How to Stop Speech Delayed Children Hitting You

Hey, this is Ming from agentsofspeech.com today I want to talk about how to stop your speech delayed child or a child on the spectrum to stop hitting you. And the reason why we're doing this video is because more and more parents are asking me, saying that, oh, my child gets upset and then they start hitting me. Talking or speaking becomes dependent on their mood. When they're in the bad mood, they would hit everyone. And this is especially true for mothers. Fathers are still rather okay because they're bigger and children do get scared of their dads for physical reasons. Right. If you talk about it, mothers, mates, helpers and also like grandma, grandpas, victims of these speech dilly children bullying them. Right, so this is why we're going to talk about it. First of all is you have to understand why they're hitting. Okay? There must be a reason behind why they're hitting. Is it because something you said, something that you triggered him with, you know, is this something that he wants from you and you're not giving him or is it that, you know, whenever he gets annoyed by some sort of stimulus, might be sound, might be smell, might be like brushing teeth or some kind of sensory annoys them and they find you and they try to like release their anger on you. So you have to understand why, you know, get to the bottom of it, understand exactly what the reason is so that we can treat it. Because if we don't know the reason, then there's no, there's absolutely no way that we can actually go ahead and provide some sort of therapy or some sort of way to teach them not to do that thing. So number two you need to do right now is to start preventing from happening. Okay? So if it is that they really love chocolates, right? Don't have it in the house for now, okay? Don't have it as an option initially, they get really angry slowly. They understand that there isn't such a thing at home. There's no point in getting angry. Right. Second of all is that whenever they try to hit you because of some sort of annoyance, don't let them hit you. Be ready to catch the hands and stop them right before they do it. And a lot of parents will say, oh no, my kid's just too fast. You know, my kid's just too quick and snappy and flashy. I can't, it's impossible for me to catch them. So the thing is, a lot of parents allow their children to be all over the body right next to them, you know, and playing with their faces. And so on. When this happens, of course you can't react. The distance is 0 centimeters. What you need to do is to distance yourself a little bit and know when these will happen. This is why it's important to know the reason behind all the hitting and slapping and punching, okay? You know that it's about to be triggered. You have to distance yourself. And when they come at you, it's very easy to catch them. I swear to you, I promise you it's very easy once you know when it happens. Okay? I have my own share of bites and whatever. I can still see some here. But nowadays I'm much better at managing children, so it doesn't really happen to me anymore. Okay. These are from my cats, some of them here. Okay. So you also have to stop the behavior that's triggering that violence. Is it because you speak in a certain tone? Your child knows that you're going to teach them something, therefore they get angry and hit you and slap you and tell you to, you know, close your mouth. Then stop teaching and stop using that tone for some time first, okay? Prevention is always the best. And just because of that, because, you know, whenever you try to teach your child hits you, parents tell me, oh, you know, like, I'd rather have a therapist, you know, do all the work. Because children to children, parents are always parents and they don't understand the role. What they mean is a speech delayed child will never treat a parent as if a therapist and that thinking is not useful for yourself, then you're surrendering the fact that your relationship, your dynamic with the child cannot be changed. That's not true. What happened is that they're associated with hitting you as something that's acceptable the household. Even if you scold them, that doesn't matter. Whatever behavior that successfully happens will happen later on because historically they can do it. Okay? It doesn't matter if you scold them or hit them afterwards, they will still hit you. So try to prevent everything so that no type of bad behavior will happen in the household. And by default, they associate good, happy times with you instead of hitting, screaming or whatever, as long as you prevent everything. Okay? You try that. And when you go to a therapy room or clinic room, right, all you see is like all the toys tucked in. There's nothing that they can touch. The table is totally clutter free, you know, and some therapists, I don't like to do this, but they like to put them at the corner or on a wall like, like a chair and a table that comes up here and they can do nothing and not move. And that's prevention, right? That's taking prevention to a higher level. So you don't need to do this at home, right? But at the same time, you need to keep that mentality in mind. Prevent everything, reduce all variables. Do not talk in a certain way that triggers them. Take away all the noisy stuff, all the toys that he doesn't like, you know, don't ask him questions if he doesn't know how to understand it. You know, there was a parent who told me whenever I asked my kid a question, he gets real mad and hit me. And I'm like, don't ask, then. Don't do it. Why are you doing it? You're just triggering him on purpose. Point number three, you should always teach a replacement for the hitting because there's a reason, there's a motive for hitting you. There's actually a communication function, right? There's a reason why they're saying it, okay? Just as when you. When you're talking, your partner, your friend or whoever might nudge you to tell you that, hey, you're saying the wrong thing in appropriate manner, right? You know, you need a replacement. Replacement for the hitting. And what it is usually is like, you can teach a gesture, you can teach a sound, you can teach a word, you can teach a sentence. It really depends on the language level of a child, okay? And I have a student who's on the spectrum, on the autistic spectrum, and she's an adult. And she said when she was young and nonverbal, she used to hit people a lot. And the reason is because she didn't know better. She didn't know any other way to express herself. Now you have to teach some replacement. And how you do it is that whenever you see that the trigger is about to happen, before they get mad, you teach them or you prompt them to imitate a gesture, a sound or a word. And then afterwards, let them have what they. What they ask for. Okay? For instance, if they want a chocolate and they come up to you and they start nagging, even before that, you teach them a gesture. Like, maybe it's tapping. Maybe, you know, it's like open palm. Maybe. I don't know, it might be the word chocolate, please or something. And then when they say that, you can give it to them, okay? How to say no to them is a whole different video, okay? But at least they're not screaming and hitting you in the first go, in the get go. If nothing of this works, especially when you say no, the kid gets really angry. And starts hitting you. What you need to do is to reward. What we do is that before the bad behavior even happens, we have to tell them, oh, that's a good. Staying calm. Calm is the behavior we want to reward. Right? So let's say that he wants chocolate, but you say no before he gets mad. You have to prepare something that's lesser as a reward than a chocolate and give it to him and say, hey, good boy. I said no to chocolate, but you're still very calm. Therefore, you can have a gummy bear. I don't know. It depends what it is. Parents will say, oh, that's a distraction. No, it's not a distraction. Right? It is that you're intentionally rewarding good behavior, that they're staying calm when you trigger them, which is saying no. Or you trigger them when you. When you start teaching all these things you can reward just before they get mad and then say, hey, good boy. Nice thing. Calm. I would sometimes go as far as always rewarding periodically, like randomly out of nowhere and say, that's being very calm. Here you go. Have something you like. What you're doing here is that you keep on rewarding the good behavior. And I do not really recommend you using this method all the time. I would say that use this method if nothing of the above works, okay? It's a last resort. And we don't always want to use this reward method with children all that much. And that's because it feels like we're teaching a pet, right? We're teaching an animal, and it doesn't feel natural at all. That's all for today. And if you haven't, you can go to agents of Speech.com checklist for a full checklist of all the toys and tools I recommend you to have when you start home therapy. All right? So thank you so much, and I'll see you in the next video soon. Bye.