Setting Your Expectations w/ Speech Delayed Children | www.agentsofspeech.com

All right, so welcome to a new year live. The first live we're doing in 2:23. So if you're watching this right now, Happy New Year. And let me know in the comments where you're watching this from. Okay, so let's begin. So expectations is an, is a word that we use. I was at a sermon and I was listening to a pastor talk about this and therefore I want to talk about expectations myself. Expectations is a huge thing. And today I want to talk about expectations because I have a parent who I've been working with in our group coaching the eight week challenge for from zero to Words. Basically. And he was telling me that after you did a medical report, right, that there was some sort of heavy metal. It was a heavy metal inside of the body that's overdosed, right over the limit or, or something. I'm no medical expert. I don't know anything about that. So he asked me, I said I don't know. And he asked me if that's the cause for the child speech delay. And I told him that I don't, I, I don't know. It doesn't matter to me if I need someone with expert knowledge to answer you. Right? And that, that's when he, he said, that's when I saw and I felt that the parents expectation change from, oh, I need to continue to work on my child in a behavioral level, right? Because an intervention and teaching speech delay children, autistic people, whoever, okay? There are different levels to it. First level is behavioral. Second level is cognitive. Third level is like is. It should be reverse, right? The very bottom is like medical, right? Medical physiological intervention, which is like medicine, whatnot. Second level is like behavioral and the third level is cognitive, right? So when we're always teaching children, when we're teaching children, we always think about like, what can we do at a behavioral level? Because that's what therapy is, right? Respect setting expectation that if we keep on doing what we're doing, giving that there are some, there are actually some sort of result. We're gonna, if we keep on going, then it's gonna get better, right? That's the unsexy thing that parents don't like to hear, okay? And, and I'm sure There are other YouTubers that are not YouTubers but other therapists online who they say, oh, look, I, if you do this and that, it's gonna, you know, if you take dj, if you take like you see a lot of those rubbish comments inside of, of my videos or other people's videos in my industry, that's like, oh, Dr. Herb, whatever ointment or whatever has cured my kid from autism, oh, my God. Hooray. If there was something like that, first of all, there would be no discussion about it, and it'll be done already. There would be no more speech delay, and we don't have any of this conversation courses, coaching, speech therapy, so on, so forth, Right? We don't need it anymore. All right? And by the way, if you're watching this right now, happy New Year to you. Please tell me where you're from and where you're watching from. It gives me a lot more confidence when I do these lives, and it really humbles me with a lot of people over the Internet watching the stuff that I say. Okay? So it really is very, very unsexy when I tell a parent that they have to. The expectation is that you cannot think that it will happen overnight. There's no such thing. Okay, that's number one. Okay, so let me see who's talking right here. So it's Jackie says, Philippines. Great. And then car. Sorry if I'm getting it wrong. I'm saying exactly, I guess, about the. The not sexy thing. Oh, she's also watching from Philippines. Very good. So let me. Let me continue. Right? So expectation is. Is. Is a thing that we use because we use our old thoughts to create expectations. And we look around us, right? We look around. Oh, my. My friend's kid is doing this, right? My friend's kid is not talking. My friend's kid is talking. My friend's kid is number one in class. These create expectations on our own children. And something I heard last Sunday at church, believe it or not, is that these expectations are not helpful when you're doing something brand new. And to a lot of parents, teaching children who are on the spectrum or speech delayed is brand new. You cannot use what you know already to think. To think that, oh, I want my kid to do this, right? Anytime you're thinking with I want, that's already sort of selfish. Okay, now listen to me first. Because ultimately, of course, we're selfish. Ultimately, because we. We think. We think that, oh, we know best. And because we do know best about how a child should be doing in the world, right? Because if they don't talk, they don't get as many opportunities. They won't be able to make friends. They won't be able to get a job, whatever. Like, be able to, like, function inside of the society, right? So we do know best, but our expectations need to be, like. Need to have timelines and time Horizons. Our ultimate goal, of course, is for the child to start talking and communicating and catch up and be a useful person in the society. Many parents will say, I just want them to be happy. Right. Who are we fooling? Right, who are we fooling? When you say, when you tell me that I just want the child to be happy. Yes, it's true. At the same time, the reason why you, you come to like my office is because you want him to talk, right? And there are many reasons why you, you want the child to talk might be like guilt from other family members, other people telling you, oh, you should get them checked up. What are you doing? Right? That, that's the