Monday Q&A Speech Delay Topics | www.agentsofspeech.com/micro

Hey everyone. Welcome to our Monday lives. Today we wanna. There's quite a few questions because I sent out an email, right. And I just want to go through them one by one. And if you have any questions right now, you can just type it in the thing. I'm sorry if there's a lot of stuttering and stuff going on in this, this live stream, I have no idea how to get rid of it. But anyways, if you have, if you need more, if you need to ask questions, feel free to do it in the comments. All right, let's see what we have for the questions today. Let me share my screen real quick. Share screen. All right, this one. Okay, cool. So I hope you can still see. I'm gonna go one by one, right? So I'll use it from email because this questions are much better now. It's very like very long, so I'm just gonna read it out and then I'm gonna answer it. All right. So Linda says, my boy just turned three. She has a slight. He has a slight dynamic issue. My son can only say mama, but not the call out kind. Okay. And like when he wants to brush his teeth, he can make a sound like, I guess he can respond well to instructions. Will he have a chance to speak? And then she asks if I want to start X on him to make the own pictures or just can buy the ready ones from Amazon. And also PEX vs. Hansim, which is better for his case? It's very hard to know which one is better for his case because there's not enough info and I need to do an assessment or at least read something about his speech ability. So basically he can say some sounds, right? Mama's fine. You can do. Which is quite a hard sound. Okay. Like the sound is pretty hard. Okay. So he responds well to instructions. Does he have a chance to speak? Honestly, I don't know. I really, you know that if you say there isn't a chance, I don't believe it. Sometimes, you know, you have to believe it yourself in order to do it. You know, sometimes we have some clients coming in who look like they will never speak. But then, you know, sometimes if we think that way, then obviously we're going towards that, right? And sometimes these children do surprise us a lot. So for you, what I can say is that do you know his true ability about speech sounds? Do you know his. Which sounds he has? Which sounds he doesn't have? Right? You say that he has a ch sound. Does he have like S sounds? Does he have like L sounds? You need to check all those to know, like, whether it's because he doesn't know how to use it or he doesn't really have the sounds at all. Right. So if you were to start to use pex, right? What is pecs good for? Is basically that I'm going to stop sharing right now. Go back to the screen. Well, pecs is good for. Is that's good for teaching the child how to initiate. How to initiate something. All right? So the thing about pecs is that it teaches the child to grab the card and stuff it into the person's hand, right into your hand or whatever. So what this means for you is that maybe your son doesn't need pecs because he can already start communication with you in a good way. All right? He has high motivation. He knows he has to come up to you and do something in order to get what he wants. Right. So my answer for you, Linda, is that you should try signing first. You should try some gestures, okay. Before you go on to trying packs, okay. Because it sounds like your child actually initiate conversation with some speech sounds. Okay? So that's the answer to the first question. And if you tripex, it's best if you have someone trained with PACs, because a lot of people do it wrongly. They don't understand. What's the. What's the goal of pacs? The goal of pacs is not to, like, replace speech. Okay. Sometimes we use packs as a system to teach the skills that a child needs to talk. For instance, you know, exchanging. You know, like having a card exchange it being able to match pictures. To match pictures to, like, a real thing. That's like symbolic, you know, symbolic knowledge. Right. So to say. Okay. So hopefully you understand. But all the end of, like, pecs and gestures, like sign language. It's a system to learn language. Okay. Once they learn language, maybe we can switch it back to speech. Okay? So it's never the goal to, like, totally just say, oh, from now on, I'm just gonna focus on, you know, getting rid of the speech, you know, getting some other system to do it. All right, all right. Let me share my screen again. Let's see what else we have. So let's see. So Kataki says my son is 15 years old. Sorry, 15 months old. He doesn't point to things, doesn't follow my point. Okay. He doesn't wave, doesn't imitate actions. He can clap and imitate the sounds I make. Okay? That's a good sign. He doesn't play with the car properly. He spins the wheels Only when it comes to cars. He doesn't say any words, but babbles a lot, doesn't respond to his name so often. Can you please suggest, should I go for further evaluation or should I wait? Since he's only 15 months old, his speech evaluation is done and it passed it on a boundary level, but