How To Get Your Speech Delayed Child To Listen and Focus

Hey, today we're going to talk about why your child doesn't want to listen to you and how to get your child to comply to everything. So it doesn't matter if your child is speech delayed or autistic or have any other problems. I want to recall a story to you is that I had a few clients. Not a few, I think around five to six clients before the pandemic started, physically, when I still had my own clinic, who had a rare genetic disorder. And because of this rare genetic disorder, when I was in Indonesia, the doctors would say, oh, he's autistic. He's autistic as well. He's like intellectual disability or whatever. I didn't care about all that stuff because what I'm going to teach you here is that it doesn't matter what type of problem we're dealing with, because at the end of the day, what we need to do is to get to the root of the problem, is that the child probably doesn't care enough to want to try. And that's why we don't know the true ability. That's what my old boss always says. Do you know the true ability of this kid? What's the point of doing something that's below it? Right. Then you have a compliancy issue. Because, you know, like, if you have a really smart kid, let's say, who's doing academically not that great, and you think the academic performance is a reflection of his ability or is his compliance? Obviously it's compliance and it's like motivation to work harder. So it's not always about pushing the competency up. Most of the time is that we want to make sure the child understands why they want to do something. Number two is enjoy what they're doing. And number three, also compliant to the teacher or the therapist, which is. Or you, the parent. So a lot of times it comes down to respect. Okay, so let's talk about compliancy first. The first point I want to tell you is are you a man or woman of your word? That's very important because anyone, even an animal, can sniff out whether they can take advantage of you or not. I'm saying this as if your child is like having bad intentions or whatever. I don't mean that. I totally don't mean that. Even a cat, which I have one here sleeping next to me, they know whether they can keep on nagging you and get something out of you, they will do it because it's. Economically, it makes sense, right? Because if I nag for 10 minutes, I'll get the treatment. And kids also know that a certain person will always give them stuff. Might be the grandma grabbed the grandpa, might be the helper, might be whoever. There's a weakest link in the family, so to speak. Right? And so are you the weakest link? Are you a person that is respectable when you say something that means it and you're gonna stick to it no matter what? If a child can test your. In Chinese, we call it bottom line, right? I don't know how to say it in English. They test your limits, so to speak. They know where and how, what buttons to press and so on. Doesn't mean they're doing it like on purpose. That's how they survive, literally. So don't think, oh, my kid is so naughty or whatever, you've given him the opportunity or her the opportunity to think in a way that I can manipulate you with my emotions and my words and my actions. And therefore they will take advantage of it. Because if a child isn't able to speak very well, then they will think of other ways to get what they want. And naturally, sometimes that's manipulating you with their cute faces, which happens a lot. They wouldn't manipulate you with fake crying, which happens as well. It will also come in the form of guilt tripping you and so on. So don't think just because they're doing these things it means that they're being bad. It's just that they have no other way in particular. Right? That's the first point. So how do you navigate that? Is that you need to become someone else. If you cannot, you can never change someone else's behavior. You can only change your own behavior and how you uphold yourself. All right, and we're getting philosophical here. Although a lot of these. I'm talking in the perspective of teaching speech delayed and autistic children. It also makes sense in terms of like just everyday human interaction. Right? So a lot of times parents actually treat their children with more like pets. More than pampering pets. Right. More than a legit human being. And why I'm saying this is because they don't respect the kid to enough for them as a true person, and they want to give as much as possible to make them happy. Right. And you know, like, if you were in your right mind, I, I'm just saying this. If it were my own child, I would probably have this dilemma too. I want to provide for my kids so that they don't feel like they, they're not supported in this world. Right. And if I'M in, in, in, in a position to give my kid. Why not? Okay. But at the same time, there's lots of types of love, right? There's tough love, there's pampering love, there's suffocating love, and there's loads of different kinds of love. And I think if we're having this conversation about speech delayed and autistic children, the most important thing is that you set your rules and when you're able to give and when you cannot. And when parents wear a lot of