How We Got This Non Verbal Autistic Girl to Speak in 15 Months

Hey guys. So today I'm going to share a story with you guys of how we got a nonverbal child to speaking in a year and three months. So at this point in time, if you think oh my God, it's going to take this long, this is one of the longer clients that we have inside of our coaching program. So what we do at Agents of Speech is that we coach parents like yourself to teach you speech therapy techniques that I can use with your child at home. Doesn't matter if your child is nonverbal, using sentences, using only single words. Whatever it is, we teach you about what to do. Okay, so this particular client trying to get permission to use some of the videos. And as I'm going to tell you this story, I'll have a follow up video. And I know I have a problem saying that I would get these videos, these progress videos out there, but it takes longer than expected. Keep your notifications on just as I am trying to do that. Okay, so let's go back to the very beginning when this mother reached out to us and it was January last year. So that would be 2024 when they started with us. It was a coaching program called Talk to Me. So Talk to Me. We've been running it for till now would be two and a bit years. And she was in our, I think it would be one of the sixth or seventh groups that we've done at that time. And when she came in and I'm just looking at the notes that the parents shared with me because it's very important that we mark down and we have data points and this mother did it on her own so I didn't have to go back and look at our database. She wrote it down herself and she shared the notes with me. So that. And she gave me permission to share this information with you. So I'm going to tell you this whether you're watching or listening. This would be great. So in the first week we taught an open palm. Right. If you watch some of our videos before or you've gone through our free resources inside of our free courses, the one called the micro course and zero to words course, it's going to cover most of these things for free. Okay. So I'm not putting price to get these information. You can just go ahead and do it yourself. Why parents pay us money is for the coaching. They send us videos and we get feedback. So anyways, back to that open palm. It took them around. How long was this? Around a week or two to get to week two, which was Adding an open gesture plus the open palm to get something from the mother. Okay, now this is. As we're going forward, I'm just going to tell you the dates here. And so at around the same month in January, at the end of January last year, she got to a point where the child could do open palm without help. Before that, she would snatch everything. And the reason we do open palm is so that children don't snatch and they wait. And why we want children to wait instead of hand leading or like pulling or grabbing or snatching or whatever is because we don't have a slot, a time frame where we can actually get a child to stop what they're doing and listen. Okay? So it's more of a waiting kind of thing as a learning to learn skill. So back to that point in February, we got to a point where she was able to do it by herself and open gesture, and we did a bunch of sing. So singing was something that she was already doing by herself, as I remember. But getting the mother on board as a home therapist, so to speak, to get her to start singing together was a little bit of a challenge. And this is where in week four of our program, we call it weeks, right? But that doesn't necessarily mean that they're going to take a week, right? This is where we added a tap gesture. If you watch some of our videos here on, on the channel or that you check out our free courses at www.agentsofspeech.com course, you will see that we add a tap to say mommy, right? Why do we tap? Okay. Is because you want to make the link between the word mama or dada or papa or whatever with a gesture so that later on you can get rid of your verbal cues of say something, right? We want to get rid of that. Okay? What we do at week four is that we sing. We do social routines like tickling, right? Going up and down. If you're on a swing or whatever, we stop and pause, hoping that the child will actually say something, communicate or just tell you with any gesture, any or any way or vocalization or whatever. And this builds anticipation. When you have anticipation, right, you have the child understands the activity, right? If your child doesn't know what to anticipate to know what's going to happen next, it's pretty hard to get a child to communicate with you because we're not on the same page. So we got to that part and this is where we got stuck, because when we got to in May 2024, we were doing some, ah, E and U, These. These very simple vowel sounds and mouth shapes. And they took a full month break. And obviously, life gets in the way. Like, it's never a fairy tale where we're able to work with the child or the parent for extended period of time without any interruptions. In fact, like, sometimes coaches, they get sick, they get busy. Parents gets busy, children get sick. Right? So they took a full month of break in May 2024, and they finally came back at around in June. So as they were getting stuck in week five, and that's what happened. Because a lot of kids, they get stuck at different weeks, different stages. Most of them do get stuck at verbal imitation because that's where the deficit lies. They don't know to imitate, although they're using words. Ready? And this is the story of this little girl here. We start to change to using reward system like a token economy. And some people are going to