Stopping Children from Stimming? | www.agentsofspeech.com

Okay, we're live. So tonight we're going to talk about stopping your child from stimming. And I want to. We don't have a lot of time tonight around, like, 20, 20 minutes. And I just want to lay out what has worked with one of my students, and let me just lay down the basics, right? The first thing is that actually I wanted to talk about something else tonight, but, you know, it's such a success. I just wanted to talk about it. So whenever she goes to bed, she spends a lot of time just rocking back and forth on the chair or on a bed. So when she's on the bed, she's like. And it's like. It just sounds like I got basically scared my cat there. But the mother was like, oh, hey, mang, listen, I. I really think that we should work on this. It's been a major headache for a lot of reasons, because whenever you're trying to teach her something, she's already like, her. Her type of stimming, so to speak, is, like, by doing that, right? Like, rocking back and forth, right? Let me just say hi to my Lin. What's up? And the thing is, to stop it, you have to be very focused. All right? So a lot of parents that I know, especially those who are very determined, and they would say, like, oh, Ming, look, I want my child to have. I want them to learn how to count and do math, and then I want them to have some sensory input. I want to take them to wherever. They have something called the rockstar gym. By the way, in Indonesia, there's a new one called Playtopia. It's not that new, but in the area, it's called Playtopia. Oh, I want them to go to these things as well. Learn how to play piano, you know, learn how to sing, learn how to, whatever. These are all great. These are all very, very good. In fact, I don't. Sorry about that. In fact, it doesn't matter what kind of thing that you put your child through, but if the biggest problem with a child right now is the stimming, then deal with it first, right? So that therefore, I told the parents, like, oh, she. She was saying. The mother was saying, oh, I have so much stuff I have to go through every day. How. How is it that this dimming is right in the way of our work? And I told her, look, you gotta prioritize, okay? And, you know, like, nowadays we say priorities, right? It just should be only one single parity. It's a singular word, okay? If you look back in the, like, 100 years ago. Like, just. People are having a lot of paral T's right now, so. And that's kind of our fault as well, right? Speech and language therapist. We have like three goals we wanted to do inside of a session. Nowadays I just try to have like one or two at most and. Okay, let's get to the stemming part now. Okay. So basically we had a plan for whenever that she was sitting on a chair and she was rocking. So doesn't matter. Doesn't matter what kind of stimming there is with a kid. It might be like this. It might be like this. Or like just eye cornering or whatever. If you, if you've seen it, then you know it, right? I'm just telling you what, what kind of stimmings there are. So to stop it, you have to have something that your child understands, like a reward system or like, just. I usually use tokens, right? So people who are like, who know therapy will say, hey, this is not speech therapy. This is not language therapy. You're correct. This is more of aba. And I've come from the land of aba. Like, that's how I started my whole career. And I'm okay with that. But if you're not okay with that and you want to deal with stimming, then, you know, like, don't ask a speech therapist, right? Don't ask. Like most people, as most speech therapists would say, oh, you just need to, like, help them learn how to communicate more. And ideas will go away. Yes and no. There are some that aren't that will not go away. Like, this one isn't going to go away, right? Like if you put someone, it's like shaking your leg. I'm constantly shaking my leg. That in itself is stimming, right? So you have to remember that. All right? So once you have a token system going on, if you don't want. What's a token system? I encourage you to search it on Google and just take a look. It's just sticker board, right? But to use it correctly is very difficult. To use it correctly is very difficult. So that one, we do talk about it in the courses. I. I don't think I've ever talked about it in public just yet. Just because it's more technical and I wish to have your 100% focus in order to say it in order to do it. Or else, you know, you might try and say, oh, stupid, it doesn't work. Right. It happens a lot. Like, don't mind me saying, right? And you need to be 100% focused to learn like you and your child, right? So once you have the token, I asked the mother, now this part, I don't know if it's working yet. All right. I asked the mother to give a free token whenever there isn't any rocking or stimming. The lack of stimming gives the token, which is a reward. So whenever she gets to five tokens, she gets to watch some iPad thing or whatever, like a video, right? So once she understands that all she needs to do is just sit still and be nice and do nothing and she'll get it. So what are the odds, right? Like in terms of economy wise, which one makes more sense? Sitting doing nothing and get rewarded or stimming and getting nothing? So slowly and slowly someone will actually know. Like anyone, even a cat will know, even the dog will know. Not saying that, I'm not saying, I'm not drawing parallels. I'm just saying even an animal will understand that. So your kid is going to understand that trade off very easily once they get more reward, like they get more rewarded and so on. So we're trying that. The second thing that we've done with the sleeping. So what's up, Melissa from what's one that's crazy. So the other thing was she was rocking on the bed, so every night, like on the mattress. So she was getting