I was not satisfied with it since he got so many red flags. Please advise. Okay, first of all, Katika, you have to calm down, all right? The. From all the language you use here, like, doesn't do something, doesn't whatever, doesn't whatever. And at the end you're like, you're not satisfied with it, tells me that, you know, you are. All this is about, you know, what you want for the child, right? Which is fine. I mean, we all want, we all know best for children, right? But at the same time, at the same time, you should change your mindset. Because he's only 15 months old, right? He's one year and three months old, right. If he doesn't have any of these things, of course he's going to be borderline passed. Because you're not supposed to some, you know, like the worst case scenario or like when we. Because there's a lot of children in the world. So for. In terms of getting all my. I'm getting flustered. It's basically at one and a half years old, you. A child is the latest time for a child to use words, right? So your child is not there yet, obviously. So if you do another speech evaluation, if you do another evaluation, it's not going to work, okay? It's just going to be the same thing. Okay? And if you tell me that, okay, how about ASD or something like autism? It's also too young. It depends on which country you're at. If you're in the U.S. they have some sort of screening that they can test at like one or two years old, but still your son is too young. Okay? And my recommendation for you, Okay, is that you have to chillax for a little bit. You have to relax and also focus on what he's good at. Because all you, you keep on saying that he doesn't do this, don't do that. Hey, he imitates sounds very nicely. He can clap and stuff. So therefore, if he can imitate sounds that 15 months old, he's not that far off, okay? He's doing quite well. I mean, like, there are children who come to me who are three and don't imitate any stuff, okay? And there are children who are 15 years old and still spinning a car wheel. Right. So this is not something that you should be too worried about. All right? You have to do what you, you know, to facilitate his language at home. So if you don't know, you can go onto my YouTube and check out like language facilitation or just in general, get a book like It Takes Two to Talk or, you know, in our micro course, agents of speech.com micro, we've got a lot more techniques that you can use at home. All right. But obviously not everything can relate to a 15 year old. But you start learning now, it's a good thing. Okay, so I'm going to stop sharing for a bit. Nope. No one has any questions, so I'm going to keep on going. Just let me know if you have questions. All right? And if the, if you can't even see that, maybe I should just read it out and I'll come back to the screen right here. All right, let me go over there. Alrighty. Let me share my screen real quick. Let me know if you can see it or not. Okay. Actually. All right. So, Lacacia, I hope I got your name right. I'm sorry? She said it's kind of a question she has. I would like to hear about a success story to learn how this place act. We've been doing speech therapy for a year and a half and my son has done great, but sometimes it's hard to see it all come together. So I'm interested in hearing about a solution where that's happened. Okay. So obviously there are like success stories everywhere. Lakeisha, I mean, I hope you were on the email thing. On the email, on our email. And last time I shared of a student I have who is like 30 years old and didn't speak until like 5 and now she speaks like fluently and stuff. So there's success stories everywhere. And obviously there are failure stories everywhere too. I mean, failure as in what we expect a child to become. Right. So really, to be honest, it depends where you're looking at. Okay. And if you're looking for like an end game, like, oh, how it's going to play out and if it's going to work or not. To be honest, in speech therapy or any type of therapy, we cannot think that in our minds. Right. I mean, it's very difficult. Okay. Because it's something that you do anyways, you know, even if you feel like it's not gonna work, you still have to do it and like hold on to it and think that. Okay. I think that, you know, by doing this My son or daughter is gonna like, or my child or my student is gonna improve. Okay? And why I say this is because I have had, I mean, as I remember, Lakeisha, your child, your son isn't that much of a like, correct me if I'm wrong, if you're watching this, tell me if I'm wrong, right? Is that he can actually speak, right? So let me talk about this kid who is like advancing slowly, who's working with me right now. Obviously not right now. I'm back in Hong Kong. But anyways, he actually couldn't imitate, couldn't like imitate sounds or anything at all. And now we're finally like, during the quarantine, he suddenly like just clicked and got and start to like imitate sounds and start saying words. All right? And now we know that he actually lacks a