A short instructional video by Ming @ Agents of Speech explaining how to teach a speech-delayed child to imitate and repeat. The presenter advises parents to stop repeatedly prompting verbal repetition (e.g., 'say cookie') and instead teach the concept of imitation using hand-over-hand gestures, prompted physical imitation, and immediate rewards tied to the child's desired object or action.
How to get your child to repeat after you. So the first thing is stop repeating the same thing over and over again. The reason why is because I see a lot of parents saying cookie, say cookie, say cookie. And then the kid doesn't talk, they get in a tantrum, they walk off. Right? So the reason why your child doesn't do it is because they don't understand the concept of imitation. What you want to do is to teach imitation through gestures. First what you can do is to take their hand and, and do a gesture, finish an action, an imitation, so to speak. But you prompt and cue your child to do it and then you, you give a reward afterwards. So the reward is whatever a child wanted at the time that he or she may have been like pulling your hand, leading your hand, whatever you call it, and asking for that particular thing. So you show the gesture.
