Friday Live: Stopping Tantrums, Q&A for Speech Delay | www.AgentsOfSpeech.com

Order. Because I've got something to do afterwards. Sorry about that. Of which I'm gonna be attempting to do a live whilst eating some oatmeal. So if you don't mind that, that would be excellent. Okay, so today's topic is actually about stopping tantrums. All right? So if you have any questions about that, you should right now. You should ask about it now. All right? So basically, basically stopping tantrums come down to a few things. Okay. You have to do a lot of leg work. So there's basically two, I would say two. Okay. For parents, the two things that you have in place for stopping tantrums or at least like trying to de escalate. Right. So what that is, is number one is prevention. Do you have a good thing in place so that you can prevent things from happening? So as I've talked about many times, if you're able to prevent something from happening, the behavior will usually die off a little bit by itself. Okay. By a little bit, I mean the most of the time, which is very good. So example, again, so if you're an alcoholic, if you love drinking, like some of my friends are, if you do not have, if your house does not have any alcohol or booze, then most probably you won't be able to drink, right? So don't keep any good liquor at home. If you're alcoholic, throw it away. It's prevention. The less likely you're able to actually drink alcohol at home, there's less likely you will actually want to. Okay, that's number one. And then prevention. So how does it work on a kid? Okay, so for example, if you know your kid will be triggered a certain way, right. You know that if I sit close to them during dinner or something, they will get angry. Or if I munch very loudly like I just have with the oatmeal, then your kid will close their ears and they will shout at you. Okay, so how do you, what do you do? Well, close your mouth when eating. Yeah. Don't sit too close. Follow their rules a bit. Make sure that you don't. Excuse me. Make sure that you're preventing it. Okay? You're preventing it. So it can go from very low level to high, very high level. Let's say that your child doesn't understand jokes. And when you make jokes and they don't understand it, they get angry. Well, don't make the jokes yet. Right. Wait until you teach them how to understand jokes. Okay. And another high level one I've seen before is, is reading. Right? So if a child is reading and he wants to. Or she wants to read it in a certain way or else they're going to be in a tantrum. Well, just let them be for that moment, okay? There are times where we're going to break those rigidities. Okay? So prevention. Make sure that 90% of the time at home that you're actively preventing or passively. Or passively preventing by getting rid of stuff that is around the house that will trigger them. And this is actually very, very, very, very effective. Okay? If you're able to do this at home, then very nice. Okay, so that's number one. That's prevention. But you can't prevent all the way, right? So you have to have some active things you have to do, right? So preventing is always passive. Okay? You cannot prevent it once it happens. Like, you cannot prevent it once your child sees the stimulus that makes them angry. So what you do instead at that point is that you have to have an active way to calm them down. And this one, you have to build it when they're calm already. So you have to set up like five or 10 minutes to teach them. Okay, this is calm. This is calm. Calm is good. So for low level children, low level meaning their language function is low, meaning they don't really talk that much. They might not even talk. Is that you're drilling the word calm into their brains, right? You're giving them their favorite food. Maybe it's sausages, maybe it's like chips or something. But you're drilling calmness into their mind. So whenever they're playing something or like doing something, that they're doing it very calmly in a calm fashion. You drill them and you say, good boy. Nice being calm. Nice being calm. That's very nice. That's the calmest. Ever seen you before? Very nice. Here you go. So this one is kind of difficult because if you're at home, you probably like, you're like, hey, I've got more important stuff to do. Right? But this is very important. So let me tell you a story about really quickly. Let me tell you a story about my first ever client who gets very mad. That's very mad. When I speak a little louder than usual. All right? And then he would scream like crazy and like, kind of want to break my eardrums or something. So that's pretty. That's pretty crazy. Yeah. So before I go into the story, Linh asks, hey, Linh, what's up? How to prevent it whilst they're playing Ming. Everything was so well before the rigidity strike in. Yeah. So Obviously, you didn't know that that would happen. Right. But the next time you will have to tell those two children. Well, I can tell Lynn what. What to do, right? Because she's my client and I know more about what's going on. So what you can do is to, like, you need to tell those two children exactly what's happening. They're old enough by the looks of it. You have to pull them away and tell them exactly what to do and also entice them. We've done plenty of work back then when we get typically developing children to do group sessions with our kids. And then what we need to do is we need to incentivize them with points and stuff so that they can get something else later. Right. You know, you