hats, sometimes you're the chef, sometimes you're the teacher, sometimes you're the police. They're like loads of hats when you're teaching children at home. And I cannot start to imagine how much emotional, you know, like things you have to go through in order to push yourself to do, to be strict with your kid. Right. So I've seen this firsthand with a lot of parents all over the world just because I've been working online now. And when parents come to me, especially mothers came to my clinic before when we're having a chat, usually, you know, the first assessment after I finished assessing, the mom would talk to me a lot and they would start crying and stuff. And in my mind I was like, yeah, I still don't understand this feeling yet. And now I'm starting to understand a little bit. I'm not a parent yet. And I'm trying to say this so that I can give a caveat and say that I don't know how you feel exactly. I will never, I'm not, I'm a guy. I will be a father, but I will never be a mother. Right. Mothers and children, they have a very specific bond. And when my mom, she gives me stuff and pampers me, I feel like that's uncalled for. And it's not like I don't want to accept, but at the same time I can see that kind of like unconditional love and unconditional gifting of gifts and stuff that I may or may not need. Right. So what your child needs is that you need to be very clear on what expectations are on the kid. Don't change because if you change something, ah, cuz I'll give in. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes. Then it becomes really difficult for a child who is already speech delayed or language delayed, so to speak, or even like cognitively disordered. Right. They're not as cognitive, cognitively sound as their peers. If you change all the time, then the child will need to resort to using their emotions to think about like how the heck do I get this woman to do what I want? Right? Don't let them go that way. Be very clear about what you're about to say. And when you change hands, change it swiftly and make sure they understand. Okay? I'm saying this just because I cannot help you with this, right? Even if you put your child with me 24 7, at the end of the day, someday he or she's going to go back to the house and you'll have to deal with it. So that's why we've shifted towards a parent coaching type of service nowadays instead of done for you therapy. All right? And I feel like this is the most important thing you have to learn, okay? So the third thing is for all these behavioral and compliancy things to be, to be solved, you must understand that nowadays behavioral psychology has become a really cool topic for people in general. But you know, back in the day, I, I would learn that on my job or during school. Basically there are three parts, right? The first, like the abc, antecedent, behavioral, and then the consequence, to simplify that is basically antecedent means the trigger, right? What triggered the behavior, the trigger of the behavior. So the inside of the trigger, there's loads. There's the environment, right? There's the way that the instruction was given, right? There's how the whole task was presented, right? The tone of how you say it, right? What prompts and cues are you providing? And all these are like in the antecedent or the trigger, the behavior by itself. The behavior could be anything. It could be like speaking. It could be doing a command, so to speak, like doing an action to fulfill the command, right? Or it could be just sitting down. It could be anything. Like behavior is just something that you do in the world, right? The consequence is where you can do the most work in. So consequence. There are two parts of consequence. There's the feedback. And also, is there a tangible reward, right? It doesn't need to be a tangible reward. It could be something that. It could be like a social reward or whatever. But inside of feedback there are two types. There's one that is like result based feedback. Meaning how well did this cat did? Right. I thought, oh, good, good sitting down, right? Or hey, you didn't sit down. That's the result, right? And then there's the performance in which I can say, oh, you sat down really nicely and very still for a very long time. So I might be wrong about my definitions here. A behavioral analyst or whoever therapist might say, you got this wrong. I'M trying to tell you the concept of it, right? So the abc, the trigger, the behavior, and then the consequence, something that the consequence is something that we can manipulate to make sure if the behavior becomes more prominent or less so prominent means if it's like, rewarding for a person to do something, can I make the consequence more rewarding so that they will keep on doing it? Or the opposite is like, oh, I make it not as rewarding, therefore I might diminish, reduce the behavior, right? So how does this make sense in this whole world? Where the heck am I going? So it's very simple, you all. The only thing that I want you to take from this video is two things. Learn how to give feedback in terms of behavior, right? If you give, go into the mode of always praising the best behavior and ignoring the rest, of which someone told me, praise