understand something, link between what they don't like and their actions. Okay. So for Leena, we might be. What I'm thinking in my mind is we might be doing it with plasters, with like band aids. Whenever you say something like that, it feels like putting a band aid on someone. It's sensitive. Don't know if this will work or not. This is going to be a hard way. And then we need to find other ways as well. We need to use. We can also trigger her to hold down that impulse to say those kind of stuff in public. So we might even use chances or token boards, you know, very, like strict ways, very rigid ways. And it works on your child too. So what we do is basically we present pictures in the beginning and then afterwards we go in videos and then we go in real life. And every time she doesn't say anything or says something better, then she gets a token or if she says something bad, she loses a chance, you know. And then the last one I would try is something, what we call teaching interactions in aba. And what it is really is to go through the rationale of why you shouldn't do it. And then, and then once they understand the rational why, then you would try to role play in different scenarios and identify emotions and then tell about like, why it's good, why it's not good, what's cool and what's not cool, that kind of behavior. Oh, yeah. And obviously there is like still the social story way of doing it, but it's pretty hard to generalize. I would use all of these methods as I've talked about, and then, you know, I would go from there. But truly speaking, it's going to be a hard, long battle just trying to make it work. And I would probably do it in a very focused manner where I just take the whole week to do it. And I would start from, you know, just pictures into videos and then to real life. And I would use all four methods because I don't know which will work. So that's my answer. Lena, you did ask me on text, but I didn't like really comment on it. I'm like, yeah, maybe next time. So, yeah, I need to do in person this one. Maybe some of it I can just do it on online as well. But let's see how it goes first. Okay, so that's it for today. Thank you so much for sticking around and hanging out here on YouTube and Facebook. Do let me know if you have any questions. Maingensofspeech.com that's my email. Text me, email me the questions. I'll get back to you through the lives see you guys. Bye.