lot of sound. So we're working on that as well. Working on his or motor which he really needs. Okay, and so do we call that a success in my books? Yes, because, you know, we went through six months of gruesome like imitation work with nothing to do with language whatsoever. Okay. And I would say that it's a success because at the end of the day, he achieved something he couldn't. Okay? So I hope that this is how you take it step by step and you know, by the time you like get to, I don't know, when he's older, you're still thinking about the next step, about the next step. And, and that's what therapy is about, right? You gotta break down the skills into really small blocks. And hopefully if you know, therapy on a small scale works, then on the long term, when it's a really hard goal, you can still achieve it. It's just a matter of time and effort, that's all. So hopefully that answers your questions. If you search on the Internet, there are loads and loads and loads of so called success stories, right? And there are also loads that are. They stay at one place and they never get any. Like a lot of children, they stay in one place. Like they look the same, like they function the same as they were 10 years ago. I mean, I've seen it before. Okay? So you know, don't put your energy on those parts. Put your energy on like how to make sure that, you know, by, you know, by 20 years old, your child can function and the world. Okay. I don't know how serious your child is in terms of like, you know, delay or speech or, you know, autism or whatever. But remember, put your effort like where you look at, at the ones that are working at the case studies that are working, not the ones that are like, meh. Right. Or else your brain is just gonna think like, oh, I don't need a. I. I don't need to do it anymore. Okay. Because as some of the therapists say, it was already roof. They already hit a ceiling or something. You can't think that. Because if you think that, what you do will reflect it. Okay. That's what I learned from a senior therapist as well, so. Cool. All right, so this is really, really long. I'm not going to share it. I'm just going to really quickly talk about it. So Maureen says her daughter can follow commands no problem. Eye contact and imitate actions or some syllables. Got five words that are consistent, like babbling, I guess, like didi for milk, kaga for pickup, ball, and wanna and for no more. And expressions like, wow, he can point to what are the things he likes, she likes. Actually, I'm just gonna share it anyways. Never mind. Right. So she's 17 months old. Currently, there are no speech. No STs, like, no speech therapist in the area, only OT, and there's a whole bunch of here. So basically her question is, should she be a little worried? Okay. And for me is that, no, you don't have to be worried, Maureen. Okay? You don't have to be worried at all. She's only 17 months old, and she's already using some sort of words that are for a certain context. Okay? So it's true that speech delay runs in the family. Okay, that's okay. Through some sort of. There are some research that has found some sort of, like, link. Right? So what I'm telling you to do right now, Maureen, is to. Is to be okay with it. Because in my experience, if your child can use, like, a specific sound or word for a specific item or activity, then they basically already had the language for that thing. All right? And at 17 months old, it's a good thing. All right? So don't worry about it. So a really long question, but a really short answer. Okay. By the time she's like two and a half maybe, and she hasn't start saying real words and putting words together, then know, maybe you should be worried. But at the same time, I don't think you need to be worried too much. Okay, so let's go on to this question. Right? So Anita says my son is able to mand, like, meaning telling, like ask or something, man for demand or whatever. Right? So this is a very ABA term if you don't know, but Anyways, but only the object or the verb. For example, donut, biscuit, let's color, eat, drink milk, walk outside, write it. Okay? By the way, Janita, I don't know how old your child is, so if your child this is like a two year old, it's totally fine. Right? But anyway, I'm guessing this is a lot older. So when me or my hubby are not around, he can speak loud, Mama, papa, But he will make a sentence like mama, I want to drink, or papa, please play with me. In fact, he would memorize randy song, vocabs or prayer before he eats. Could you have advice how to teach my son to make a two way conversation? Okay, cool. Nanita, first of all, I do not know how old he is, okay? If that kid is like three, that's still rather. That's still okay, Right? But you were talking about two way conversations. Okay? So given that your child is. I activated my phone. Okay? So anyways, if your child can speak in words. Ready? Okay. But they cannot like start a conversation with you or have a conversation with you, right? That means he only thinks that there's a strong routine involved. Okay? And