Ming, a speech therapist, says teaching speech-delayed children to communicate means focusing on what they actually want right now, not what you think they should want. Skip the developmental milestones and teach language as the tool to get toys, food, or comfort. See a speech therapist when you can.
Hey, this is Ming here, speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com in this video, I really want to talk about selflessness. And the reason why is, you know, I'm getting a lot of comments and emails about, hey, Ming, can you share something more practical? You've been talking about parenting for a long time, and I'm not a parent, so I'm not here to share anything about parenting, actually, but actually how to interact with children. So. So if you don't know how to interact with children, especially those who are speech and language delayed, no matter what, practical advice, especially, you know, what kind of targets you should do. What kind of language targets? Like, are we doing subject, verb, object, are we doing you know, who or why questions, These kind of stuff. Or even like, oh, my kid doesn't know how to do the F sound, and I teach you how to train them. It doesn't matter because you might have the best tools in the world, but if you don't have the software to actually operate it, you don't know how to talk to your kid, and they run away, then it doesn't matter. Okay? So stay tuned. Okay, so talking about selflessness. First of all, when we're teaching children, we have to answer a very simple question. What does your child want? So most of the time, if your child isn't talking, they're pretty selfish themselves. But if we are selfish ourselves and we don't think in their shoes, then we're going to go nowhere because they're not going to compromise. They'll scream, they'll shout. They do everything in their power to just run away from you. You have to realize what your child wants. So in their minds, it's actually very simple. They just might want food, just want toys, the iPad. They just want to hug or be thrown around by their daddy or something. So there isn't very complex wants if you're dealing with a child that is around two to six years old. Okay? So once you know what they want, you can shift towards focusing on what they want and then teach them how to get it by actually talking. And once you've done that, you will understand that, okay, it really isn't about what we want as an adult. It's about seeing what your child wants, what they want, and then think about, okay, how do I give them what they want? By teaching them how to communicate with. And the second point is you have to realize that you're measuring your child with someone else's ruler. As a therapist, we like to use something, what we call a standardized test and that's actually a ruler made by a lot of data around the country of language development or speech development and then we measure them towards them. But when you are teaching your own child at home, I hope that you're not measuring your child against anything. Especially if you're comparing your child with other children in the kindergarten. That just won't work. Every person actually develops in their own pace and it's you who are the person to decide whether they are developing or not. So you have to set your expectations straight. And once you understand that, okay, my standards are put upon my child who is delayed already, then you need to realize that your wants aren't your child's wants. Your child doesn't want what you want. One of the things I heard multiple times when I was in Hong Kong was the parent would tell me, oh, is he gonna be able to go to university? But the kid was 2. This might sound very funny and crazy right now, but I'm sure these are the thoughts that go through the parents minds. They don't care. All they want right now is when do they get crackers, when do they get to play, when do they get to watch iPad? And when you get in the way of that, you're the bad person. They're not developed enough to understand that. Not to even mention that they're speech and language delayed if you're watching. So once you realize that your child doesn't want what you want and you stop projecting what image of your child will be in the future onto them when they're like two or three years old, then you can start really focusing on being present and giving what your child wants is in order to teach them the things they need to learn. And yes, in this channel we're gonna talk about much more practical tips and tricks to actually teach language and speech at home. But it doesn't mean that you don't need to see a speech therapist at all. In fact, I encourage you to go see one. But right now it's not the best time, right? With all this pandemic and virus thing going on. So what you can do right now is go to www.agentsofspeech.com checklist and download that checklist for all the tools and toys that I recommend. My physical clients, my online clients, all those people, what to get at home. To start, I know that these kind of advice is not practical and it's hard to actually listen to, but this is the hurdle we need to go through before we can actually start doing anything practical. Alright, so I'll see you in the next video soon. Bye.
