How to Get Autistic Children to Talk to You
Ming from Agents of Speech explains how to get autistic children talking: drop the therapy voice and build a real relationship. For verbal kids, comment on what they care about instead of quizzing them. For non-verbal kids, start with high-value rewards and teach easy requests, then fade the prompts until they talk on their own.
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Hey, today I want to talk about how to talk to autistic children or people naturally. So this is just my experience. If you have better experiences or you think that it's totally different than what I'm describing right now, feel free to put it in the comments below. I'm very happy to have a conversation. So I've been doing this for 11 years. The other day I met up with some of the people that I had my first job. I started off as an ABA therapist. We were having a conversation. One of the biggest things that they said when hiring for someone, it was being natural, right? How to be natural with children, how to be natural with people who are on spectrum, children who are not talking yet. How do you be natural? Because a lot of times the first thing is that therapists, parents, teachers, they develop a voice that when they speak a particular way, children will look more. And we call this motherese in speech therapy, which is very important by the way. But it doesn't mean that when you're talking to autistic child, you should always use this therapy voice, right? And you can turn on to Ms. Racial or whatever and she speaks in a particular way. She's actually quite natural. But I'm telling you, a lot of parents and therapists, they speak in a therapy voice. And when that happens, children turn off, especially those who are on the spectrum because they know they can take up rules and patterns. So when there's a pattern that and people might say, oh, autistic people or children, they have problems and trouble identifying social cues. This is not a social cue, it's just a tonal difference. One of my friends yesterday was like, oh, you do speech therapy? Does that mean oh, probably English is a little bit easier because like Cantonese or Chinese, they have more tones. And I was like, hey man, if someone has a problem identifying tones and that they cannot produce tones or whatever, and that's actually quite severe. And usually people only have problems with consonants and not the tones. So to say that autistic children cannot take hear the tonal differences would be wrong. So how do you talk naturally is that you treat them as if like you're like me and you, we talk just like how I am with you right now. And we don't add intonations, we don't go higher, we don't go lower, we talk naturally like just what we are doing right now. Alright? So that's something you have to understand. The second thing when you're talking to autistic people or children is that don't quiz so Much don't think that we're above them. Right. A lot of times what happens is we put on our teacher hat, therapist hat, and we start quizzing. We just keep on asking, what's this? What's that? How to do that? Instead, use more open. And I'm talking about like verbal children. I'll talk about non verbal. Later on. I'll talk about verbal children. Things you should give comments like the videos they like to watch. Right. Ms. Rachel. Like Blue's Clues. That's. I'm a little older. Those are stuff I grew up with. Is like you comment and say, wow, can you tell me more about that? Whoa. Yeah, that's a really fast train. Go into the world and talk about it. One day I was walking down the street and this is like me after years of therapy experience. My friend was like, oh, you really know how to make a child smile. Like, because when I saw that child do like a somersault or like hanging upside down, I'm like, yo, what's up, Spider Man? Like, I'm just being natural. Treat them as if, like you're on the same level, right. Talk as if talk about their interests and not to quiz. Right? Because they're not there to impress us. I am not there to impress them. I am there as a companion to talk to them. And therefore, when I have the trust, then I can proceed with therapy. Right. Yesterday I was giving a special training to parents inside of our community. And I was saying, look, the best way to get a child involved is to actually have a really good parent child relationship or therapy. Child relationship. Because when we have that, a lot of times we don't need rewards anymore. And this is one of the topics that a lot of people, parents will say to me, Ming, you always talk about rewards, right? When I go to therapy, they don't have rewards. They don't bring anything out. And it still works. Maybe it's because the therapist used 10 years time to develop soft skills in order to make children talk naturally. To think that you can just replicate the same thing with a very short amount of time, which is not undoable. I would say it still can do, but it's gonna take a lot of work, right? I'm not as talented as a lot of people in the therapy world. It took me a long time to be natural. Right? But I understood that if I could put myself at the same level as a child. And this is exactly what talking at your child's eye level or level is about. It's not about like physical level. It is Physical level. It is also about language level. But the thing is like, we're not putting ourselves on a pedestal. We're not putting child on a pedestal or else children will turn off, especially children on the spectrum because they're like, why are you training me so special? What are you doing here? I know what you're trying to get me to do something. What's the catch? There's a lot of question marks, especially children who have been through a lot of therapy. They'd be thinking, what's the end for me? It's very