sort of guilt that will force you. Not force what, but push you towards where you know, push you towards getting, getting him or her checked up. Right. So I'm seeing more and more people here. So Vic Ness. Hi, Vic. Oh yeah, it's Vic. Hi. Yeah, let's, let's keep on going. So Vic is inside of our group coaching. We're opening quite soon. So again, so please look out for the, for the posts and the emails. Rachel, what's up? Watching from Canada Quebec. I guess you guys speak French there. I don't speak that. I did speak it when I was young. I went to a French preschool, but I don't think, I don't remember anything at all. Anyways, so I was saying expectation needs to have a, have a timeline and because your time horizon is so short and you think that it's something that is very, how to say, it's very important for you to get it right now. It's very difficult for you to see the granular steps you have to take. And because it's something brand new, you cannot use other things, other things like other, other people, other parents, other kids as a frame of reference because your child is your child and your expectation will be different. Should, your expectation should be no expectation. Okay, now when I say no expectation is going to blow your mind or it wouldn't be because isn't it, isn't it funny that when you have no expectation of a child, actually they will do better, right? You have no expectation of someone. It removes the stress and it makes it easier to teach and for someone to grow. I know like you would know it if you were at a job. Maybe you would say, oh, I strive in a stressful environment. But you know, like you shouldn't put your own standards onto the kit. So let's talk about long term, the long term expectations that they're going to catch up I believe it. That's why I'm, I'm in this industry. I truly believe it. Whether, how long it takes, I don't care. But ultimately they're going to catch up and they're going to have a good life and they're going to be able to communicate. They as in children who are delayed right now, like in any shape, way or form. And one person, like one of my friends from the online business world, he was saying how, oh man, you know, if you just wrote something like cure to autism or that's why you said it's like this is for autism. This is how you get, get your child done with autism or whatever, you would make a lot, whole lot of money. Well, that's true. By the same time, most of people who are watching this, you don't know whether a child is on the spectrum or not because other than in USA, you cannot really get them checked up before 3. And whether your child knows, I mean, you know, if your child is on the spectrum or not shouldn't affect what you're supposed to do with your kid. All right, so long term expectation. Yes. They're going to catch up, they're going to do all these things in the world and they're going to make you and themselves very happy. All right, how about short term? How do you align those that long term purpose? Using short, small steps. Okay. The very small, smallest step is to think about how to get my child to communicate with me with what they have right now without any stress. That's the most important part. If they do not communicate with you, then think about how to get them to care. Okay? That's always number one step. And we talk about this many, many times. All right, we're talking about getting a reward, using something to bribe. Many people don't like that term. I use it because I don't think it's correct to say it. But just if I say it, then you're going to get it right. That's why I'm saying it. Then what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the, what's the. Sorry, I'm stuttering. What is the, the, the use of plain semantics. If I say something, you get it right? And we're trying to play like word games or whatever that a lot of people in our industry are trying to do, which is a little bit besides the point because if we're, we're caring about what semantics are, what the words mean and then how it makes you feel and how, whatever. And this is like why some, some people like me and dislike me at the same time. You know, like they, they like what I say. I'm sure it's a point, but at the same time it doesn't, like, it doesn't help everyone in terms of their feelings or whatnot. But I don't, I'm not here to help you feel good. Although most of my time, whenever things go south, I usually am the person to talk to parents the most like. But you know, you get what I mean. I do care about your feelings, but it's just your feelings right now is not the most important in terms of getting your child to talk. Getting your child to talk is to, for you to let go of those feelings and those insecurities about yourself and your guilt and whatever and face the problem, which is like just daily action on doing it. Yeah. So how do you do it? So it's easy, right? Grab something your child cares about, put it in front of him or her and see what he does. If he snatches, then teach him not to snatch. That would be the first step. And how do you not teach him to snatch through throughout the group coaching? Believe it or not, although we always talk about this in like free videos or whatever, we always say teach them open palm, you know, like take his hand, turn around and give it to him. Right? We always talk about that. Right? But then how you do it is, is the most important part because each child there's going to be small things that you need to look out for. And for every mom and dad out there, how you're gonna, how you're gonna do it is