especially for Janita's child, who memorizes a lot of stuff, that means whatever you do, you have to be careful because it goes into like a pit, right? A pit of habits. All right? So once he gets used to that, the mother or the dad will say these things and act this way. They will be forever stuck there. Okay, What I mean is. What I mean is, if he wants to do something, some children will always look and wait for the mom to ask, what do you want to do? Like what do you say? Or like what's going on? And then this cue will let the child to say that one word. Okay? That's why it's not two way. It is kind of two way already because he's waiting for you to do that cueing. You have to be careful about children who are very rigid, all right? Because once you set how you communicate with him, he just stays there for a long time. Okay? So you need up. First of all, you have to break the routine, okay? You need to identify the routine first. Actually, when does he talk? Is there a cue that he talks? Right. Those are the things that are making him very rigid right now. He only wants to talk when that particular cue comes out. All right? So what you should do is to see how you and your husband interact with your kid, all right? Understand that, you know, like sometimes if you keep doing it one way, they will get stuck and keep wanting it that way. All right. And we talk about this in the micro course. So, you know, check it out over here. The agentsofspeech.com micro. Okay, so we talk about how to create a better routine so that they come up to you and you can cue them without using speech. Like maybe using gestures or like eye contact or whatever. Okay, so I think that's probably it for the email questions. Let's look at some live ones. So, Beth Elson, doctor. I'm not a doctor, by the way. You can just call me Ming. Okay. I'm a speech therapist. My son is 2.5 years non verbal. Every time he wants something, the fridge, he will bring what he wants for me. How could I get him to use words? Okay, cool. Okay, so he brings that thing up to you, right? So at that time, can you, like, what does he want you to do? Like, does he want you to open it? Most probably. Right? So what you need to do right now is to increase the number of times that he asks you to. To do something. Okay, so right now you're kind of like a vending machine, right? He wants something, he knows which buttons to press. Ok, Open the fridge, come up to you, like shove it in your face and then open it. Okay, so I'm guessing when you tell him to say, oh, say like help. Or say like mommy, help me or something, he just kind of not talks, right? He kind of just walks off or just maybe sometimes he cries. Okay, so what do you do in this situation is that you don't use words first. You use like gestures. Okay? And I've said this many times, all right? Start off with simple actions that they can imitate, okay? And you might ask like a lot of parents who say this, like, oh man, what if my child uses gestures more than they speak? Right? And we have had like some members in the agents of speech, the moms, right? They're like, oh, no, now my kid uses gestures more than words. So that's cool. That's actually fine. All right? Because then once they know the gesture, it's very easy to teach the word because they know the meaning now. Okay, so for you, Bethel. Yes. You said yes. Open, right? So open is like that, right? Like that doesn't matter up to you. Okay? It can be like that. It can be like that doesn't matter. So this is a gesture you can teach. All right? And there's one time it really doesn't matter what the gesture is. You're teaching the meaning of the word. All right? So after they Do a gesture. Maybe it's like, looks like this, that's for open that, whatever. And then what you can do is to teach the word. Okay, so once they can consistently use the same action over and over and over again, when you teach the word, it'll be so much easier. All right. And a parent also asked me, right, okay, what, what if I. When they do the action, I don't give it to them, they get angry. Well, the thing is, hopefully when you're doing the gesture over and over and over again, you've been saying the word also over and over again. So, like, once you've done, he can, like, follow you and do that. Hopefully he's heard the word open for, like, gazillion times. And so it's easier to actually prompt. Okay, so. So how things work, and I probably said this quite a few times here, is that. I mean, talking is quite troublesome. Sometimes when I'm talking here, I'm answering questions. It's all in long form sentences, right? Yeah. And why do I speak so long? Why do I have to use speech? It's because I ought to, in order to make you understand that's the best I can do. So for your child right now, if he's not using words, it's, number one, he can't do it. He doesn't. And number two is. Doesn't understand why. Okay? So when you use a gesture and then you make them understand that, okay, this is not good enough, I don't understand what you mean. And then they need to