transactional, right? You're making a transaction. Don't make it transactional. Okay, so the last part is talking about non verbal children. This is very important because most of the children who come my way are, because of my background are autistic and non verbal. Right. I just can't run away from it. This is how it is. So why, and so how do you do it? It's quite simple. What you do is to show that you are a person of value. What I mean by that, there's a lot of. That's very hard words here. So does it mean that I have value over a child who is on a spectrum or non verbal? Very simple. And in the beginning, as you build a relationship with a non verbal child, you should always lean on rewards, especially those who don't have the training just yet. It's very important that you lead with rewards. Lead with the incentives. That's the main word in the human race, incentives. What are you incentivizing the child to do? All right, so it might be that they love trains. Lean on that. Can you bring more trains? Can you have more trains than the child? Can you have a lot of train tracks? Do they like cars? Can you build a ramp with books? Can you build a tunnel? Can you make the car go faster? Can you flick a car so fast that the child treats you as a toy? Become a person of value to your. To a nonverbal child. Show them that whatever they're doing or playing, you can do better. If they love songs, can you sing? Right? Can you make the thing louder? Can you connect it to a Bluetooth speaker? Can you take out a, a microphone with the echo effect and put it near the iPad to create a better sound quality. Right. How can you add value to a non verbal child's life? And do not add demands when you're adding. The only way to get a child who is autistic or non verbal to want to talk to you is that when you have value, they come to you and they ask you for more when they ask for more. And then you can teach demands. And this is something that I wrote in an email. And if you want to read more about what I've learned and stuff, go to agentsofspeech.com, sign up for the newsletter. Something that I learned from my ABA therapist was demand fading, right? Do something so easy. So it's like a really good trade. It's incentive that if you do something so easy, and I'll give you this, right? First of all, add value. The kid comes over to you once more, it might be like I'm throwing him up and down. He really wants it, right? I do something that's super easy, and I slowly fade out the demand. I make it harder and harder. In the beginning, I might just teach him to tap me. And I'm like, oh, cool, let's go up, right? And then he comes down and he asks for it again. And then I prompt him a little bit, and he goes tap. And I throw him up and down. So then I teach him this, and I slowly fade out my prompts. And now he can tap me by himself. And I'm like, yay, good job. And slowly, as we get closer and closer to him, just doing it spontaneously without any help. And then I'm gonna try to make him talk only then. So this might be like 20 times, 30 times, 100 times. Who knows? Until he's very happy coming up to me, knowing that if I. If he taps me, I'm gonna lift him up, right? Then I'm gonna try to push him a little bit harder and make him talk. And because he knows and we have a relationship, he. He knows that whenever because the 100 taps or 100 ups I've done before, he can rely on me. And children on the spectrum, they are ritualistic. They know that I ming equals fun times up, right? And then he will be more lenient or she will be more lenient to wait for me to make, to allow me to push him or her more in order for the teaching to happen. Now, I can say this over and over again. I can show it to you through a demonstration, which we have@agentsofspeech.com course where we have free courses in the community. But you have to do it yourself, right? You need to do it over and over again. You need someone to give feedback on. So I challenge you to teach one thing to your child. Where you provide value, you add value. The value is so good that the child comes to you, and then you add A small demand. Fade out that demand. Teach a prompt in order for your child to think that, oh, you're very, you're very reliable. What else can I get from you? What are you going to teach me in return? Take a video of yourself doing it and watch it. You don't need to get feedback from a consultant or a coach or therapist like we have at Agents of Speech just yet. But watch yourself and you will pick up a lot of what are you doing? That may not make it very, may not make it very naturalistic. Are you asking a lot of questions? Are you like going too close to them? Are you putting yourself above? Are you using a therapy voice? Does your tone change? Are you treating them different? All these are something that you should look at. And don't get me wrong, by all means, being naturalistic with children and especially autistic children is very difficult. All right, I'm not going to downplay it. The best therapists out there, whilst they're doing therapy, it looks as if they're just having a conversation, they're just chilling, they're just hanging out with children. All right. It took me a long time in order to look like, as if that I'm exactly doing that and to sound and have the body language that I'm not treating them any more different and that I'm not at work is definitely very difficult. That's all for today's video. If you liked it, please put a comment like it, whatever and then go to agentsofspeech.com course grab all the free courses we have that we have demonstrations that teaches you from non verbal all the way to sentences. There's a huge community of 13,000 parents online as of this recording. Okay, go there, have fun, connect, learn. Alright. And that's all for today. I'll see you in the next video. Bye.