the best and ignore the rest in terms of behavior, it's going to go a long way. Whether your child is on the spectrum, whether he's speech delayed, whether he. Whether he has a genetical disorder, whether he's, like, cognitively delayed or disordered, it doesn't matter. Because even cats and dogs understand the tone of praise, right? If you say something, ah, good girl, good job, right? For the very first time that when I got my job, my first job as a behavioral therapist, of which I was very blessed to have a very good supervisor, he told me, yo, Ming, listen up. I want you to think about how to praise this kid in 10 different ways. Just think about it. Just think how to praise him. I'm like, And I asked him, yo, he doesn't even understand simple English. Why should I praise him? And he's like, look at the difference between you and the lead therapist who's working on this job. Why do you think whenever the lead therapist says something, he's going to do his bidding, right? So I told him, yo, I think it's just like, a matter of time. And then he pointed out, how about the mother? Why does the mother not have the same power as the lead therapist if it's only time? So he went on to tell me that having a very. What they call contingent in aba terms. But I'm just going to simplify it for you. It means having the habit of praising good behavior will always make the person animal or whatever, keep on doing the behavior. Because, like, social praise, even if a child who is on the spectrum, they understand that because that's a preferable behavior, right? And the second thing I want you to learn is scolding is not something that you should learn about. It's not something you should do. In fact, scolding is so ineffective that if you think about it, it's like a punishment. So in terms of punishment, punishment, punishments, there are, it's a negative consequence. There are two types. There's a positive punishment and a negative punishment. And, and you're like, dude, what's that? Well, it's basically one thing. I'm, I'm not going to define it here. There are only two types of punishments. One is that I was supposed to give you something, but I'm withholding it now, not giving it to you because you did something wrong. Right. The second one is that you did something wrong. I'm going to give some sort of bad consequence to you. For instance, there was a famous study that I Talked about on YouTube before in Richmond, Vancouver, where all the Chinese people are, they did like a ticketing thing for jaywalking basically. And they did both. One is handing out a fine and the second one is to reward and praise and give them a coupon for pizza or whatever. So they realized that when they started to give out coupons randomly to strangers who didn't jaywalk, the percentage of jaywalk went way down. And when they realize that defining thing they've been doing for years on like 10, 20 years, it doesn't work. But the other type of punishment is that when someone is anticipating that we'll get something for free and you say that, oh, because you jaywalk, I'm not going to give it to you. That hurts. Right? That's some sort of fomo. So when you can you understand these two things? Number one, to always reinforce positively verbally and give feedback about something that's good for a child, they're going to be more likely to do it. Well, whether or not they understand it doesn't matter. Because if even a dog can understand positive praise, then you know, like a kid with any type of disorder should, right. Unless they're, they have hearing disorder and they need a hearing aid, right. Or the glued up ears or whatever, then go get checked, go get that checked out and deal with it. But on the other hand, if you're used to rep and reprimanding your kids saying hey, you didn't do a, that's very short term because what happens is like punishment doesn't work as well as rewards, as I was telling you. So what if you're not around to punish? Then the kid doesn't understand that anymore. Right. When you reward someone for doing the right thing, that behavior keeps on going and you actually develop a good relationship with your child. And that's why the lead therapist inside of my first job had so much power over the kid and he would do anything compliant. And now we know the true ability of the kid. It's not a compliancy issue. Right. So therefore whatever you're trying to do, you're thinking about in terms of behavior, you're thinking about increasing the number of times you're able to praise and reward good behavior. Right. Set them up for success. Right. And if you put all of these things together from the my YouTube videos and so on, you start to understand how to teach children who are on the spectrum who are speech delayed is that we need to provide positive, positive experiences, positive things that to do and set them up to success even if the goal is low. And then I get to praise him. And because the kid likes me praising him and likes me rewarding him, I relationship starts to build. I can see where the ability is. Every time when I push him to do something harder, he's more likely to do it because he's had a good track record with me because every time I say something, the child wants to do