frown, they're going to sigh or whatever, and they're going to be like, oh, my God, Ming's going to talk about ABA again. Now, excuse me. ABA or not is just a reward or behavioral system that helps us get closer towards the goal that we want to get to. All right, so whether it's going to work with your child, and we don't say this to all children or all parents, we don't use it as a cookie cutter. We look at whether the reward is going to help or not. If it helps, then great. That's something that we're going to use because we're going to use all the tools in our arsenal. If we don't use it, that'd be very foolish of us. So we changed into a puzzle because she likes the puzzles. She likes to complete puzzles. We use the puzzles as a token, meaning the reward itself is the puzzle. When she finishes the puzzle, she can swap that puzzle with an edible, with a snack, with a whatever, with the activity. Or she could go away. But she knows she has to finish the puzzle because she has a problem with motivation. A lot of times when we tell her something, she just, like, starts talking other stuff, starts using, like, different sounds, or sometimes she would just outright cry. What happened was, like, we start to do these using the puzzle time as a token system. And we were there for a very long time. We were there from. From December 2024 all the way to February. So at that point, she did say some vowels, she did say some words. She did do those via imitation. It was a very low percentage. So. So, Joanne, one of our coaches at Agents of Speech, we talked about it with this mother, and then we were like, dude, actually, she knows how to do all of it. It's just a matter of behavior. So then we're like, okay, so we've been stuck here for some time. We know that she can do it. We've made her imitation skills a lot better, albeit it wasn't like a hundred, like, all the time, because of her willingness to do, not because we haven't taught her anything. She definitely has a lot more words and sounds and more willing to sit down and work with us, right? And play. But what we do here is that we skip forward, right? We went to the play routines that we wanted to teach. And this is where the biggest difference that we see with our work and other therapists. That doesn't mean that we're. We're better or more special or whatever. It's just that we try to do things that make the most sense for parents. So we skipped. We usually do a very structured task in the beginning, and then we move towards play, whereas a lot of people, they start off with play. We don't. And then we moved on to play with this girl. And we came between February and March. This is where we saw, like, we saw more progress, right? We start to do longer vowel sounds. We start to do more action imitations to help make her compliance better, right? And we started a lot more pretend play so that we're not leading on the puzzles anymore. We're building other reward systems, like, to create things that she actually enjoys. And that was until March and the end of March, towards April, which is this year, very recent, was that we started to do a lot more pretend play. And during the play, she started to pick up the play a lot better, all right? And we got her to talk, and she talked more. Her percentage of imitation increased by a lot. So then Joanne asked her to go on to week 11, which was a lot more parent child interaction. We saw that the mother was doing very well, and Joanne actually said that she was practically a speech therapist at this point. She could now do some svo, meaning subject, verb, or verb object phrases to say in front of the child. So a lot of times, I think the general narrative of therapy, over the Internet or otherwise, is that we should narrate. Narrate, right? Talk about, describe whatever that we see. But then a good chunk of work in front wasn't done yet. So then the mother wasn't ready. The child wasn't ready. And therefore, like a lot of times when we tell. And I've done this for 5 years now over the Internet. When I've taught parents that that's my thing. All right. I like to teach parents. If we start off a play and start with narrating without any structured tasks or whatever, and getting a child to understand turn, taking, getting them to sit down or whatever, it's just going to be super hard for the parent to continue. And so after a whole year and a bit, when we got this mother to get parent child interaction, we got to after a year and a bit what a lot of therapies would start at, which I don't care if it's a mistake or not. I just think that it's easier for us to teach. I'm not saying what other people are or whatever or that we're. Although we have a lot of success and a lot of failures, by the way, we're not going to say that, oh, this data driven or whatever. We're not going to shove it down people's throat that way. It's up to you. This is what happened for us for this particular case. Doesn't mean it's going to happen to you. It doesn't mean anything. You need to do your own research, man. When it came to the last week, which was basically getting a child to like identify, like a week 12 of our program, we usually do object labeling or we in Ava they were quite expressive or receptive. Labeling and speech therapy that we call it object comprehension are object naming. So you see, like all fields, we're doing practically the same thing with different names and little variations and some theoretical, like differences. But at the same time we're doing the thing. So at week 12, finally, this girl, she is verbal. You ask her, what is this? She's going to say cup, right? You tell her to give you something, she's going to give it, right? You tell her to sit