going to be very different. And I believe like for my, like from now on, agents of speech is going to be very clear cut, you know, like the, the, the information, the information, right, is going to be as free as possible. That's what I'm trying to do. I'm not there yet. Give me some time. But the most value I can give you as a parent is breaking down the steps and the expectations in the small parts. That's why I'm saying in this new year your expectations should be different because you're doing something brand new and you're not supposed to have any expectations towards something you don't know anything about. Right. You cannot go in with expectations. Okay? And that's crazy because if you're gonna like, the other side of information is all the coaching that I'm doing right now. And if you think, oh, the coaching, how could I not have any expectations about coaching? Right? That's Impossible. And you're right, you're totally, you're totally right. We, we. You should. And your expectations would come from all the, all the successed stories that we have, which I am like I have so many videos right now that I want to share with everyone but I just rather, I rather really cut them all up into like different small stories because we did a case study group and I want to expand it into, into more, more, more parents all over the world. Right. So let me just see who else is here. Right. Carly says from Trinidad and Tobago. Is that how I say it? Excellent. Wow. So many Trinidad people. By the way, Marquesh from Bahamas also a lot of people from Bahamas. Gee, Cebu. Is it Cebu Jebu? I don't know. This is Philippines. Right, Sorry about that. And from Ghana, Accra, West Africa. Is that how I say it? Is it Astra or Accra? I don't know which one I'm really bad with with spelling and pronunciations. Although I'm a speech therapist. Anyways, West African. Very nice. All right, tell me where else you guys are from. Keep it going and we'll talk about now. Let's, let's set some expectations about what we're going to do in the future and on this platform. So somehow we are, we got to a place where, you know, like the, you, you know, I'm talking to parents every day from, from different places which I'm very happy about. So from now on, if you're already in some of our courses and, and your child is below single word level, right. The expectation for you is to go through the micro course, right. If you, if you can afford it, you can go buy those courses. The micro course, full intro course. Those are your best courses to understand. If you want more coaching, please look out. Later on we will have the eight week. Eight week is an average, right. Most people will be done around eight weeks. But if you need to take 16 weeks, I'm still going to be there for you. Is my full effort coaching with a group of, group of people, with a group of parents that we try to go from like zero to imitation and at least using single words. Right. So that's what we're trying to do. Okay. With the group coaching that, that, that's below single word level. Anything above would be the word combiners course plus the membership that we're going to relaunch very soon. So yeah, that's what, that's what we're going to do for now for speech, for agents of Speech. Okay, let's see who else is Here, let's see what else is here. So sorry, don't know how to say that. From. From Philippines. Luzon. Luzon. Luzon. From Florida. What's up, D? From usa? Durga. Is that Summer GM That's. Good morning. Nice. Rita from Nepal. Very nice. Kuyan. What's up, Kuyan? I got your video. Well, let's talk about it on Thursday, all right? And then my video, my. Sorry, my kid is not able to shake hand for yes and not even saying yes. He says no. Can you please help on this? Thank you. Like, okay, so I, I think a lot of times, like, please, if you have any questions, let me know right now. But what I'm trying to say here is, is this. Look, there are millions of things that you can work on with a child, okay? If you go to ABA therapy, you will have like 30 plus goals, all right? 30 plus. Imagine that if you go to speech therapy, you'll get like three to four short term goals that you're supposed to get that like be done with. And other parents, they see something that a child cannot do and then they teach the child to do something about that, which is something that I do not totally agree on if it's a parent doing it. And the reason why is because if you lay your, lay your expectations so wide and you're focusing on something such as not able to shake hand for yes or not even saying yes, and you're focusing on teaching yes or no questions, that's not the biggest thing you can do for a kid. You're always trying to find what we call a lead domino. What is something that after you master the skill, the masquerade, one skill or one set of skills will make it easier for the kid to do anything else. And that's the same with all skill sets, right? I'm trying to say unsexy things to get views, which is very difficult. But if you put up with me for a bit, what I mean is this is not a very important skill at this moment in time. If the child cannot even say the word yes, it means that they already, they don't have that yes function, right? Because if they don't say yes, it means yes already. So by saying silent, it means they're accepting that and they don't need it, right? So it's not, you don't have to teach that word. But then he only says no is because he needs to reject you and therefore he learned to say it. So therefore your main goal here shouldn't be to teach yes is to get him to imitate