some bruises already. Not saying the mattress was bad, it's just that the frequency and, and the intensity of the rocking really made it very difficult to not be injured even with, with a mattress. Right. That's just how crazy it is. All right, so how we did it was first of all, the child has already been very used to doing that on the bed. So she thinks that once she goes there, she's going to do it. She's going to do that. It's just like when you sit on a, when I sit on a wheel, like a wheeling like this, I can go back and forth, right? I'm going left and right. So it's very easy for me to get conditioned to start swaying because I like it, right? So therefore I told the mom, right, we need to create a new sleeping position for the kid because if we hold her down and she doesn't get what to do and she's non verbal, she doesn't understand, then you know, chances are she's just going to beat you up. She's going to punch you and say stop it mom. Like you're, you're not allowing me to like run rock. That's crazy. So what I told her to do was to buy a wedge. So you see this wedge over here, like this one. I bought it in Hong Kong. I brought it over because it's comfy. But you know there are loads of these kind of things online. Doesn't need to be expensive, doesn't mean cheap. You choose your own. It's just a, just a wedge. It's a cushion thing. So that cushion thing, I asked her to put it there and use the token board and what we're trying to do there. It's just established the fact that if she stays, if she stays not moving on that wedge on the bed, then she gets rewarded which is to listen to stuff and watch stuff and we're just giving her tokens for free. So it's all suns like flowers and roses and like nice rainbow. It's just a good experience, right? So it's comfortable. It's a wedge. It's not like sitting up straight. And I'll be damned. You know, she starts asleep. She started asleep in that position without rocking, right. She fell asleep faster. The mom just showed me a video of her sleeping that just today and we did it. So as a, as a speech therapist, like especially now that I'm working more out on the Internet, I've been getting a lot of like weird. Has it weird requests from parents. Like this morning I had a email about pooing, like pooping. Like yeah, we do have a toilet training program and like a workshop that I did before inside ofagents@speech.com you can go check it out if you want to. But you know, like pooping, sleeping, eating, you know like haircuts, wearing face masks. All of these have a similar. And you know, once you understand the principles of, of like modifying someone's behavior then you know like you can pretty much teach anyone anything. Okay, so what you need to remember from this short live here, okay is number one, do you have a reward system that can teach a non verbal child something that you cannot explain or even if you know that child is verbal, you're not. You can't just explain something to like, to, to, to, to a, to a single word user. Right? You know, like I, I don't, I'm in Indonesia, I don't speak Indonesian that well. You try to tell me with Indonesian a reason about doing this and that and not being like the reason for, you know, not doing something. It's going to take a long time, right? I won't understand. So the best way is just to reward me whenever good things happen and maybe punish me when bad Bad things happen, right? When I do something bad or do something inappropriate in the cultural setting, right? So that's all you can do with your kid. But the problem is when you're dealing with a non verbal kid, when you tell them no, when they're doing like stimming or whatever, stop it or whatever, they don't get why they should stop, right? So give them a better reason, which is if you stop or whenever you're stopping, I'll reward you. That's number one. Number two thing you have to remember is a prompt. So for everything there must be some kind of a prompt, something easier for them and some something around the environment that you can manipulate. So a prompt is always you as like the agent of therapy. That's why it's got agents of speech by the way, because when the therapist is not around, you need to act as an agent for therapy, right? So when I'm not around, you need to be the agent of speaking of like getting your child to speak. So as the agent like you, you can manipulate the environment or whatever to make it easier, to make it easier for the kid. So no matter if it's teaching a child a gesture, right? No matter if it's putting your face closer to the faces so that it's easier to look at you, no matter if, even if, like the, the sleeping that I was talking about, putting a wedge actually makes it like harder for her to stim because it's softer, it's on a 45 degree angle, it's harder, right? Think about it like make it easier for her to achieve what you want. And then when that happens, you can reward, right? So always these two things, no matter what you're doing, you're trying to manipulate the environment, right? Use our brains to think about how to make this possible easier for the kid or maybe make it harder for them to make that behavior, you know what I'm saying? So a lot of moms will say, ah, my kid is throwing stuff, I don't know how to stop it. First of all, don't have let them have anything in their hands that they can throw, right. Secondly is to reward them whenever they're not doing it. All right? And the third thing, the third thing that I didn't talk about here is a replacement as a replacement for that behavior. So a replacement for any behavior, like there's a reason for every behavior, okay? At least I hope so, or else it would be very hard to do anything about it. Right? So there's a reason for everything, right? There's a Reason for people who shake their legs like I do, right? People who play with the hair like bite their nails, there