Teaching ASD Children Eye Contact

Hello. Today we'll be talking about eye contact. And recently I had a, one of my friends from, from my master's time, we talked about like eye contact and so on. And he was telling me about how the parents want him to do some eye contact stuff. And if you've watched any of our videos, you would know I am not a strong proponent, a strong. I don't stand with people or, or people who like, try to teach eye contact as, as a target, as a therapy goal. I'm saying this because I, I've done this before myself. And the only reason why we were doing that back then, when I was, when I was learning myself, was that we needed the kid to look at our mouths in order for us to check imitation. That's why we did it. Other than that, there was no particular reason. In this video, I'll talk about a little more about what I think I think and what has been working for us@agentsofspeech.com so the first thing is you have to understand why people or why children would want to look at you. Why do they? Like, why should they care? Yeah. So number one reason, number one reason is that you have. Okay, there's only two reasons, basically. The first one is for a child to get your attention, right? For someone to get your attention. If you want to get someone attention, you look at them, right? You look at that person. That's the reason. Number one reason number two is when you are looking at someone, you're trying to find some sort of social cue from that person, meaning from the person's face or eyes, there's some sort of information that will help you with something. So other than that, you wouldn't be really looking at anyone, not being a creep about it, right? So those are the practical reasons why someone will actually, or child will actually look at you. Okay? So if, if you're watching this, say hi, tell me where you're from, let me know. And yes, we've been taking quite a break and it's been great. And I, I like my break anyways, so talking about these two reasons about eye contact, how can we use those to teach someone to look at us? Right? There's no way. There's no sensible way of cueing or prompting someone to look. So I see parents might be you, might be not might be someone else, might be teachers. No judgment here, really none. Because we all have done it before, right? We would say, hey, look at me, or we call the kid's name, right? We talked about this before. If we use an External cue, especially something visual. Or like we. We call the names or we shout a little bit. We go, hey, what's up, yo? Look at me. Hey, look at me first. Look at mommy, right? Look at that. You're not looking. Look at me. Or you turn their face or whatever, right? Which happens quite a lot. That's what we call artificial attention. And this is learned when. I learned about this when I was my time in aba. And people are gonna maybe talk about ABA sucks. Maybe ABA gives, like, what's that? Traumatic experiences, whatnot. Not here to talk about that. We're here to talk about what has worked. Okay? So whenever you're doing and using artificial attention, that's never gonna help you, because what's happening is that you are creating an external stimulus that is a trigger for a behavior. Let's say it does work, right? When it does work, what happens is that people will think. I mean, that your child will think, oh, I'm supposed to only look when you tell me to, right? So that in itself is a conditioning. I don't want conditioning. Because when you condition like that, you've rewarded or you've reinforced the wrong thing. Because now every time, your child will only look when you say something, which is not cool, because 99 of the time they wouldn't. And they wouldn't even know why they should look. So why should you do it? Okay, and then today during our discussion, we talked, like me and my friend, we were talking and then he was like, how about if. If I have something that the kid wants and I withhold it and I wait until he looks, right? That's totally fine. That's quite a sensible way. And I think a lot of therapy people actually do this as well. I think it's okay as long as the child already knows he or she is supposed to wait, is supposed to put up open, palm out or whatever. And you're waiting for that. I mean, the kid's waiting for you. If they know that already and you upgrade grade the up. The demand for the child to look at you first, that's. That's also okay, right? That's also okay. But the, the main reason why this may or may not be a good, good reason. A good, good way of doing this is that if you are giving the same reward whether the child is not looking or, or looking, let's say the trial fails, right? And they don't look, and you've been waiting and you give in and you give the thing, right? Then you have rewarded the whole chunk of the child just waiting with their open palm out, which we talk a lot. A lot about open palm, Right? You reward the whole thing. So they think that they're supposed to, like, just put their hand out, look around, and just wait for you. Right. The second reason is that if you have a child who does look and you give the same reward, that's actually not very rewarding for them in order to look at you. Right. So