happen. You happen to been to, like, jumping gym. Oh, wait, that. That's in Hong Kong, in Indo, it's called. I forgot. Like, you know that the ones with the guns and the arcade. The arcade, yeah. So you get the tickets, right? So you tell the typically developing children, okay, if you can help me do this, if you listen, then I'll give you five points or something like. And then you have to tell them the rules of playing with your child. Like, okay, so you have to listen up. Do not. Do not make the dominoes fall before you're instructed to. All right? Do not. Like, the colors need to be together. It needs to be perfect, or else no playing. All right? No points for you. No present later, something like that. Actually, the prevention is on the part of the typically developing child, you know, especially at home, where it's like, it's more. Because it's at your home and it's at her home where she's the queen of everything. If she was at a clinic or she was at another place where there's other children playing with her, I don't think that she would be that rigid, you know, And that is actually a very problematic thing. Right, because you're at home. I think that's the biggest problem. So if you can. So if you can tell your. Those two children about what the rules are, what's going to happen, what they need to do, it's going to be much easier for your child. All right? So prevention goes in that way. You need to prevent all things. All right. Sorry that I'm eating. I'm in a hurry as well this morning. And I was talking about, like, the first ever client I had. Right. So how we prevented it was basically we would. First of all, we would only work for five or 10 minutes at a Time. Basically, whenever he. He was looking to be mad, Right? Well, we know that if we hold him down physically and, like, try to pull him back, he will get so angry. Right? So we don't do that. We never do that. We never do anything that makes him remotely angry. Right. And how do we. Okay, that's a passive part, right? But how about the active stuff? So basically what we've been doing to build that habit of that routine of calming down is to actually kind of trigger him a little bit. Just a little bit. And then before he even gets to be angry, we reinforce him. Okay, so let's say that the kid hates me when I, like, lock him down, right? So basically what I do is to, like, lock him down a little bit. Like, let's say my cat hates it too, right? I'll lock him down a little bit before the cat even screams. I'll give a little bit of a food to him and say, that's calm. So Daewi says my son likes to hit table or his own hands, legs when he's angry. Not so hard, actually. What should I do? Oh, Dewy. Well, first of all, you have to know why your child is angry, right? And actively try to avoid it. You have to prevent him from being angry sometimes. Then the next part is to slightly trigger. Slightly trigger. As a very structured task, my whole task is just to trigger a little bit. For Lynn's case, maybe I would make a very small version of the dominoes and make it fall, you know, in the wrong way. And then I would reinforce before she even gets angry. All right? Start from a small scale. Okay. And that's actually how we do it, right? That's how actually how even adults go through therapy. You get desensitized, basically, from. For the things that piss you off, right? The more times you go through certain things and it doesn't really. And it doesn't really piss you off, the less likely you will actually be able to be pissed off. So let's say that you hate getting into a traffic jam, but, you know, you get numb. You know, like in Indonesia, you get numb getting in a traffic jam because you can't control it. But autistic children, they don't really care about that. They think that everything should be within control. That's why they're so pissed off all the time. All right? They're always actively trying to control everything around them to keep it the same and according to the rules, which is not cool. All right? So, Debbie, when your child likes to hit the table or his own Hands and legs. When angry, that's a release of frustration. That's fine. He's not actually destroying anything. He's just telling you that he's unhappy. All right, and that's good. So now you have to think about why he's unhappy. And when you know why he's unhappy, you can actually go in and slightly trigger him. And before he gets angry, go and reward him. All right, that's what you should do. Okay, so I'm going to give you two seconds to think about this whilst I eat some oatmeal. Yeah, this live is also like those Korean guys who, like, eat online. But anyways. Yeah. So you need to have that actively trying to piss them off. And before they get pissed off, you reward them. All right, that's the second component. The first component is to prevent with all costs. Okay. 90% of the time, you're actually just. You're just. 90% of the time, YOU are just preventing. Right. Number two is maybe 5% of the time you're pissing them off every day a little bit. And then before they get pissed off, you reward them. And then we go to number three. Number three is a routine that will calm them down no matter what. Okay. Routine of calming down is like. So let me give a little more explanation. So the prevention part is like what you do, you keep on doing, right? You keep on doing. That's like your standard way of operating. Okay. The second part of trying trigger them a little bit, that's actively trying to desensitize their rigidity towards