upgrade, right? They need to increase their, like, how much they communicate. So in that case, what we're trying to do is to, you know, tell that kid or child that I want you to talk. Okay? So you go open, open some, like, you do it a few times, and you also prompt. Okay, And. And you open that thing. Bethel, you open that thing that he wants before he gets angry. So maximum is that you do it like maybe two or three times. It depends on your kid. And I've seen many, many, many parents just keep on asking the child to like, repeat, repeat, repeat, until. And push them so hard that they'd rather not speak. Right. So even if he doesn't say it, remember, it's about the times that you know, is about the number of times that are successful. All right? If every time he fails, then he's not going to want to do it. All right? So make sure that you know, even if you're telling him and prompting him to talk with the gestures, all right? Make sure that you do open it, even if he doesn't say it, okay? Because if he does, if you keep pushing him, it's not going to help him in the long run, all right? He's going to think that mom doesn't help me anyway. All she does is just, like, keep on saying the same word, hoping that I say it, but super hard. Mom doesn't know that. And then in the end, he will rather not. This is where, like, children throw stuff around. It's because, like, I'm not getting what I want anyways, and you're not helping me. So they kind of throw stuff, right? So I hope that answers Bethel, your question. Right? So great. Keep the questions coming. And just as a general. As a general question that I've been getting so far, is that, okay, should I focus on, like, teaching, like, academic stuff, or should I focus on, like, functional stuff or. You know, my therapist has been saying this, and I'm telling them to do. Why? What should I do? Okay, so the one of the question I saw, right, Which I didn't put in the PowerPoint, but doesn't matter what. What she said was like, how do I get my child's eye focus, right? So I'm like, okay, so what are you doing right now? Are you, like, calling his name? Are you, like, holding his head and doing like that and, like, oh, look at me and stuff? And she's like, yeah, because the therapist told her to say, look at me. Look at me like that. And then put the two hands on his face and, like, turn his head and stuff, you know? And when you turn him, his eyes are like that, right? You know what I'm talking about? If you've seen it before, okay? So I was like, hey, this is not the right way to do it. Is obviously not the right way. So. And then she's like, so what do I do? I mean, like, the therapist told me to do it. The therapist told me to do it. Like, if I don't do it, then what am I paying that person for, right? And I'm not telling. Saying that. That's, like, wrong for the therapist. I'm trying not to, but don't do it, okay? Don't do it. If you want to have a good relationship with your kid, don't take his head and turn it. It's bad. It hurts. It's forceful. And even if you turn his neck, what are you gonna do with his eyes, right? Like, his eyes. You can control his head, right? But his eyes are still like that. What are you gonna do? Like, poke your Fingers in. And then make sure that the eyeballs align to yours. No, that's never a good way to do it. And good eye contact is like, what's that called? Something that you don't work on directly. It's an indirect thing. Once they understand communicating, once they understand that to listen to you, they will get what they want. They will look very intentfully because they're looking for clues. They're looking for what you're trying to make them do in order to get what they want. Okay, so my advice for all the parents here, if you're thinking about how do I get my child to look at me, that's the wrong question. Okay? Because you shouldn't work on eye contact. You shouldn't have to. Unless. Unless. Okay, unless you must work on eye contact fast in order to work on some speech production, which they have to look at your mouth or something. Okay? Then I think like eye contact is fine. Like if you're doing eye contact, it's fine. Okay. Or you're doing some like really like skills that involve imitation and they're not looking at all, then fine. Okay, then you can do some, some eye contact, right? And this might like sound really crazy to you, right? This might sound really crazy to you, is that, you know, eye contact isn't that important. It is important. I'm just telling you, don't use it as a goal at home. Okay? Focus on letting them understand what communication is. There's like initiating, right, with like the tapping stuff we were talking about. You can also try out in a micro course. We did talk about tapping. We did talk about, you know, open palms, using gestures, whatever, and also waiting, waiting nicely and stuff. All these are part of communication. Do they understand that? Do they understand that you're the gatekeeper, that people are the gatekeeper towards the stuff that they want and therefore they have to