it. So that's why when we coach parents, we still we start way down below here. And not because of the child's true ability, but your ability to teach a child like the parents ability to teach child is very low because the compliance and the power of the child, of the parents commands inside the house is very low. Right. If the, the mom says sit down, how often does it work? Like 40%. Then if you're going to teach something that's way harder than sitting down. Think about the percentage of your how you're going to succeed, like how much you're going to succeed. Just think about that. All right. So that's why in the previous video, last week's video I was talking about yo, if you're thinking about like prompting a kid to speak, why are they not speaking when you prompt and ask questions and why is it like some up to the child's mood or whatever is because your relationship with the kid has been choppy in terms of performance. When they do something bad or they say something that is incorrect, you scold and you ask for, you ask them to repeat and keep on going. And that's a punishment. Right. People run away and try to reduce punishment, but they seek for rewards. So is there any time in your life that when you're teaching a kid they want to actually, they actually ask for to be taught. Right. We've got parents inside all of our parent community of which they tried our courses and they said, oh, yeah, now my kid wants to, like, bring the toys onto the table and sit nicely and say, learning time or whatever. Right? We need that. Okay. It doesn't matter what type of goals and whatever things that you want your child to do. Like, I get parents to say, I want to teach my child yes and no questions. That's my goal. My goal is to teach them how to read a book or whatever. That's not the point. The point is, can you sit them down? Are they ecstatic? Are they at least wanna do things right? Do things with you? Do they want that? Is it possible? So you think about that first. Think about how to build that good relationship, how to make them comply, how to make sure that the behavior is good. I'll summarize one more time. Only start with only two things. Things, which is one behavior. Basically, praise the best and ignore the rest. Praise the good things that your child does, no matter what, in a good way. Think about 10 Ways to say the same thing. Right? It could be. Ah, nice sitting. That's awesome. Sitting. Oh, I really like the way you're sitting. Wow, you're sitting so nicely for 5 minutes already. Can't believe it. Oh, my God. You can say all these things. Wow, you're. Whoa. Your hands are so still. Like, usually you'd be, like, touching the knife, but the knife's over here and you didn't touch it. That's excellent, right? Okay, here, I give you another toy to play since you didn't play with the nightfield. These things, if you do this over and over again, kids are gonna love you because you're a man and a woman of your word, right? When you see something that's correct, you praise like crazy. And then when they do something wrong, you don't scold and you just ignore it. And you use your hands and stop them. And then after you stop, you say, that's right. That's nice. Stopping. Nice. Thank you. Thank you for letting me let your mom or dad stop you. I really like it. Okay, can we try? Can we try doing this longer? Can your hands be still? Thank you. These words mean a lot. And if you see. If you think about what happens when a child does something wrong, what is your first reaction? Think about that. What happens when a child does something right? What's your reaction? Is it just okay? That's right. That's. Taking for granted is the reason why your child doesn't like being with you all Right. I'm not saying that that's the case for you, but in general. Right. Taking good behavior for granted is the surefire recipe for a bad relationship. Because why should someone. And this is. This is way, way more general, general advice for everyone in the world. Right. I'm just saying that from my experience, every time I, like, no matter what, parents, with my teachers, with whoever, if I express my gratitude and praise for the things that they did that impacted my life, those people usually come back and help me more. All right, so I'm going to do it now. I'm going to thank you for watching this all the way to the end of this video. I know I've been rambling for a long time, and this. I usually don't do these long videos. I'm very thankful that you've made it to the end. I don't say that you. I want to say that if you're able to make this as an end, you're a great parent and you really want to learn more for your child. And it means a lot to me because then I don't need to work as hard. And it means that my message is being heard and it means a lot to our team and the things that we do to help parents over the Internet. It's a positive reinforcement for myself. So thank you very much. And lastly, if you haven't, Please go to agentsofspeech.com course to grab all the free courses at any level, from zero all the way to full sentences. You can learn there. The information is free over there. All right, so that's it for today's video. I'll see you in the next one real soon. Bye. Bye.