How to Get Children to Repeat After You

Let's talk about how to get your child to repeat what you say. So when we're teaching speech delayed children, it's pretty simple. But simple doesn't mean easy, so to speak. And today I want to walk you through some things that has worked with us. Teaching parents how to do it is very different from, for instance, a therapist or myself doing it. Because when we are trying to teach parents, a lot of times what happens is that we go into these very generic advice, telling parents you need to speak to them more, get down to the level, you know, like talk and narrate everything that you do. But at the same time, when we do it, it's a little bit more different because we are under a time constraint. And in the past few years, we've been trying to teach parents similar, easier ways to teach children how to copy them or speak at home. And so I want to tell you, like, whenever you are teaching a child, there's always extremes. There's always a very structured way, meaning it's more aba, meaning it's more behavioral therapy, there's more rewards and so on. And using those, I'm okay with using those. If you're not okay and not comfortable, that's also fine. We have other ways, right? We have something in the middle, which is like structured play that involves playing. And also teaching a child to play with some requirements. And all the way at the end is more naturalistic, is where you're talking as if your child is your friend. You're narrating everything you're saying you're seeing and doing, and that in turn, you're trying your best to get your child to imitate you, and the success rate will go way lower. So let's talk about some structured ways first, right? Let me just show you some videos right here and then you can see for yourself. So as you can see here, the mother is using some cues and prompts, using a paper, if you can see it, and also a mouse shape to get the child to start speaking and imitate her. And this is a very structured task. When we're doing this is because the child doesn't really know. She will imitate some, but the accuracy is fairly low. So when we do this, it becomes really difficult for us to get a good result out of it. So this is only one part of the therapy. Don't get me wrong. And a lot of people out there on the Internet is like, oh, you're only doing like very robotic stuff with Kit. That's not true. There's only one part of It. And we still have to do it because listen to the quality of imitation here. Keeps on trying. And then the kid starts shouting, right? So that's no good. We try something that is lower than the current level. And usually what that means is that going from a speech sound, we go down one level lower. I don't have videos about this. I'll get more consent from parents to show you. But at the same time, what is one level lower is maybe some oral motor stuff that you will see a lot of speech therapists use. Like, for instance, you will see a lot of speech therapists use talk tools like some sort of chewy tube, some sort of bite block or whatever. And that's because what the speech therapist is trying to do is to get the child to do something easier first, right? And a lot of times for us, what happened was that we would shoot for mouse shapes instead, and we would also shoot for some sort of action imitation. And whilst that's not very speech therapy, like, at the same time, what we're trying to teach is the concept of imitation. But we've talked about this on this channel. So you can search imitation inside of a channel and you'll see it. Okay, so other than using this kind of structured approach, what else can we do to get children to repeat after us? So the other one would be somewhat of a structured play. So we don't always have to get a child to sit across us with a flashcard or whatever. In fact, what we can do is to take a piggy bank or whatever. And it depends on how old your child is. Whatever toy is age appropriate. You can take a look here. Open. Just open. Good girl. Open. The mother just asked her to say open, of which she did, but, you know, like, the sound is a little bit low here, so bear with me a little bit. So for every action, she's saying the word, but she's not pushing her to say, right? She's saying out, take, out. Right? Because this child in particular, she cannot do more than one syllable. So we're targeting only the word out, Close. So there she tried. She tried to say it. So then usually what we tell parents here is we say, hey, you got a reward, and we gotta praise her. Say nice thing. Clothes. That's right. So that was her clothes. Okay, so it doesn't matter. We're not doing a speech task here, right? Because we're teaching her to use the right words at the right time. And that's more of a language task. And here it's more of play situation, a structured Way for every action, the mother tries to say the word and to get the kid involved, close. So maximum tries of three. And now should be put. See, so she's trying super hard, but then the mom didn't give the correct word to help her out. So in this situation, she should have said put long ago. I would agree with that and reward her for saying, ow, whatever that was. I was like, yes, put, and I'll put it in. So I have, like, 10 coins here, and I don't need to be like, I can be selfless a little bit here. I can be a little more generous, and I'll take that as a win. You know what I'm saying? Like, I would totally just put it in and say, that's right. I say put, and I move on to the next one. No. And I would say, yes, put. I keep on doing it. And this is what we call shaping and therapy. It's very good. So if she tries so well like that, I would put two because it's such a good imitation, right? So you might be saying here, Ming, that my child isn't even at this level. So what do I do? So I will keep on pausing. And if I remember what I said at this situation, if she doesn't say a word and we started off with this child at nonverbal level, what I'm telling you is what worked here, all right? I'm not telling you should do it. I'm telling you should try and listen to what worked for us, and then you can think about what you can do. So what we did was that instead of trying to go for the word every time we put it, we would do a gesture instead. Instead we go put. We just wanted the child to do a gesture. That's all. That's all we wanted. So whenever we teach her like that put, she would do the gesture. And obviously, she already, like, graduated from that, so she's not doing it as much anymore because she can speak. So that also breaks. A lot of the parents would say, oh, what if my kid doesn't get too used to signing and they don't talk? It doesn't happen. All right? So onto the next thing that we're going to talk about is, look, okay, we have some structure, play. What else can we use to shoot for some sort of imitation or get the child to repeat after us? Now, we can use some cues and prompts like we just said, right? We could use mouse shapes. We use cue cards. We could use actions, gestures. And then we can also make it easier, right? So for instance, just now, if the puts was too easy, we can just go for the vowel sound. You know, if, if take was too hard, we can only go ah, then that's fine as well. So we go lower and lower. If even the vowel sound cannot, we go for like the very first mother that we saw. We go for a mouse shape only. Okay. So if mouse shape doesn't work, then we go for a gesture that has some language meaning in it. And we're always thinking about how we can shove this in at different level of the spectrum of therapy. So when we talk about very structured in the middle, structured play, and then we talk about like totally free language stuff, which I'll show you right now. So as you can see, she's also using this kind of like a centerpiece toy, as I like to call it, as a vending machine. I like it. We have a video on it. So if you just search for vending machine inside of our channel, you'll see it. And how it works is that you see the mother is not hands on, on this toy anymore. Although she kind of unlocked this free play, naturalistic kind of language facilitation thing. Those are all the keywords. People call it different things, but it's basically, you know, like language facilitation. Right. So if you watch this.

