Rant About Speech Delay From Speech Therapist (Must Watch for Parents)

Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com today we're going to talk about what you must hear for parents who consider their children speech delayed. Okay? And this is a little bit of a rant for myself. This is not really that well scripted. It's not really well written. And I just wanted to get what my mind and what I think you need to hear. Okay? And I'm not that kind of therapist to tell you all the flowery words like, ah, your child's gonna be all right. You know, your child is smart in other ways, and so on. I'm being very realistic in this video, and I want to tell you what I hear from parents and what I think and how you should tackle this. Okay? The first thing I want to talk about is that speech delayed is an overgeneralized term. Usually what people mean is language delayed. Okay? There's speech and language. That's why our profession is called speech and language pathology or therapy. Okay. The reason being speech means the ability to make sounds that are speech sounds. Right? So for instance, if you have speech sound errors, meaning some people will omit some sounds or substitute some sounds, you know, make a lot of mistakes when they're speaking. Okay? Those are speech errors, meaning they are speaking in words, but the sounds are off, the pronunciation is wrong. Okay? That's speech. Language, on the other hand, is actually if they know the words or not, if they're getting the grammar correct, if they have how long of a sentence can they can they speak, so on, so forth, Right? So speech and language is different. Usually when. When parents tell me all my child is speech delayed, most of the time, they might mean actually language delayed. And actually, I don't have it at hand. Right. Most of the time, it's both speech and language delayed. All right? But we should always teach language before speech. And I'll get to this in a minute. Okay? So let's talk about autism and red flag. We have a Facebook group called Speech Delay Children Parent Support Group. Okay. I'll put the link below in the description. You can join if you want to. It's awesome inside. And basically every three days, a parent will ask about autism and red flags. What I think about it, first of all, red flags doesn't automatically mean there's autism. All right? If a child doesn't respond to your name, doesn't look at you, repetitive behavior, the list goes on. Right, that there's a bunch of lists. It doesn't automatically mean that your child is autistic. There is a higher risk okay, so let's say that you're coughing, you're sneezing. It might be Covid, given the situation now, or it might be just common flu. So which one is it? You don't know. So that's why you need to get it diagnosed. And this is where parents are praying and praying and praying, especially the mothers, like, ah, no, please, no autism. Please, please, please. Right, So I don't know. And you wouldn't know and the child wouldn't know. The only way to know is to get an assessment. All right? I know you're worrying. I know it's really, really difficult for you. But at the same time, being realistic is that other than being worried, you should be proactive and seeing whether they have it or not when they hit the age. So at different countries, Right. Some people can be diagnosed at a younger age at around like two. Nowadays, I don't even know how old they you. You can be diagnosed. Apparently it can be under two. Okay. But for us in Asia, most of the time is around three. So if you think about that, it's hard to tell you, but you have to wait. Okay, And I will drill down more about eye contact and also responding to name. Okay, Remember when I talked about speech and language disorder? So in speech and language disorder, right, we are actually dealing with the language part. Okay. Most of the time, if a child is not responding to a name, is not looking at you is a common trait of autism and language delayed or disordered children. All right, so what does that mean? The outlook looks around the same. All right? And to help them, to teach them to look at you. It's not by, you know, telling them, telling them to look at you and all that. We have a video, separate video about eye contact. You can go take a look at it. You cannot teach a child to look at you by making yourself more noticeable. That doesn't work. Okay. It doesn't matter if how much you shout. If your child doesn't understand why they're supposed to look, then there's no point. So what I mean is here you need to teach the language, make sure that they can understand you. Make sure they can start communicating with you even without speech. Okay. Start playing a lot more with you. Because that's the way how children learn. Um, we know this since forever, but somehow when we teach children, we want to go into teaching mode right away, and we want the child to be in learning mode and we want them to stay focused. And a lot of parents will say, ah, my child is not focused, not attentive. Whenever I teach them something, they run away and so on. Right? So this is something you have to work on, not by sitting them down and teaching them and expecting them to learn from you at like 2 or 3 years old. And then a mother would tell me, right, it might be you. You might say, hey, my friend's three year old can sit down and do a lot of things with the mom. How come mine can't? Well, obviously your friend, your friend's child is typically developing. Your child who you're comparing with is language delayed or speech and language delayed for that matter. Right. So you cannot exactly put them on the same scale. All right. The last thing I want to talk about is why hinting, repeating won't work with a child and it might work with your typically developing child. They just didn't want to respond to you. So I always say on this channel is that children don't do. Humans in general won't do something because of two reasons. Number one is that they don't want to. Number two is that they don't know how to. Right? Either you don't want to or don't know how. That's why if when you repeat and hint and keep on saying, hey, say whatever, say mommy first, say daddy first, look first, it won't work is because it's not helping either of the of the reasons. It becomes even harder for them to want to communicate with you because you're so repetitive, it doesn't make sense. They're like, ah, I can ignore this, I'll just keep ignoring, right? If they don't know something, if they don't know how to communicate with you, then if you repeat and hint and over and over again, are you helping them to achieve something that they find really difficult? You're not. So when you're hinting and repeating, it doesn't work. What you need to do is to take something hard like speech and lower it into something that's easier, such as doing a gesture and so on. Doing a gesture, doing an action, just tapping you or whatever make it easier for them to communicate. You're not teaching the speech per se. You're teaching the concept of initiating communication with you. And we go into this, this a little deeper inside of our online course, right? It's. I'll also put the link in the description. You can check it out if you want to. And this is probably the end of this video. I know that this isn't what a lot of therapists will try to tell parents. Most of the time, therapists will either try to blame the parents for spoiling their children. I don't do that. Or they, they will try to talk about how the child is actually a genius and oh, have you heard of Einstein syndrome? Kid is good at other stuff. You know, it doesn't mean because their language or lacking or speech is lacking that means the IQ was lower. Well, that's true. We shouldn't think about it that way. We should think about in solutions. That's why I always talk about, hey, this is what you should do. Parent involvement is very, very important in terms of speech and language development and even academic development for all children, like, not even those who are delayed or disordered. All right, so if you have any questions, comments, or agree or disagree or whatever, you can put them in the comments below. We can have a chat. And if you haven't, you should go to agents of Speech.com checklist to grab a list of tools and toys that we recommend you to have when you're starting your home therapy journey. All right, I look forward to seeing you in the following video. And that's pretty much for me. Bye bye.