words from you consistently so that later on when the opportunity for him saying yes arrives, you can teach him and you can say, say yes and say. He says yes. Good boy. That's right, you said yes. And you give him more than he was supposed to get by saying silence, which is his own way of saying yes. Right. So I hope I made it clear. I guess. But anyways, let's keep on going. So, Elisa, Grandma. The trouble with speech disorder has difficulty in articulation pronouncing her sounds. In 6 years of age currently receiving speech therapy. We do have, we do not have unrest or unreasonable. Okay. For us progress. We have concern that online reasoning his struggles are. Have not been diagnosed. It could be a physical issue. Yeah, so about like, yeah, don't, don't take me the wrong way when I say like, oh, you all have unrealistic expectations, right? It's never like that. I'm just saying don't have any expectations when you're starting out. Okay. But for you it's very different because he's six years of age, you know that he's receiving speech therapy. There must be a bunch of articulation errors and pronunciation like what you call phonological processes that are already like you already know about and you just don't know what the underlying reason is for his struggles. Which is fair enough. A lot of us, including like speech therapists, us, we, we cannot, sometimes we cannot find the reason and we cannot look at where, where this is like why this is becoming a concern. So I get why this is very frustrating. And just to tell you right today I'm talking to a longtime client of mine that's been like three or four years now serving the child. And we do it over zoom. They live in Indonesia and although I'm in Indonesia now, but anyways, so the, the child has some sort of speech disorder. Whether it's apraxia or not. I've always had doubts, I don't know. And recently they're in USA and they decided to go get a speech therapy assessment. So they do it, come back with a bunch of reports, ask me to look at it for course. I don't usually just look at random people's reports, but because they've been a long time client, I'm like, okay, let me check, let me take a look. So the errors make sense. It's been the ones that I've been working on anyways. And getting him to have a higher like what we call speech intelligibility, meaning how clear the speech is at a conversational or at Least like at like a word and also at a census level. So these two. And then the other thing is, like, trying to get him to pinpoint some errors that I'm not going to share here because it's too technical. So the speech therapist there was like, oh, let's do, like, ENT to check out whether there's anything to do with his focal folds. Right? Anything. Is it a physical issue like you were saying, Elisa? So of course it's. I find it. There's. Whenever you get a fresh pair of eyes, you see different things. And I did think about this before, but I thought it wasn't going to be, like, fruitful. But given this opportunity, I'm thinking, like, why not, why not just go check it out if we've never done anything about it, right? So always be checking, always be thinking about what other like, reasons there might be in terms of articulation. And the problem is this articulation and language is very different, right. In articulation, if you know the underlying reason, we might be able to skew the treatment to help children who have articulation issues better. So, for instance, oh, a kid has a poor tongue coordination, therefore he cannot say certain sounds. So if I focus my efforts on teaching and enhancing the child's tongue elevation, let's say, like putting the tongue at the top, at the roof of the mouth. Right. Would help. Then that would be a viable and a sensible thing to do. Right. Rather than treating just with words or whatever just sounds. Okay. So at this point in time, that's all I can say. Elisa, I'm not, I'm not trying to say wrong things here. Like, I'm not trying to, like, tell you that you have unrealistic or unreasonable expectations. But what I'm trying to say is that in your, in your case, you're correct. We must find in articulation therapy underlying reasons about why. And we need to keep on trying and keep on finding the leading domino. For speech, what is it? Is it that if we do more, if you do more, like sequencing, would it be better getting technical now, you know, is it about like, oral motor maybe, which usually it isn't. And you know, like, that's the thing. But what I want to tell you here is that speech and language is very different. For language, we don't need to pinpoint the reason why, because there is probably no reason why there is a. Is probably there should be. It's should be impossible for, For. For us to find. Like I, I say impossible, but maybe down the line, maybe four or Five years later, we will find some, some reasons and maybe that will help us know about what to do. Right. But in the very beginning, very, very beginning, we're talking about zero to like no words to some words, then it's going to be something that we're. Is going to be something that we. Cannot know. What we cannot know, then we shouldn't care mostly about because that's something that we cannot control. So if you get my point there, if you have any questions, please let me know on a continual basis. So let's see who else is here. So Lilia, what's up? From Philippines, CS from usa. Missouri, I guess. No, Nice. Lai from Philippines and Beth from Dubai. Right. Just spoke to someone from Dubai today. Very interesting conversation we had about the child beating