How to Use Rewards Properly for Speech Delayed/ASD Children?

All right. Hey guys, good evening, good morning, good afternoon, wherever you are. Today we're going to talk about how to use rewards properly for speech delayed children or, you know, just in general, autistic children. The reason why we're doing this is because recently we had a parent ask us about how do we, how do we use reward? Because they're like, you know, like, we've been using rewards for a long time. The daughter is around like nine years old, but at the same time, she still doesn't like talking to the mom or interacting and so on. So what's going on with the rewards? Right? And also we had another parent who, the son is like 7 years old, still doesn't. He still doesn't imitate properly. He can use words, but he's not imitating. And you know what? We teach inside of Asians of Speech, right? In our YouTube videos and also in our online courses, we talk about using rewards to teach. Okay? And you can see my cat over here. I teach her a lot with rewards. So sometimes if I call her, she will come up. And if, sometimes even if I don't have a reward at hand, right? So, okay, so here she comes. So whenever I talk, she comes over, right? So it's a, it's building a relationship, right, with an animal or a person. They need to pair you with that good feeling. But the problem is that. Here's the problem. A lot of parents are using rewards for free, giving it to them for free for no particular reason. Where children don't know what the reward is about, that's the biggest problem. So if your child gets the reward, but it's not clear to him or her how they're supposed to get it, they're going to try all kinds of things. All right, so let me give you example. So for instance, this cat called Slate over here, you can't see her. She's on. She's right here, right? She. So when I reward her, I call her name and I also let her know. I try to let her know as, as well as I can why she isn't supposed. What she's supposed to do. So for instance, long ago, right now, she still does it, but you know, because we live in the house now, and when she runs outside, it's okay. But back then when we were in an apartment, when she ran outside, the neighbors would like, like, really, really. They'd be really unhappy about it. So that's why we started to. Actually, I started to reward her when she's not going out. So what happened was that I would trigger her by opening the door a little bit when she was going out, I would stop her, and then if she stayed inside, I would reward her. And that's it. Okay. I would try again, open the door a little bit, tempt her again. If she doesn't go out, which I will stop with my hands, right? She doesn't go out. That's 100% sure that she won't go out. Because I'm holding down on her, right? I'm not allowing her to go. I put my hand forward like that. And so whenever I do this, she doesn't really move still nowadays. And that connection really stuck on with her. Okay, so obviously you can't do this with all cats. I know that. And you can't do that for, like, you can do that for dogs all day long, but not really for cats. But okay, so it might be like. It might sound like I'm dehumanizing your child because I'm comparing a cat to. Or an animal to a, to a, To a. To a child or a human child. But I don't mean that. What I mean is, is that the human child is so much smarter, so much more sophisticated. So therefore, to teach them something, you cannot leave it to their own devices. Right? And what I mean by that is that if you leave them to think what they're being rewarded for, there are too many variables going on. What are they? What are you trying to do? Okay, so one story, okay? A child who. I think maybe you're here. I don't know. I'm not going to say your name right. So he used to try everything, like touches, touch, everything. Because that's what we teach, right? The very stupid, you know, like, gesture. Like, what's that called? Gross. Motor imitation. That's what we do. Like touch, head, touch, whatever. And we teach that because it's easy for the parent to implement. Not because I like it per se, but we use it a lot. Okay? So the child would do all these things even if the mom was saying, say, ah, say, say, say, give, say cookie, whatever that she's trying to do. Okay. He was still like touching his nose and whatever. And that's because he was rewarded for doing that behavior, but not the concept of imitation. Right? We've talked about this before, so it's after a long time that we had to do one behavior. One. One. Sorry, let me start again. One instruction, one behavior, one reward. That's the thing I'm trying to talk about today. You cannot do a bunch of stuff. You're in for instance, if you guys repeat yourselves, right? That's already number one. The biggest problem is that if you repeat yourself over and over again, you go and say, oh, dude, listen to mommy. Look at mommy, look at mommy. Okay, answer my question. He didn't answer. Whatever. Like, how many instructions have you given three or four times? So which one are you, are you rewarding him for, right? For his response, which one are you rewarding him for? Okay, so what happens is that when you reward a child after doing a bunch of stuff, for instance, you tell them to look at you, you tell them to, you know, concentrate, focus. You tell them