Thank you. For one coin, Put in the coin and choose to drink.

Choose the mineral water on the left.

Oh, choose the mineral water on the left. Oh, no. Which one is a mineral water? Okay.

So they're bilingual. That's why they have different languages. And you see that the parent isn't stopping the kid's hand, letting him talk and then unblock him. We're not doing any of that. The mother just now. What we're doing here instead is like asking some open ended questions, narrating the stuff, speaking with no hopes of the child, like responding or returning in hopes that he will actually repeat.

Oh, well done, high five. Well done, high five. Are you choosing you.

You see? So even sometimes when you go up to this level, like just doing language facilitation, you can see that the kid totally just ignores it. Mom. And we're okay with that because we're giving full access to the toy and we're not trying to push the kid to repeat anything. And don't get me wrong, when we're doing this kind of therapy, it doesn't mean it's always like this. We also have structured times, and we also have structured play times and we also have this kind of free play that we're trying to give language. Okay, so you see, he hasn't really had a real word come out yet.

Oh my, this is really delicious, let's say.

But you can see it like she's talking to the child. Very naturalistic, right? There's very naturally. There's no, you know, like pausing and making him talk or whatever. There's none of that. And this is fully played.

That's a good water. Put it back. Okay.

So then he starts talking whenever there's something going on. So at this stage, this child is obviously just above single word level. And you know, if you're trying to get a child to repeat after you, sometimes the best way is not to think that he will repeat. And then when you're playing, you know, the language suddenly happens.

Yes, that's a blue mineral water. Mommy has another coin. I shall put in the coin.

He's too smart. The coin doesn't need the mum's help.

Put in the corner, push the orange.

Juice on the right.

Choose the orange juice on the right. Okay, I'm gonna swipe it. You swipe it. Swipe, swipe.

So then you see, finally he starts to use the word that a mother asked him to repeat. And he did it at his own accord, at the right time, at the right place and with the right meaning. So sometimes when we're doing this, there's like all the verbs and all the words we've already taught him in a structured way and also in a structured play. And then when we have a hands off, we're trying to teach him to generalize, to put it in a more real life scenario. Okay, Anyways, so that's why the last point for me is that you have to create routines and systems so that you can allow your child to start repeating after you. And it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter if it's a structured way that you see like parents do over the Internet, ABA therapists like to do, you know, sitting across each other doing flashcards. Those things can work. But your child needs to understand the routines and the systems. Right. The second one is like when you saw the other mom when she was using a piggy bank. The child needs to understand the toy first, like the sequence of using a toy and that she's okay with the mom's like, stopping her hands, withholding the toys before, before allowing the kid to play. Sometimes with talking, sometimes not, depending on what the demand is. Remember, if talking is too hard, go down one level. Right. The third thing is, okay, now that your child can probably repeat words Whenever they want something which is very need based, how do we make them so that in play they can speak. And how we do that is basically at the very the video you just saw, right? We allow the child to have the toy and we speak over the kid narrating everything. And this is where you see like for speech therapists we always give these kind of advice. We say, oh, go down to the level, play with them. But then the thing is you need to have all the three levels on the spectrum in order for it to work. If your child doesn't understand you or doesn't have a working relationship with you, they're just going to ignore you and you're going to feel really bad because you never had a success at home, right? You never felt successful. You never had the chance of listening to your child repeat after you. So in the beginning of course it's going to be more having something that your child wants, asking your child to say something and if they don't say it, reduce the level of difficulty like meaning. Maybe go down to only using gestures. Right? If gestures are okay, maybe do mouth shapes and mouse. Okay, Then maybe do just a vowel. Right? If vowel is okay, then you can try a word. But it's always need base first. And then we slowly move towards play. And it's not just play, it's structured play. And then we go into the naturalistic language facilitation stuff that we usually recommend. All right, so that's the end of this video. If you haven't, please go to agents of Speech.com course. It doesn't matter if your child is non verbal, single word level or whatever. If you want to start home therapy, we are giving out all our courses that we used to sell for free. Okay, go there, apply, answer all the questions and you will get access to it. All right, so I'll see you in the next video next week. Bye bye.