listen. So Bethel has another question. She says what age is good for him for therapy? So I think therapy can start at 2.5 years old. But you cannot have too much of an expectation that your child will listen or follow everything that the therapist says. So whereas sometimes, you know, some, you cannot put your expectation too high. What I mean is I've seen that some children at two point something years old, like 2.3, is usually when I start saying yes to clients, right? If children of 2 years old come to me, I say like, okay, wait, maybe wait like three more months. Because what I do is I don't do 30 minute slots, right? And I only do like 45 to like 60 minutes, usually 60 minutes. Because, you know, it's just stupid to travel so long just for 30 minutes. Right. So for 30 minutes, I think it's fine for two and a half or two and a two years old per se, because it more focuses on, like, you know, the parent education and also to build, like, routines and trust and communication with the child. Right. So I think it's quite okay. And their lower attention span as well. So for you, Bethel, I think 2.5, like two and a half is totally cool. If you want to try like for an hour, then you would try to budget like 45 minutes for general therapy time. And then like around, if you get like 60 minutes slots, which you would not. I do 60 minutes, but, you know, other parents would. Other therapists wouldn't. So aim for like 45 minutes and maybe like the last five minutes out of the 45 is for you to ask the therapist questions and stuff. Okay. And during of that time, there would be a lot of, like, switching games, switching whatever and all that. All right, so keep that in mind. All right, But I'll just. I think it's a good age for him to start. But the most important is to find someone who can keep his attention. And it's not about really about the skill level. It is about the skill level. But what I mean is more about if you can find someone who is on the same page as your kid, someone who can analyze the kid and someone who can get along and also teach. That's the main point of therapy. I hope I have answered your question here. All right, so I'm going to keep on scrolling through, like, I wrote down in my notes about what kind of questions in general that I got. Okay, so another type is, for instance, an aba, right? In aba. Is ABA Good. Is like ABA more about learning skills rather than communication, whatnot. And one mother in particular was like, oh, ABA has been working for, like, you know, working the same skills over and over again. And they haven't given up, you know, like they're teaching the kid how to count money or something or whatever type of like, functional activity. Right. So I think that's totally fine to work on functional goals. Right. And if parents are starting to ask these questions, if you are starting to ask these questions, it means that you're not convinced, right? So if you're not convinced, then, you know, you should really talk to the ABA therapist and talk to the supervisors and talk to a therapist, talk to the, you know, like, I don't know, even the head and say that, hey, I Don't understand why we're still doing this. You have to voice it out. Okay? I know in certain countries that this is not something you should do. Okay. It's kind of like stepping into the boundaries of the therapist. But if you come from, like, let's say that you work with me, right? And you start suggesting stuff to me, I would be a little bit disappointed because I'm like, okay, you came to me, you wanted to answer. Now I told you. And you're like, oh, allow me suggest something else to you. Right? Like one of my clients who told me, why are we working on an F sound? There's like. There's no F in, like, Indonesian. Why don't you do S? I'm like. And I would say, hey, man, in order. Why are you recommending me when you haven't. We haven't done enough to, like, to understand his. Her speech. Okay. And do you have any evidence that she can do the S at all? No. So therefore, we have to do the second best thing, which is the F, and slowly build towards the S. Right. So there are so many different factors when, like, choosing a therapy goal. Okay? So in the. In the end, do not go to a therapist and recommend them to do something. It always turns them off. It turns me off, obviously. But, you know, there. There are some people in the world who are very okay as long as the parents are, like, happy and they do their bidding. What I mean, okay, so what I'm trying to say is that whatever goals that you are not happy with during therapy, you have to discuss with your therapist. Okay? There's no point coming up to me. There really isn't a point that you would come up to me and say, ah, this person is doing this to my child and I can't do anything. I don't know if it's right or wrong. Okay? Because that is really your therapist's job, right? I'm not your child's therapist right now. Okay? You can describe to me and give you some general guidelines, which is what the micro course is for. Because, you know, it's very general. It