what you got to do is to increase the. The. The reward when he or she does look to make sense, economically speaking, for the kid to learn that eye contact was the, Was the. Was the thing they were supposed to learn. All right, so someone says, yasmin says, I'm Tunisian. Oh, that's your name? Sorry, that. There's different names, man. Anyways, I'm. I'm not autistic. Keep. Can I keep? I look away. More comfortable. Yeah. A lot of times it's not comfortable to have eye contact, especially if you don't have a good relationship with someone. It's just kind of awkward. But we're talking about children here of which they don't really understand what being awkward means. Right? Not being socially awkward, mean or uncomfortable. Those things we don't even know. So I'm not going to go there because I cannot. Like, obviously, if you put your head too. I'll talk about this later, but we've been coaching a bunch of camp parents, and one of the parents was, like, putting the head closer and closer to the kid in order to. In order to get the kid to look at you, which is fair enough. From a therapy standpoint, we call that, like a distance prompt. So you reduce the distance, right. And you increase the chance of a child actually looking at you. But what happens is, like, if you put your face too close to your child, what if it's a. What's I call. What if it's making them, like, kind of uncomfortable? And that's uncomfortable because if you put something close to someone, especially a child with sensory issues or whatnot, they're not going to like it. And especially if when you're playing with them, normally you're sitting like this, but whenever you want something from them, you go like that, then that's going to create some sort of discomfort and they know what you're trying to do. Right. And that's not cool. Right. So what do I usually recommend? Okay. And I talk about this anyways. Whether you're like, you're paying me money or not, I'm just still going to tell you this because it doesn't matter to Me and I'll talk about like the, the courses and whatnot later on as an update. But let me finish about the eye contact. And at any time, if you have any questions, just let me know in the comments and I'll be, I'll try my best to answer. Right. So how we do eye contact is that we don't. Right? We don't do it. And it shouldn't be a therapy goal in general because we can still communicate well without looking at someone's eyes. We only want the kid to look at us because we want to feel respected a lot of time. And that's, I mean, that's fair enough. You pay for everything. You feed that guy or girl and you want your child to look at you. At least give mom the respect of looking. Right? I get it. I see it all the time. But why it's not a probable goal is because you're not going to be able to prompt the eye contact correctly. If you talk, then it becomes a verbal command. The only way you can do it is by what we call shaping. Meaning whenever it happens, we reward and we slowly move the behavior towards our desired goal. And it's not like a 0 to 1 kind of situation. So 0, 0.5, 0.6, 0.3 again and then so shape it towards 1. Right? That's what I'm saying. But if you're talking about like teaching eye contact, all you got to know is that you need to make sure you, you teach the kid why they're supposed to look. A child will only look or a person will only look is because they know they need to produce some sort of, some sort of response to you. Right? They need to respond to you, but they cannot. And therefore they look at you because you've been a very loving and a very giving person and you give a lot of like, cues and prompts. And therefore when they look at you, they're looking for information for them to get what they want. Okay? That's the first thing you have to understand. The second thing is if you are a good playmate, the chances of your child looking at you is going to increase. Because they want your attention. They want your attention to do something and make it fun for them. And therefore they will start looking at you. And those for these two reasons. Your child's eye contact hinges on two things. Number one, are you fun to be with, Right? If you're not fun to be with and you always like get closer and closer to your kid to take a response out of your child, which I was not going to like it. And they'll try to avoid you. If you put your face very close, they're most probably just gonna like, avoid you, right? Physically. Socially distancing. Yeah. So are you. Fun. Second of all is that, does your child know in order to get what he or she wants, they must produce a response of any, any kind. Is it gestural? Is it a verbal, Is it, you know, is it through a play action? Right. Do they understand that? Yeah. And I, I just want you to know that if you put. Oh. If you take away, if you take away your urge and your wants and you start giving first to children, you will be rewarded. Okay. If you. The more you want someone to do something and it doesn't matter if a kid or an adult or whatever, unless they have come to you and seeking for advice and seeking for your inputs, they will not listen. Okay? So that same reason why I'm telling you only from what I learned