something. Right. You're actively trying to do. And the last one, you need to have a calming down routine. This is like when they get angry. Right? The part like the two parts before the preventing and the triggering is actually before they get angry. The last part is about, like, after they get angry, what do you do? What's the reactive situation? Like, what would you do about it? All right, so with Lynn. Yeah, most probably you guys are already very good with the prevention. She says that both of them know the rules. Since Nanny had become an interpreter, she's upset with one of them did a little bit late. Yeah. So these things you cannot prevent. Right. If there's a lot of situations where you cannot prevent a child from just getting angry because, you know, there's a thousand situations going on. And if your child isn't trained at the point where you can trigger your child at the highest level and still be calm, then anger will still happen. Right. But what I'm about to tell you about is like a Calming down procedure. You have to teach your child. Okay? So back my first ever client, how we did it was we had a calming token, okay? And what that really meant was basically whenever he was calm, I would just put him on the floor nicely, of course. And he's, like, lying on the floor, and he was like. He's like hitting the walls and everything. And if I try to touch him, he'll like, basically bite me. You know, if I put my hands. It's like. Like that. And basically what we did was we took a bunch of tokens and we would give him whenever he de. Escalated a little bit, right? First we. We would have. Because. Wait a minute. So let me backtrack a little bit. Your child has to know how to use a token, right? So if he sees the token, he knows it's good, okay? He knows how to use it. So you take the token. Whenever he de. Escalates a little bit, like, he would go. He would, like, stop to breathe. Give one, say, good being calm, right? Nice. Calming down. Good boy. Give him one. Another good method is to feed the child water, okay? When. When a child is drinking water. When someone's drinking water, they cannot actually say anything. If they do, they choke, right? So you give the child water to calm him down. And when the child is calming down, you give another token. All right? So once you get through the token, maybe six or like seven or five or four, doesn't matter. Once you get there. Once you get there, if they're good, like, if they already learned this calming down method, it's basically like counting down, but with the real token, right? So when you do that, when you get to the end, usually they're already calm. Usually. Or, like, not as angry. And then what you need to do is to teach them to hold the token to give it to you, and then you say, oh, you're calm. Good boy. And then you give them the best stuff ever, okay? For Lynn, that sausage is for my first client was Oreos. Yeah. For my other clients is chips. One of them is iPad time. And some of them is like me singing. So you never know. You have to know what kind of reinforcement is good for calming. So remember that calming down is super, super difficult for the kid, all right? It's very, very hard. You cannot take it for granted. Oh, no. Come on, Jaro. Move across. Go on. All right, all right. Yeah. So it's difficult for them to do. So reward them accordingly. All right? Reward them accordingly. Don't let them. Don't allow them to do that. So this Is good for removing any type of behavior, to be honest. But calming down is such a hard task that you have to actually use it. You actually have to like keep on doing it. So how a session looks like how you should do it at home is basically 90% of the time you're actively trying to. Trying to prevent anything from happening. Right. And then when you have like around 10 to 5 to 10 minutes to work with your child, what you can do actually is to actively try to trigger them a little bit. Right? Trigger them a little bit. If you're triggering them just before they get mad and you say, oh, nice, staying calm, you can catch the moment and give them a food. That's great. Okay. Another last part is to what if you trigger them too much to become really angry? And then you can teach them to use the calm tokens. Right. So the calm tokens work for both non verbal and verbal kids. It's something, it's so structured that anyone will understand. Right. It's just very easy. If your child understands tokens, token economy or just stickers, what it really is, if you understand that kind of stuff, this is going to work. It takes a lot of consistency on your part. Because what we're doing now is that changing the rigidity towards the rules of our rules, right? Our rules is that, oh, you have to be calm these tokens. And then in the minds would be, oh, it's worth it to calm down, therefore I'll do it. Right. We're not teaching any reasoning right now because when someone's angry, there's probably no reasoning you can do. Okay. Even if we're adults, right. You get angry, emotions get in the way, logic goes out the window. Same as kids, especially for kids, because they can't regulate themselves. So we use external things, external rules that are feeding into. We're using their weakness, their rigidity as, as a way to actually help them. Right. We give them a rule for them to follow. Cool. So. Well, that's it. That's all I wanted to talk about today. Just stopping tantrums. And basically it just. I was inspired by Lynn, basically. And it's not only her. Right. There's a lot of. There's