up, not beating up, hitting the parents, which is a very, very, very, very, very common. And we have a whole video about that. Yeah, Jennifer. Hey, Jennifer, yet again from Chicago. Nice. Is that how you say the Kaiser? Is that his name? That's great. Yeah, like, update me on how it goes, man. Diane says, hi, Ming. My son is 4, going to be 5 this year. He can say out label almost everything in single word, but I cannot converse into a long sentence. You can follow and imitate our words immediately too. We're seeing a speech therapist, but it would get good to know from point of view what is coming. Yeah, sure. So for. And this, this description is nice. I like it better than like some of the questions here on, on like Facebook and YouTube is like, sometimes my, my son is too. She's not talking. What do you recommend? But this is a lot better. So converse into a log sentence. Yeah. So this is what we actually teach inside of the course called like word combiners, which I'm just gonna like put together with the membership for coaching. So what we usually do at this point in time is we're trying to make sure. We're trying to make sure two things. Number one is that your child is able and has like interest and play. Right. And you can do long play sessions with the kid. That's the first thing. We don't even care about the language just yet. Right. If here, if he in this case can do this, then great, then the next time. The next thing we're going to try to do is to put. Is to put words together. And there we focus on verbs, trying to teach the kid as many verbs as we can. And once we have the verbs, we put words in front and behind the verb to make svo. Right. Subject, verb, object, which is a pretty Common structure in most languages that are mainstream, I guess. Yeah, mainstream, I believe. So when we do that, we will do it at a very structured setting, which is basically using flashcards or act out once he can do SVO at that level. At that level, meaning at a very structured setting. What we're going to do is going to move all those structures we practice into play, and then we'll try to get the kid to say those words in play, during play. And after that, during play, we'll try what we go on to pretty naturalistic things. So for instance, we can make it into like something pretty naturalistic. We can keep on playing, adding words here and there for him. And whether he. Whether he imitates or not, that's not the problem. Because now we have at least like three or four words that he will be able to say on his own during play. And that will make it a lot easier. And the next thing would be like teaching him to answer some questions, which are who and where, which is something that is quite important because, like, most of the time when I. I see this, Diane, it means that the. Your kid can mostly just imitate most of the time. All right, next, Melissa, what's up from Canada? Good morning and Happy New Year as well. Beth says hi. My son is 5 years old. Under speech to every talking bunch of topic. He keeps shouting at all times. What does that mean, Beth? What does it. What do you mean? Why is he shouting? What. In what circumstance? And yeah, that's not enough information for me right there. Okay, so I'm gonna end this live pretty soon, in like a few minutes. And I want to say that I'll say this right. Thank you so much for being such a blessing last. Last year from you guys. And I really think that, you know, like, from. From here on then it's going to be like a lot of work for us all because I believe therapy is moving from, like, therapy centers into families. Especially, like a few Canadian families reached out and they were like, oh, man, they're not even seeing me anymore. Like, they're just trying to teach me and give me feedback when I interact with my kid. Right. So that's kind of. That's kind of the. The way it is nowadays, so why not we. You start off early and you do it now. Okay. Okay. So Jennifer says, are you. I don't know. Who's Lori? Are you filming Ion Tea Toss for Authentic Children? I do not know. I'm not familiar with that. Maybe you're talking to Lori. I don't know who Lori Is Beth shouting for no reason? Well, I don't know if there's a. Like, I don't know. Maybe there is a reason. Do you think there's a reason? Is he getting. Trying to get your attention? Try to think about what the reason is. If you put him in a. In a room without anyone inside, do you think he'll. He'll shout? Yeah. Think about that. Why is it that he shouts is a sensory thing and is releasing some of the frustrations he has? Like, what is he frustrated about? There must be a reason when someone does something, must have a reason. Are you giving him a lot of attention when he screams? Does he scream louder? If you don't care. Well, think about those. Right? There must be a reason. There is no humans and animals or creatures. Behavior must come with a reason. All right? You must find out. You must find out. You cannot just say there's no reason or else there's no. There's no way we're going to intervene if there's no reason. Right. Okay, cool. Cool. Guys, thank you so much for today's live. I know I've been on hiatus, not making any videos at all whatsoever. And, yeah, that's pretty much it. There's nothing else I want to talk about as of right now. And I'll see you guys next week when we're back to a more regular video. Video content thingy. All right, so that's all for tonight. If you haven't, please share this. Like it. Whatever, you know, so that more people can see this. And I'll see you guys next week. All right, Bye. Bye.