from teaching parents, parents, is that we don't do eye contact, okay? Because the more you ask for eye contact, the more you can't. Because you cannot prompt the child's eyes. You can't put a finger in their eyeball. Actually you can, but it's going to hurt, right? And make them look at you. And you can't even know. You don't even know if you're looking or not, right? You don't even know, like, even if you can, right? I can look at this thing, my eye is towards you, but I don't know where I'm focusing. So how do you know if that's the correct behavior or not? So you can. If there's a behavior that cannot be properly prompted physically and there's no way to make sure that's 100% attainable, then what's the point of doing it, Right? Instead, think about the underlying reason of why eye contact happens, which I told you. And this does work because a lot of times in our coaching programs when parents focus on the play, right? Focus on teaching a different type of response, like for actions, right? Or some sort of. Like what we do is basically we teach the child to imitate some sort of action which is here you can use your peripheral vision and you can still see my hands moving, right? You're not looking, but you can still see my hands moving. And therefore the child can imitate that gross motor movement. And once they know they're supposed to imitate, then they. As you get your actions more and more fine, finer, right from here towards the face, then what are they going to do. They're not going to still, maybe not going to look, but they can still see you moving, right? Then they can imitate. They can still imitate even if they're not looking. And then you go even finer and maybe touch your nose or something or touch your mouth or you go like that. So you open your mouth or whatever and slowly you're treating that you're teaching the child. Oh, you're supposed to give a response and the response is getting harder and harder and harder and harder and harder and it gets closer and closer to our faces. And therefore, once we do like really fine oral motor movement and we can get the child to imitate, then the chance of them actually doing a verbal imitation and looking at us is a lot higher rather than a lot of people will skip towards doing flashcards. And although the child does know some of the words and they do say it, but your, your how to say your success rate is so low, it's like 20. That's just gonna piss the kid off, right? Or that we do like word imitation. I see a lot of people do word imitation way before. Like when, when people join our coaching program, they're like, ming, my kid already knows these words. Why, why are we doing action imitation? What was the point of this? The point is you need to become a better teacher. That's. First of all, can you even get your child to do an action imitation upon a command, upon instructional command? If not, then go do it. Because, like, what's the point? Like if, if you can't get your child to just imitate any old action, then you tell them to speak. What's the percentage that they're actually going to listen? Very, very low. And if it's, that's, that's, that's how low it is, how it's going to be very defeating for you as a parent, as a trainer. Because then you, you're going to say this, this stuff doesn't work. I don't want to care anymore. And you see parents who have been on programs, although they go through the whole thing and they get stuck, they're more willing to stick to it. And that's because before they had some wins, like the parents had some wins that they did get child to sit down. They get, get the child to do action imitation, did get the child to play with toys and stuff. And now if they're stuck at verbal imitation or like teaching words, teaching like other types of words or just doing like command, what's that called? Sentence comprehension, right. They're more willing parents are more willing to stick to it because it's the same psychological idea is that if a child's success rate is very low, they won't like working with you. And same as you, if your rate of failure is so high, you don't even want to do it anymore because you're just running into a brick wall all the time. Okay, so I see a comment here. Austeon. Am I getting it right? Austin? I don't know how to say that. Now became verbal need based. Oh, thanks. Oh, you're welcome. And yeah, so this is quite. If your child rarely looks at you, but is verbal copies words easily, then you have to think about like, then you're not at the stage where you're doing like those action imitation stuff anymore, right. Rather, you should be focusing on a lot more on the play stuff. So because they don't need to look at you in order to imitate anything, so why would they want to look at you? Right. It's like someone who, who doesn't even study to get like good grades, why would they want to study? So therefore, you need to make the interaction between you and him into something that is fun. Right. I apologize. My. My voice hasn't 100% come back. I was sick for a bit. But all these things you need to understand. All right. N says my child has acquired many functional words now. He tried to join words. Oh, that's. That's perfect. And I