to say this first, answer this first, or say this, that or whatever, say mommy first, whatever. You are rewarding the whole thing. Okay? What happens is that the child thinks that he or she has to go through all the tormenting of him crying, pulling your hand, you asking a question, he tries to answer, but he doesn't, and then you give him the right answer. So the whole thing, the whole block of thing gets rewarded. Okay, so how are you supposed to use rewards effectively? Think of one reward equals one behavior in the very beginning. Okay? So if we need to use rewards, it only means a few things. Number one is that your child isn't very compliant. That's why we need to use rewards, right? Number two, your child's language abilities aren't very good because. Because you cannot reason with him. That's why you need to use rewards to get to him. Okay? Number three, your child probably doesn't really treat you like a, like a caregiver. He treats you like a vending machine, right? He wants something from you. Who presses a button, he gets it. Say, so using a reward correctly is very important because I've seen so many times that a child, when he or she gets to like up to primary school age and they're still rather like at the single word level, and if they're on the spectrum as well, and other complications, it's very difficult to get them to do anything. And the reason is because that relationship isn't there, right? So going like going back full circle, how do you use a reward correctly? Is number one, you have to be clear about what behavior, what you're trying to teach, right? If you know what you're trying to teach, then do that one thing only have instructed one time, right? If it's a behavior that they can do, they can do themselves, then allow them to do it or give it cue so that they can do it. If they can't take your hand or just give them the answer verbally or whatever. One instruction, one behavior from the child, and then the feed and one reward and the feedback. Okay? 1, 1, 1, 1. One very easy one to one relationship directly. Make sure the child directly knows what's going on. All right? So that is number one, number one principle for using rewards. The second one is this. You have to be crystal clear when and why you're giving it to your child. Okay? So the mom just now, we were talking and she said that I don't know when to take the reward away. Well, you take the reward away when they're not listening. Why give a child a reward when they're doing nothing? Right? It doesn't make sense. They think that, oh, I'm on welfare, doesn't matter. I don't need to do anything not to say that people on welfare are doing a bad job. Like, I don't mean that. So please don't politicize anything I say here. I'm just, you know, everything I do and say is for teaching children, not. Don't take it out of context. All right? The reason why I'm saying this is because one, in one of our courses that we were talking about, like, I showed Indonesian man a policeman, and I was like, okay, doesn't matter what race he or she, he is or whatever. And then the mom took it, as in like, the policeman is black, you shouldn't have done whatever. Right? But then, hey, man, first of all, the policeman is like, it's Indonesian, right? And second of all, hey, this is all about teaching children. Nothing political here or whatever. Okay? So I kind of forgot what I was trying to say. Yeah, so like, you need to give the reward not for free. Don't give it for free. Don't give it for nothing. Don't be, don't make your child feel like he's on welfare. Don't feel like it's for taking it for granted only. Like, be okay with taking that away from a kid. Be okay with not bargaining with the kid. Okay? It's very, very important that you do not bargain if he or she keeps on crying. And over and over again. And you see all the experts on the, on the Internet say, oh, you gotta make it hard for them and communicate in order for them to have something from you. That is all true. But at the same time they also say like, oh, no matter how the tantrum, how bad it is, don't give in. Right? That's very true as well. At the same time, I understand how difficult it is. Right. You know, it's really really hard. When a child is like screaming, shouting, hitting you, biting you just to get what they want. But you have to remember, if you negotiate with them, the terrorist activities that they're doing to you, all the bullying also gets rewarded. Remember what I said just now? One behavior, one, one, one reward, right? So the whole thing becomes one behavior. Like biting you, scratching you, like crying for you, like cry, I don't know, Screaming, shouting, the whole thing, whole package of bad behavior gets rewarded, okay? That's the reason why. And yes, you're gonna have a good time after you give it to her or him or it becomes the new normal. So to say that they, they just don't mind, you know, they, they just don't want to listen to you anymore because they get what they want to get anyways, okay? So you have to remember, all children who are below five, especially they, they really, all they care about is themselves, okay? It's true. I don't know how to put this lightly. You know, like children, us, when we were kids, we were all egocentric. Only later on that we learn to. Egocentric means like self centered, right? So we only