covers nearly all bases, and it tells you, like, with a foundation of knowledge from you. So that next time when you talk to me, you're like, okay, so, like, this happened. I already did it. It doesn't work or did work. What do I do? Right. When you talk to a therapist. Not me. Okay, talk to your therapist. Tell them why. Like, which part you don't understand. Okay. For instance, the. The mom that asked me about, like, counting money and Stuff. Ask why is it important? Okay. What do you think? Like, how did you come up with this? Like, upon what evidence? Right. If you come, if you ask me that, I will tell it to you because you, you know, it really is a professional judgment. All right? So. And then after you listen to it, it's up to you to decide whether you think it's bad and you can tell them, you know, you can just terminate the service or something or, you know, continue. Or maybe you didn't understand it and they told you and explained it, and you're like, oh, my God, I get it now. Like, I didn't think about it in that way. So it was a stepping stone towards another goal. So, excuse me. That's something you have to realize. Okay? There really isn't much I can answer if you tell me, like, oh, this particular occupational therapist is teaching this, right? Or this ABA therapist doing that. This speech therapist is doing this. You have to ask. And even for, you know, for us, when we see other therapists do something, we're like, what? What's going on? What's going on in his head? What's he thinking? Why would you do that? But when you ask him, when you ask the therapist, when they explain it, there is a sort of logic going on, all right? And most times I'm like, okay, that's fair enough. You know, Most times it's like that, okay, so give your therapist some benefit of the doubt. They're definitely trying their best because it's not. It's not hard. It's not an easy job is what I mean. Okay. Okay. So another common theme, another common theme that I've been seeing for the past few months, right. Is that during the micro course, the parents would ask, oh, I get it now. So what happens if the child has very bad speech errors so bad that you can't even start to understand what they're saying? Well, obviously, we teach a lot of gestures and whatnot, but when it comes to, like, speech errors, there's something that you need to set them down at three, at least, right. To start charting down what speech sounds are there, are not there. Okay. And it's best that you find a speech therapist to do it, especially for the younger ones. You know, I've seen therapists who are senior than me, and maybe some of them I'm still learning from. Right. They're very good at this kind of stuff. Like, if they're specialized in speech sound errors, they're very good at picking them up. They don't even need to do a Test. They can just listen and test and stuff. They don't even need to do formal test. But whenever there's a speech error, you must find, not must. I strongly recommend you to find a speech therapist to help you chart down the errors. Because most of the time when you do that, it's kind of like detective work, right? There are patterns in between. Okay. So for instance, that child I was talking about, I was doing the F sound and the mom was like, no, do the S. Right? That story basically, is that any sound has a continuation. She can't do it. So for H sound like, like F. Like these are all out, okay? Even like ah is very short. So you go like that. So if you think about it, it's logical to treat the sound that is most visible, which is the F is the long sound and is airy, because that's the most common thing within all the sounds that she's lacking. So therefore, I would do that and I wouldn't do the S either. Because the S sound requires the tongue to stay at the bottom of the mouth. You can try right now, if you go think about where your tongue is, it should be 80% of the time that the tongue is at the bottom of the mouth, like right behind the front teeth, the bottom front teeth. Okay? And that requires some sort of, like, some sort of control. And if a child cannot do, like l sounds like la, la, la, or like that kind of stuff, I would think that it's rather difficult for a child to do a s, okay? So I wouldn't even do that because I'm setting up that child to fail if I try a super hard sound. And some therapists would argue, of course, start with the hardest sound. Right. In a private practice, you know, you have to go to the hardest. Once you get the hardest, it will get the easiest. But I don't think that way sometimes it depends on the kid. So for speech sound, you see how much, like, thought it goes through. Okay. To understand about. Okay, so this sound, that sound, what kind of common stuff they have, right? And so which brings me to the next one, which is when parents say, oh, my kid, can't do the L sound, can't do the N, can't do the T. Okay? These three. These three are very, very similar. They all go up to right behind the front teeth, which is like where the tongue lands is right. Is in the bony