want to tell you now on agentofspeech.com you will not be able to find any course to join because I've shut it down. And as far as I'm concerned, all these information, I do talk about it in the course. And some parents will say, oh man, like, why should I buy the course? Since, you know, like, you talk about this so openly here. So I'm just going to make it free from now on. And the only way that you pay me or pay agents of speech is if you join our coaching programs. All right. Although it's a lot more labor intensive and I don't really like, it was great, you know, like parents just joined whenever they wanted and watched it whenever they wanted. But at the same time, people need accountability. You know, that's why we're doing parent coaching. It's like everyone knows how to keep get fit, right? Eat less and move more. But then why do people get personal trainers? The only two reasons, number one, they're not motivated. Number two, is that they're scared that they do something wrong. So it's the same model that we're gonna shoot for online from now on, right? I would hate it to give you an online course and you don't even know how to do like you're not even sure if you're doing it correct or anyways, right? So I am a super mom, okay. From Nigeria. A non verbal child at six. Okay. Tell me more about that. Sam says my four year old sometimes deliberately ignores me when I asking him to do something. Why is that? Okay. Yeah. So you know these, these questions. I've gotten it so many times and that's why I made the online course. And later on when our team is like, our team is basically moving all the courses to another, another platform where it looks like Facebook, it's not Facebook. And then you know, like you can just search for these things. You don't have to ask me anymore. So Sam, although like you're asking me here, I've answered this question so many times. So I'll tell you that just a bit. Basically it's because was it what's, what's. What's it for your child to listen to you? Why would your child want to listen to you? Think about that. Instead of thinking he deliberately ignores you when you ask him to do something. Why is that? Well, why does he have to listen to you? Right? And that's the first point. And the second point I'm trying to say is he is verbal. He just has trouble with back and forth conversation, right? What? Why is there no back and forth conversation? Right? The, the real answer is there's no mutual interest, right? There's no mutual interest. There's nothing that he wants to talk to you about, right. If he comprehends everything. If you think so, okay. Which I highly doubt it. I really think that there's a high chance that he doesn't comprehend everything. And you can watch and allude to the previous YouTube video I just made. But what I'm saying is think about why is he not. Why does he have to listen to you? Why does he need to want to talk to you? Right. A lot of times we put our agenda and we want the kids to follow. Right? So make sure that there's something in it for him when you ask him to do something. And it could be as primitive as providing a reward. Right. Or as socially easy as giving a praise. Right. And if you have back and forth conversation problems, you need context to have a conversation. I don't know if you watch football or not. I don't. But if you talk to me about football, our conversation will be very short. All Right. So, Sam, go on YouTube and search our videos and watch more. All right. All right. Yeah. So, you know, that's. Then that's fine. Right? That's fine. If. If you're. If she's. She looks at you when you talk, that's totally okay. And the thing is, she doesn't respond to her name well. Like, and she would look at your lips when you're singing. So therefore, when you're fun, she'll look. Right. So think about how to pair yourself with more fun things. Pair yourself with more fun things. And you're trying to teach her yes or no? We do have a video about that, so you can search it. I don't want to repeat myself. Here, hold her in the arms. Nod. Oh, that's pretty okay for the most part, from what I see. Teshuba Stephanie, North California. Hi. My son's on the spectrum. He's very nonverbal. I have some pointers to learn. Did you send me an email? No, that wasn't you. Anyways, teacher respond to his name. When we say his name, he doesn't respond. Whether it's good things, bad things, or emergency situations, I'd like him to understand for safety reasons. Oh, yeah, yeah. Stephanie. So, like, if you're like, you can. You can search on YouTube. Our YouTube channel is called agentsofspeech.com if I don't get into too much enough detail here, you can watch those videos and you can learn there as well. All right? But responding to name, you need to have something that he wants that you can pair with his name. All right? If he's on the spectrum, he doesn't understand the reason as to responding to you. There's nothing in it for him. So you see, whether it's children or adults who are on the spectrum, a lot of things are means to an end to them. All right? And I say this as a neurotypical person. Hopefully, I don't even know. Like, nowadays people just get like that, just diagnose themselves or whatever. I. I can't do that. But what I'm trying to say is you can. First of all, you cannot call his name too much and take and use it for, like, just any old thing. If you want to use it for safety reasons, make sure that you bring along, like, you need to teach. It's kind of like teaching a puppy in the very beginning. Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to, like, you know, like, it's very aba, so to speak. People are saying, oh, you're treating kids like animals. I'm not. I'm just saying if you want your child to respond in a certain way, you have to praise and reward the correct behaviors. So what you got to do is kind of like teaching a puppy. Like, whether you like it or not, that's. That's just going to be it in the beginning before your child finally understands the reason for responding. A name and looking at you and having a social engaging moment that is internally fulfilling for the kid. That's going to take a long time. So at this point in time, when the child is on the spectrum, doesn't understand that, and takes a long time to teach that, your best bet is to take something that he really likes to eat or to play with, right. Show it to him and say his name. And when he comes over, say, good boy. Nice. Nice. Nice answering me, or nice coming over, Jack. I don't know what, what his name is. Stephanie. I'm just saying. So you do this enough times, you make the rewards smaller, right? If you're. If he likes. I don't know what he likes. Like a biscuit, break it into smaller bits, put it into a. Into a container. And I can only tell you that this has been working with our, with our parents, our parent coaching clients, for the past three years, is that I always tell parents to have a small container with a bunch of, like, biscuits or whatever consumables that are small, bring it out and use it as a reward whenever good behavior happens. Right. And always start off by teaching at home first so that when he responds, like, just looks over at you, you say the name and you give the reward. It's just going to start conditioning your kid, Right. And whether you think that's robotic or animalistic or not, it certainly works. And later on, we can get rid of the reward, right? It's only animal. It's only robotic. If we don't get rid of the rewards, right. If it's only animalistic, if you know, even, like, we cannot even say, like, even animals are very social. Yeah. So once you teach, like, for instance, my cats. Now, if I call their names, they all come over, right? And there's no reward. There's no anything. It's just me. So my cat sleeping. So I. I'll demonstrate later on. But what I mean is you have to start off somewhere, all right. And it's the same as eye contact, right. How can you get your child to like. It's something called shaping. We cannot physically get someone to do something. We can only shape it towards the correct behavior. So when it does happen, we have our rewards ready and give it to them. So on the same note, Stephanie, this is the same method that we use for responding to name. So in the off chance that someone does respond, like the kid does respond to us or looks at us, we immediately provide reward. And some parents think that some parents with our coaching patents, okay, Some of them, they said, I don't get it. Whenever my child looks at me, I get very bubbly and a very like I go to them, I give them a hug and stuff. But the thing is for children who are on the spectrum or just delayed sometimes they have sensory issues and they have physical aversion. They don't like being touched that much. So when a kid looks at you, whatever you run over and you squeeze them, that's kind of like a punishment to them. And you have to understand, don't take it personally because everyone has different type of boundaries. You know what I'm saying? So don't think that just because it works for your, your, you know, like a lot of parents are like veteran parents that are like third or fourth child and then suddenly the third or fourth is delayed or is on the spectrum. Happens quite a lot. And then they're like, I don't get it. I know how to, how to, you know, like how to talk to children, how to interact with them, how to get them and play with them and so on. But it doesn't work. The reason is because the type of reward, what people, what the children find rewarding is different. Right. So anyways, so all this info, I will be doing more lives, I guess and how agents of speech is going to go on later on is that whenever you have a topic that you want to learn about like eye contact or whatever or like, you know, like toilet training, those ones, we already have those, those stuff. And it's all going to be very searchable for you. It's going to be free. It's going like just go ahead and do it. There's a few reasons for this. Number one, I don't like to repeat myself that much. Right. Excuse me, sec. So that you know, like, so you can just go in and watch and just search for it and stuff. Second of all is that I just think that like to be honest, just want to give you all the information because some parents out there, not everyone has a credit card, number one. Number two is like not everyone has the means to pay