How to Stop Children from Hand Pulling and Start Talking

Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com in this video, we'll be talking about hand pulling, hand guiding hand, whatever you call it. So what is hand pulling is when your child wants something from you and they take your hand and they lead you towards the place that the desired item is at. So hand pulling itself is already a form of communication. Okay. Your child needs help from you and therefore grab wants your help and make you grab that thing for her. Right. So there's a reason hand pulling is actually a common trait within speech delayed children, language delay children, and also autistic children. And the reason is that it's very effective. How much more obvious can it be that a child wants something from you by just taking your hand? Right. Sadly, we live in a society where talking is the norm. So therefore, we need to teach our children how to communicate effectively and appropriately in order to cope with the society. Right. When you're doing this at home, when this happens at home, you have to be careful that the hand pulling is becoming a routine. Okay. And what I mean by that is that if your child is on the spectrum, they will learn things by routines. Actually, any children would, but autistic children would. Would be a little more rigid and they would learn as a gen. As a general. Right. I don't mean all children are like that. So what I mean by routine is that if this is familiar to you, Right. What I'm describing is that your child would take your hand to the place and then right in front of the counter of the kitchen or in the fridge. At the fridge. And then you ask the child, hey, what do you want? What do you say? What is it that you. Whatever that you ask, Right. And then you will ask the child to say, say cookie or like, I want whatever. This whole routine the child learns because they get rewarded at the end. In order to get rid of hand pulling, you have to get rid of the whole routine. And how do we do that is by teaching them a different gesture. And more often than not, the best one is to start with tapping. So it would be tap, tap, tap, hey, I want something. That's what we would do. Especially if we were in a library where, you know, you cannot really talk. We would tap instead of pulling, pulling their hand. When you teach them to tap instead of pull, it makes the child wait for your response. Instead of them actively trying to get what they want by just keep on pulling. And plus, they don't even listen to you when they're pulling. I mean, you would know very clearly because you experience it right now. So the key is to change the routine. Make the child understand that you don't have to start the whole conversation by pulling your hand. Secondly, teach a better and a more efficient way of communicating, and that's usually by talking, just like how I'm talking to you through this camera. Right? It's more effective. It's easier than, you know, signing and so on. Right. Once you've taught the tapping gesture, you can slowly increase it towards different gestures. Right. Something that you can do at home is like seeing how much your child can actually imitate. Once you get them to do a tap, you can imitate, like, open. You can tell them to do like that, like, open palm gesture. We talk about this a lot on the. On the channel. And if you need more help, you can join the micro course as well as the link is down in the description box below. Your child masters tapping, you can increase the difficulty level. Is that now they understand. Oh, okay, so if I tap, mom will give me that tension right away. What can he do more in order to get more of what he wants? Okay. Then usually it means like using sounds, using more gestures, using words. Okay? So you have to slowly increase and see where the breaking point is. Where the child thinks, oh, this is too hard. I don't want to work for it. Where you can meet them halfway and say, okay, if you use this sound to communicate with me, you will get more stuff. Okay? It needs to be logical. All right? And the last thing I want to talk about is to be active and create opportunities instead of waiting for your child to want to talk to you. Right. So a lot of times what I hear from parents is that, oh, yeah, sometimes according to their mood. According to their mood, right. The child will pull me towards the kitchen and I will kneel down to them and say, what do you want? And then he copies me and says, like, cookie or whatever, and I give it to them. And that's it. That's only one trial. Okay. That's only one time. What children need and what us humans need is repetition. The more repeat something, the faster we learn anything, to be honest. Right? So what you need to do is to get the stuff that he wants. Maybe as a toy. It's a. It's food, as snacks, drinks, whatever. Give it to him slowly, give him some, and then wait for him to want more and then teach again. All right? And that's where if you do it like five times in one go, then you can slowly increase and see where the middle point is. What we were just talking about, right? How much is he willing to talk? How much can he imitate in order to get what he wants, right? So for hand pulling, we have a five minute activity. We put it inside of a PDF with all the steps and all the nitty gritties instructions that you need. You can find it in the description box below. It's agentsofspeech. Com Handpool. And you can go there, download it and try it for yourself. So thank you for tuning in. I hope to see you in the next video very soon. Bye bye.