a few clients that are suffering from tantrums right now. And the thing is, my role has changed throughout the years from like ABA therapist to like a speech therapist. So sometimes I'm not in the liberty to give, to do this kind of stuff because it takes a long time. It takes like two hours at a pop. They try this kind of stuff and Plus, I'm not that qualified anymore. I haven't been doing aba, so sorry about that. This. This. This cat is clumsy, okay? So. And I'm not like. And if you. Some of my clients already have. Some, like, already have ABA therapists. It's not in my interest to, like, tell them what to do. It's not in my interest to interject with their program, right? So not a lot of people are doing this, to be honest. Like, when they're angry, they just count down, right? Or, like, when they're angry, they just try to reward them. But that never works. You should never bribe or reward. When a child is angry. What you're doing is that you're teaching them to be angry so that they'll get that kind of stuff and you wouldn't, like. It just doesn't work. All right? Never works like that. So you have to teach them to regulate themselves, make sure that they can identify when they would get angry. And that's why we're triggering them, right? Slowly. We're triggering them so that they know when they're gonna get angry themselves. It's just like the way that I do toilet training, which there's gonna be a workshop about it. But what I'm about to say is, like, what you do is you keep on feeding water to the child, which is actually triggering them to, like, pee, right? So you're actually teaching them by repetition that this is the sensation of being about. Like, to be triggered and about to do a certain behavior. And same as staying calm, you have to trigger them a little bit, Little bit. Let them know that this is for them to identify. This is not calm. You're being angry soon, right? And then you should be, like, just at the edge, just at their comfort zone, and then they would, like, basically calm down. Okay? And I just. I did this with, like, a high. Higher functioning kid who is in, like, mainstream school, right? And he wasn't my client, but I was inside the center, and we were doing some stuff together. We were doing some therapy together. I was helping out. And basically, whenever this. This child on the spectrum, whenever someone was, like, laughing at him or, like, making fun of him, he would get super angry. You know, he would, like, slap someone. So basically, one time my supervisor asked me to, oh, can you make fun of this kid? I'm like, oh, man, that's my specialty. I'm very good at making fun of people. So I go up to that kid in particular, and I said, you can't even do that. Something I forgot. And he got super mad and that's when I know that I went overboard. You need to be right at that place. And then when I did that, what happened was he needed some cues. So his therapist was like pointing at him. And then he was like, oh no, I'm getting mad now. And then the therapist was like asking, what's happening? And he's like, I'm getting mad. Why? Because he's making fun of me. Should you get mad? No. And then, and then she would ask why. Oh, well, because the words is his. It shouldn't upset me in any way, you know, because I don't want to hit him or anything. It doesn't help the situation. So for higher, like language function, that's high with like verbal reasoning kids like that, the tantrums still happen, you know, you can still trigger them, but at the same time, once you can help them identify, you can then teach the reasoning behind it through social stories, through something what we call teaching interactions in aba. So all these things we will talk about soon, sooner or later. And I'm actually thinking about doing a workshop with. I'm trying to get like one of my supervisors before from Autism Partnership to actually do a workshop with me online to talk about like, okay, what should you do to like in terms of tantrums and stuff? Yeah. So if you're interested, let me know because I've been actually planning a bunch of workshops I want to do and I've actually even having problems with like just sitting down and finishing off the toilet one which is going to be like a super detailed master class, that kind of thing. And it's live so that everyone will watch it, you know. Alright, so that's it for today. I'm gonna cut it short because I need to go out to see a client. So don't worry, it's all very safe within the regulations of, what's that called? Pandemic control. Okay, so that's it. Thank you so much for hanging out with me and I'll see you guys on Monday morning. Okay. I'm gonna try to do more lives. I mean like keep on the lives, keep the live going on, but at the same time, you know, it's getting more and more. It's more and more work for me, but I think it's very, very helpful for parents and myself. Yeah. So if you want more on exactly what you want me to talk about and what your troubles are, put them in the comments, let me know, send me an email or something. My email is MingAgentSofSpeech.com and if you haven't. You should go check out our website. We've got courses there. We've got, like, blog posts linking to different topics and stuff. You can search it, you can read about me, you can learn more about what you want to know. But at the end of the day, you need to tell me what you want to learn so that I can make it happen for you. Okay? So thank you so much, and I'll stop the live now and I'll see you on Monday. Bye. Bye.