down, she's going to sit down. You tell the repeat. I think like now I can't say 100% but like 80% she would imitate after you. So we're finished. This is three days ago actually. And I was like, I saw my telegram. That's the software that we use. It's kind of like WhatsApp for coaching. So I was looking at my phone, I was like, wow, she's done. And like a lot of times there are a lot of. For the past, I think two and three months, we've been trying to get parents to think long term. And it's paid off because we've had around three or four parents who have been with us for more than a year. They've started to see the results now. Right. And obviously there are, I could beat the drum about, oh, parents got their child to speak in four weeks or eight weeks or whatever. Those get the clicks, those get the views, those get people signing up, those get parents wanting to try. But the reality is that you or your child, your relationship, right, it takes a long time to build. Okay, so now the work is not done because my child is now using one word to request for things. Whereas before she would pull, she would cry, she would do whatever. Sometimes she still needs time to think. This is the mom's word I'm reading off here. But using syllabic cues, meaning the first syllable of the word or the first sound of the word will help her remember what word she's supposed to use, which is great. She's learning the words fast as her mom's reporting. Ready, steady, go is mastered. That's excellent. She's back being a happy little girl. That's her words there. And I'll again, I will try my best to, to get permission for the videos so that we can share a little bit about the whole journey. I do have a few parents in my mind that I will reach out to talk about all this. And then this particular girl, she's going to start the next program. Okay. Which is going to be a single word, sentences. It's going to be a long fight. It's a hard fight. Obviously it's difficult work for all of us. Right. And before we go, I just want to tell you all this info, definitely you can learn if your child is non verbal. You're struggling. We have a full fledged program that's free. Okay, Go to agents of speech.com/course. There must be a course for you over there. If you watched and looked at the start here post, you read the video, you watched the videos, you searched the whole community that has 15,000 parents inside. I think it's the biggest one on the Internet right Now, despite our YouTube channel size and everything. It means a lot to go through everything and then to ask the question and then like the coaching side, that's entirely up to you whether you want to join or not. It's just the best way that we can help at this moment in time. And that's it, man. Before we go, I just want to encourage you because just to be very frank with you, from the, I think two years ago when I started to do the coaching, I felt like we weren't evidence based and that's a key word in our Industry, a lot of people get shot down because, oh, that, that's not evidence based. The like it's fraud or whatever. The underlying tone is that it's not verified. Part of me was a little hesitant about all this because we needed to get. That's my cat, sorry. We needed to get people to do the work and she's moving the camera. All right, cool. We needed to get parents to do the work and it really helped when we had other coaches coming on. So we have three now as of this video, obviously. And then what they said gave me a lot of confidence going out because they were like, oh, I can't believe this kind of model will actually get results. And we have been getting results. Okay. And even if we were working in the clinic, we see a non verbal child, we may never see them talk. And then they would leave. Like they would try something else. They would go, leave the country, go to a different city, whatever the reason might be. And we might even change jobs. So this is a great thing. And if you are someone who wants like deep help, this is what we like to do. A lot of the clients that we have, I've been talking to them for two years, man, and I really enjoy it. I like seeing these success stories and I'll share with you even more. It doesn't matter if these videos don't get a lot of views. I don't mind, I don't care. It's just that if you're watching this and you feel, man, I would do that myself and I need the help with or without, without paying. Just hop on and start today. And that's all. I just want to see if this is like Agents of Speech is going to be the best place for you to learn and grow as a parent. And hopefully I can share your story one day. And this is my work now. I want to reach out to the parents out there and encourage them that this is doable. And it's very doable because I've seen it so many times. And the very last thing is, oh, share something I heard over the Internet. And these days you're just scrolling. And then confidence is something that comes from past experiences. And this is a quote from Morpheus from the Matrix. So Morpheus says, I like he's ready to do something because in the movie, because of not the path that lies ahead, but the path that he has tread on the past things that he has done. And it's the same for me and the same for parents who have done it and been there. They have confidence that they can teach the child to do something because there are small wins along the way. And hopefully you can start today so I can build that confidence. And, yeah, that's my rant at the very end of the video. So that's all, man. Have a great one. And if you wanna get more out of this, please go to agentsofspeech.com course. All right. Thank you. And I'll see you in the next one. Bye.