Ming, a speech therapist, shares behavior strategies for children with delays or autism. Ignore minor misbehavior with neutral attention to avoid reinforcing it, and actively praise small positive actions instead. The Richmond RCMP uses positive tickets to reward good behavior, a model that works better than punishment.
Questions this video answers
40,000 positive tickets a year
3 to 1 ratio (positive tickets : violations)
Dropped by almost 50%, keeping more than 1,000 youth out of trouble with the law.
Chapters
Hey, this is Ming here, speech therapist. In today's video, we're going to talk about a tested method that works for dealing with bad behavior with children on the spectrum, speech and language delayed, or just anyone in general. So stay tuned. So first thing we're going to talk about is please like the video and subscribe to our channel because we're bringing more and more educational videos to parents like yourself to learn about how to teach children at home. So in terms of, of bad behavior, what you want to do first is to ignore. If you've been to behavioral therapy or any therapy in general, therapists will tell you to ignore bad behavior and there is a reason behind it. So the first reason is because whatever bad behavior there is, there's actually a reason behind it. There's a reason why people are doing things. Humans are creatures of intention. When we want something, our behavior changes. So you need to understand the underlying reason why. Okay? And by ignoring it, you actually reduce the risk of actually fulfilling, fulfilling the purpose of the behavior. It's just risk management. It's just good practice that you be careful about how you react to a situation. I've seen a lot of parents, when a child does something naughty, they say, oh no, oh no, oh no, oh, oh no, no, no, no, no. That kind of stuff actually is reacting to the bad behavior and you don't know if your child is actually seeking that kind of attention from you. So be careful. And number two, by ignoring your child, it actually breaks the routine, the habit, it breaks the pattern of how they survive in this world. And when you do that, children will tend to change their behavior, whether to increase their tantrum, increase that behavior, make it even more annoying, or even worse. They would either stop or they would change into something else. But at least when you do that, you see why they're doing it and you see a change. So any change is good when it comes to bad behavior. And when I talk about ignoring, I'm not telling you to, you know, lock your child in another room, ignore totally and just like shift your eyesight away from them. That's always a bad practice. Alright? And the reason why I know there's parents out there who lock children inside the room because they get very, they get very frustrated and angry. And what that really means, that it will create some sort of a trauma to them. And you need to remember, children who are on the spectrum or delayed in some kind of fashion, they cannot express themselves and they cannot resolve that trauma by talking about it and expressing their feelings because it's not Just available to them. Instead, when you ignore them, you're still looking. You're giving them attention. But doesn't mean you have to react. Your reaction can be very neutral. So you look at them. No matter how they scream, they can still be at arm's length away from you. But at the same time, you can just ignore them. All right? Give them no reaction. Give them the neutral treatment. Nothing bad, nothing good. And I love ignoring. And the reason why I say this is because it's actually a subtraction from what you're doing that gives you a better result. And whenever you can subtract something and get something better, you should always go for it. And this is tested with results, because as a therapist, when I do it, it works. But when I teach parents how to do it, they actually implement it at home. Bad behavior decreases significantly, and they report back to me. So you might ask me, meng, hey, I can't ignore everything. I gotta react in some way, okay? And I want to switch how you think in terms of bad behavior away from reactive. Because when we're reactive to a situation, we're not doing any good. We're trying. You're just trying to, like, put out fires. Very reactive. We're just putting out fires. What we want to do is to prevent. And the best way and the favorite way and how to do it is actually praising your child when good behavior happens. Good behavior is actually very, very underrated. We take it for granted. It's very underappreciated. As an adult, we think that, oh, yeah, they should do that. Or like, they throw something in the. There are children out there that are throwing rubbish all over the place. When we see that, we start to become. We start to have that gratitude that your kid is actually pretty well behaved. And even for adults, when we do something good, we don't instantly feel good about it. We only feel good about it when someone praises us or when someone else tells everyone else about what we did that feels the best. And the best part of this strategy is actually you're able to praise your child. And don't get me wrong, praising actually requires practice. You would not believe how out of practice we are in terms of praising and showing appreciation. I am living proof of this. When I just started in my first job, I couldn't even praise the child. Not even one. And I'll tell you an example right now that actually makes a lot of sense even in our society. In Richmond, British Columbia, in Canada, there is a police force that uses these tactics, these strategies to the extreme. And they use something called a positive ticket system. And what that really means is that whenever someone does something very small, very micro, like a very small good deed, they would reward them with a positive ticket, which is like a coupon they could buy pizza, shopping, whatever they would like to do with it. The behaviors that were rewarded were as small as wearing a helmet when they're skateboarding, crossing, using the crosswalk, staying on the pedestrian, you know, stopping at a red sign, so on, so forth. And it's crazy because it's just these small, small, small behaviors being reinforced that dramatically change the who. We cannot argue with results. I'm just going to read an extract from our article from the Guardian and you can read with me. All right. If you reward good behavior, your return on investment will be more good behavior. This is not rocket science. We, especially OP police officers, simply don't reward and celebrate positive behavior enough. The Richmond RCMP detachment where I worked was handling 40,000 positive tickets a year, a 3 to 1 ratio compared to violations. As a result of several youth prevention initiatives, including positive tickets, our youth related service calls dropped by almost 50%, keeping more than 1,000 youth out of trouble with the law. We have maintained a similar level over the years. I'll drop the link to this exact article down below in the description. And so far, what we've talked about in this video can be summarized in the saying that a supervisor used to tell me in my first job, which is praise the best and ignore the rest. It's very easy to remember. But the question begs what about punishment? So punishment is still effective means to change behavior and managing behavior. But punishment shouldn't be a means to prevent bad behavior. It should be. It is only a reactive solution. And from my experience from seeing parents in action, I feel like a lot of them are using punishment in not the best way. There's an effective way to use it, and we'll talk about this in a different video. If you have any questions, please put them in the comment section below. And that's the end of this video. Thank you so much for watching. Before you leave, please get your free gift. It's a therapy checklist of all the tools and toys and equipment that I tell my clients to get before they start at home. At this time in the pandemic. If you're watching this during the time of recording, then you would be at home most of the time. And if you want to know what kind of toys you should get and the stuff and tools and whatnot, you can go to www.agentsofspeech.com checklist to gr have a copy. It's free. Go download it. You can use at home. Okay, so if you have any questions, please put them in the comment section below. Please remember to like and share to friends who are in need of this information. Okay, so with that said, I'll see you in the next video real soon. Bye.