must be a reason. There's an underlying psychological reason or there might be like a very functional reason. But the third thing that whereas it would be the most appropriate thing for most people is to find an alternative behavior, right? A replacement behavior for that matter, to help them achieve what they need. But yet it's a lot more appropriate. Okay? So example for that is like you know those fidget spinners that happened long, long time ago, like, like four years ago or five now I think. And the premise for it was because like oh, I just like fidgeting stuff and like autistic children really like to play with it. And so like the mass market started to become cool and want and become hip and wanted something to fidget, right? So those fidget toys, fidget tools are a more, how to say, a little more appropriate once it's more socially acceptable when everyone's doing it. Right. But you get what I mean, right? So you need a replacement behavior at the end of the day. So what's the replacement behavior for the sleeping, you might ask? And that's just sleeping, you know, just lying on the bed and you know, listening to music and go to sleep. That's the replacement behavior. Because I don't know if she finds it better or worse. And that's not my problem. It's up to her to decide. And if the kid thinks that it's okay, then it's okay, right? So this is how you deal with stimming with children. You find out the reason you look at it. Do you have a reward system that you can reward the kid whenever there's an absence of, of such. Right? And then when make it easier for them to, to achieve that thing like by manipulating the environment, right? If like for instance, we can use a wedge for sleeping, make it harder for them to go like to go for, for this particular matter, right. It's very different for a case by case basis for these things. So see a therapist for help about that or you can try to ask me online. But you know, like usually I need to see what's going on, right? And then the last thing is find a replacement behavior, okay. And then you might ask, okay, what about all these things? They don't work. So let me share one more thing with you. Back in the day, my first, very first, I think I talked about this in the live before, right? My very first client ever. He used to just scream out of nowhere and it would hurt My eardrums a lot. And then how we dealt with it was that whenever he screamed, we would punish him. And use of punishment is not something that any therapist would recommend. Although there are a lot of therapists in this particular. In Indonesia, where I'm from. Not from, sorry, where I am right now, I don't want to be from Indonesia. Sorry. I'm from somewhere else. Right. And the thing is why punishment doesn't work is because when the reinforce the enforcer. Sorry, the enforcer, the person, the police that's supposed to give you punishment when that person is not around, the behavior will come back. There's a short term solution. So the, the good. The long term solution is always finding a replacement strategy, replacement behavior, and also to praise and reward whenever there's an absence of that. Right. So what's the punishment is that. It's what we call negative punishment. And what's that is to remove something that's nice. Right. Not to apply, like add a punishment. Right. You're trying to remove something that they were enjoying already. Okay. So there's a. There's a slight difference. So when you add something to them, you are dealing like some sort of damage dealing sort of, I don't know, like giving them some sort of punishment additional to. But you can remove something as a punishment as well. Right. So for this little cat here, you know, whenever she gets naughty, what we usually do is that we take her away from the situation and we lock things up and we don't let her have it anymore. Right. So what happens is that this cat over here starts to know how to open drawers. But that's a different subject. Right. What I mean is, for the very first client I ever had, what we did was we took his favorite snack and we ate it in front of him as a type of punishment. But he could get those, his favorite snack, which was Oreos, just by being quiet and getting tokens for free. And he would eat one when he was quiet. And you just keep on telling him, nice being quiet. That's right. Hoping that he would catch on. And he did and we stopped it. So that's something I found really amusing when I just started working. And I really like this kind of stuff. So that's why I was. I'm still very into looking into, like, what kind of behaviors we can, we can like modify with children, especially those on the spectrum. But the particular student I was talking about, about the sleeping and chair rocking and whatnot, she probably is not on the spectrum. But all these principles still work. All right. Especially for like non verbal children who you cannot articulate what they're supposed to do. All right, so that's all for tonight, guys. Really. Thank everyone for watching this. If you have any questions, please put them in the comment section. I will not be able to answer them right now because I have something to do right after this. But please let me know how I can help you. All right? And before I go, I'm coming up with a new course. I'm nearly done. So it's called Speech Disorder crash course. So, um, this is like for free for all the people who are in group coaching right now. And it's for what was Speech Disorder crash course? Right. It's basically a course teaching you how to teach your child to. To correct sounds. Okay. So if you're interested, you just let me know. Just in the comments. Let me know and I'll PM you like the early bird discount that is going to come out with the course. All right, so that's all for tonight. Keep your questions, let me know what they are and I will see you next week. Bye Bye.