structure right behind the front teeth, the top front teeth. And that structure is what we call alveolar ridge. Okay? And that thing basically is that whenever we talk like using the T sound, D sound, L sound, N sound. We always put the tongue up top like that. Okay. So I don't know, it might be the case that your child is going through that right now. But the thing is, parents who are asking this is that the children are very young. They're like one or two, right. And all speech sounds have, like, milestones, just like language. So if a child is actually like between 1 and 2 and their speech is unclear, that's fine. Okay. You know, I think maybe like, apparently. Apparently sometimes in some clinics, which I think it's like, fair enough, right? I've only heard from parents, right. They say that if 80% of the time they cannot understand, it's still fine if they're like one or two years old. Don't quote me on this, by the way. But what I mean is it's totally okay if your child is messing up some speech sounds when they're young. By the time you're three or four, it's a better time to tackle those. Right? So what I'm trying to say is to address all the parents that have been asking, oh, they can't do the L and D and T and stuff. Yeah, it's fine. Okay. And then another one is that parents are saying, oh, the longer a sound a word is, the harder it is for a child to say it. Right. And that's totally fine too, because, you know, because we also get into it, right? The longer, the more syllables there are in a word, the harder it is for us to actually remember and use it and say accurately. I think this is like a universal thing. And then the longer it is, the easier it is to get it wrong. So for children, if it's like three or four syllables, it's a part of what we call phonological awareness, right? So you can clap those out and the opposite is true. Sometimes when children cannot understand how to say, like, one syllable at a time. There was, for instance, one of my students, she would say, like, for put, right? Or she would say like, pink. Pink, Pink, Pink, Pink, Pink. For pink. And this is where you need to teach them. You need to go like pink or, you know, put. Give them more cues. Like, give them visual and a sound cue maybe. Or like, you can tap them and tell them it's only one. So the same thing is true for long syllable words. You can tap it. Like, for instance, you say elephant or broccoli, something like that. It helps them to visualize and like, to feel how many syllables there are in a word. Okay. So one Thing that's been working a lot lately with parents over the Internet is that if there's like a three syllable word, put your three, three fingers up and then take your child's hand and put them down for every syllable that they talk. Okay. So for instance, if they have a problem saying dinosaur, right? They say dinosaur or dino and then the sound just disappears. You can put up three fingers and tell them like dinosaur, like that use their hand. This finger is yours, this is the child's. So you take it and you say dinosaur. So he physically has to get rid of the fingers every time he says a sound. It'll be very easy for him to understand that way. All right, so that's all the questions that I want to answer during this time. If you want your questions answered, you can put them in the chat box here. Okay. In the comments below or you could send me an email. And about the questions getting better and better is very true, by the way. And I think it's because like more and more people are joining our micro course. There's like a hundred something people, parents, moms, especially inside the course, which is absolutely great. So with these type of questions I'm getting because knowledge is growing. It makes me, it makes it easier for me to teach and easy for me to like, not to repeat myself over and over. Right. So it's a good thing. It's a win, win. Okay, so before I leave, I want to say thank you everyone for hanging out today. And if you need anything, please do let me know, okay? I'm trying to help in the sense that, you know, this is as much, as much as I can do. Okay. Anything that requires more would be like you talking to me over zoom in a private consultation. And you know, I know that it's, you know, this type of consultation may or may not help, I believe, but if we group everyone together and then you ask similar questions and I might give you some, like some insight about something you never thought about and you could try it and it works. Okay. And I've heard it a few times already that this happened, so I'm pretty happy. All right, so thank you. Let me know if you have any questions. Just put it down there. I'll be hanging for one more minute and if there's nothing more, then I'll just stop the live. Okay? All right. So I don't think anyone has any more questions tonight. And tonight we don't, we didn't really have much of a topic. Right. So it's just basically ask me questions. So that's it. If you have any questions more, just drop them here. All right? See you next week. Bye.