learn to care about other people because like the relationship is actually rewarding, right? But especially those who are on the spectrum, they don't understand that. They don't care about that. All, all they want is like the thing that they are asking for at that moment in time, what they're thinking about then, right? And if they, if there's the only way that they can get it is through like screaming, shouting, then that's the only thing that they will do, right? So that's why teach them a new behavior in order for them to get it. Okay? So compliancy is a huge thing that I think a lot of online, you know, just in general, the whole industry isn't talking enough about. You cannot have a child who doesn't listen to you, who doesn't give you the respect that you should command as an adult for your kid and try to teach them something, okay? You can turn on, you can turn. Like I see a lot of therapists, we do it only like once an hour, like once a week. And every time maybe one or two hours, right? But the problem is that we go full on Disney Channel, we go hahaha, all that stuff, right? I seldom do it nowadays. Thanks, Naz. Yeah, I try not to sugarcoat. I can't. I cannot do it anyways. I cannot go on Disney Channel for the whole day, all right? And it's impossible for you to do it because If I do it, I get really tired at the end of the day I just want to sleep. Like when I first started doing therapy, I went home and I started to sleep at this time, like 9pm I just couldn't take it anymore and I would wake up and it's the same old thing again. So treat your, your, your spare your therapist a little better. Guys, you know, just, you know, they, they're going through hell basically. Um, I had like 12 hour days back then and because there's prep and in the beginning of the morning and also prep to like make everything pristine again just so that when the next day, kids who come in the morning again the next day, it's the, it looks good, right? So the thing is, yeah, you need to be able to make your child listen to you and you're going to go through a bunch of hardships, especially when dealing with rewards. Okay. Because they were used to having you listen to them and when you now want them to listen to you, then it's going to be like a 180 for both of you guys, you know. So. Okay, so that's how you use rewards. And by the way, if you're sticking to the end of this little live here, we're doing a giveaway for one 27 USD dollar online course and includes a 30 minute consultation with me. And you can just go to the, to the link in the description box. I know where it is. Maybe right here, right? It's textmytribe.com agentsofspeech and guys, I know that the courses we give out here isn't, you know, it's already very, very, very modest, you know, the pricing so. And plus there's like a refund policy. If you don't like it then you know, just give, give you back your money. So doing this giveaway is just a way of me telling you guys that I want to speak to more of you, right? Not just on like a, on a PM basis, you know, not on an email basis either because I cannot attend to all of them right now, to be honest with you. Right. So join the. Join our giveaway and then let us know we have three winners and we'll be announcing it in like two or three days basically. And that's pretty much it guys. Or tomorrow, I'm not entirely sure. I need to check the dates. Right. But yeah, join first and then we have three winners. We'll announce it very soon. Okay. Maybe within this week. Okay, so that's all for tonight. If you have more questions about using rewards, especially which is a very soft skill. So it's impossible for me to tell you, ah, you got to do this, that this time at this whatever, you got to be careful about it, okay? Because you know, no one can tell you exactly what to do without seeing your child problem properly. Okay? And I do it, but through like a lot of videos from, from parents. Guys, you got to stop sending me videos as well. We, we have a whole membership for that. I don't want to like, it's, it's just, it's unfair to you because if you send me a video that I didn't tell you to send, like you said, send me a video of your child playing, it's not going to give me a lot of information, you know what I'm saying? Like, it's got to be something that I've, you know, you've learned from me. I told you to do this. And I know what I'm looking for and I know how like around what your child is like to give you a good insight about it. So it's impossible if you send me a video. I feel like I'm cheating you and you're cheating me, right? Because I have a whole membership doing that. And plus people are paying private consultation for that. And secondly, I'm cheating you because if I give you advice, it won't be like the whole picture and it might even confuse you at the end of the day. Right? We don't want that. So yeah, if you want that, just let me know either like email me as the best channel because nowadays PM on Facebook or Instagram or dm, it's practically impossible to catch up. Anyways, thank you so much guys. Have a great evening or morning or wherever you are. Let me know about the giveaway. He says I will be the one. I don't know, man. Maybe not. That's the thing about giveaways. But your chances are great because there are three winners. Okay, see you guys. Have a good one.