anyways. Right? So I believe it's, it's only fair that you know, everyone gets the same amount of information and how this is going to work from now on is for instance, if we like I've told you some of the methods that has been working for, for me and our clients. Right. So what's going to happen is for the clients who are able to pay for our services or like have the means or have the time to engage with us, we will continue to work with those parents and use what is proven to work with those kids. Right. Use those to make new teaching materials and new instructional videos and whatnot and share to everyone else with the consent of the, of the, of the, of the people who are coaching clients with us. All right, Stephanie, no worries. I hope Garrett starts looking at you, starts responding to your name, to his name. Shouldn't be too hard. We've done this multiple times. Just when I say just, it's not nice. But what you got to do is something, what we call pairing, just pairing good things to, towards his name. Right. And also shape that behavior. Whenever he does come over, make sure you shower him with the stuff that he does like instead of the things that you think he likes. All right. Texas wench. Okay. My two year old son will learn a word, use it for about a day and never use it again. He also sings song pretty well, but never use. Yeah, we, we have loads of that. Texas wench. Sorry, if I'm calling that's your name, I'm calling you that. So, so loads of videos about that on YouTube and loads of videos and instructional videos about that coming soon. We're still setting stuff up, so look out for that, for that email if you want. Don't want to miss things. Go on agents of Speech.com and put your email in. All right? Because we're going to send out emails, we're changing the systems, changing everything just so that people can have things for free without too much operational cost. It's been quite difficult to do this revamping of such. So go to agents of Speech.com, put in your email, press submit, and then when you're on the newsletter, you'll know first thing because Facebook, you know, or YouTube sometimes doesn't push our things as much. You know, one cat video and then that's it, man, that's, that's game over. I, I don't get to be in front of the people who have subscribed or like my page because I also love cat videos. So, you know, anyways, I do have a video for that, but let me tell you a little bit here. So first of all, you can watch the video on YouTube or Facebook. The One that is titled something like. Something like Child recites ABC sings songs but does not communicate something like that along those lines. Right? And the reason why your son will learn a word and use it for about a day and then never use it again is because they acquired the sound but not the meaning. So let me give you an example. Have you ever learned a. Have you ever learned a word, a foreign word, right? That's not, not your language and you learned it like you've been using it for a day. But then the longer you don't use it, the more likely you forget it. Right? But you do remember the meaning of it because you learned that word or that meaning in your own language in your own mother tongue. Right? So I cannot give an example because there's multiple examples that I forget the foreign word. But I did know how to say it for like a day or two when I was traveling. Right. But true learning of a word only comes, only ever comes if the child of a person, including you, not just children, when the sound goes to the meaning and the meaning links to the concept. So there's something called what we call semantic mapping, right? Semantic links. So if you ever heard of something called fast mapping, it's like when children from like two to three, they suddenly have an explosion of vocabs is that suddenly they can. They're able to link words towards the meaning really quickly. They suddenly go I know, I know now I understand, I can link all those things subconsciously. And then you see an explosion of words in their vocabulary, right? So what is happening now with your two year old son is that he doesn't understand between the sound of a word and the meaning of a word towards the concept, right. When there is no, when you have no. What's that called? Link. It's very easy for a child to forget and for you to forget too. So that's why we focus on gestures. Because the gestures, the action that is linked towards a meaning and the concept in the real world. Right. Anyways, you would want to check that out. All right. Go to agents of Speech.com and put in your email first so that you don't miss when we are making everything available to everyone that's very searchable and you guys. And there's a community there and you can just interact with people and bounce off ideas and are. We're hiring more therapists so that they can come in and answer questions for free as well. Hopefully that's, that's going to be helpful. But anyways, we'll, we'll see about that Les Grossman. I really like that movie by the way. I'm not sure what you mean by copy that but definitely that this movie will not be able to withstand the current politic political environment. Anyways. Oh, Kuyan's here. Hey, Koyan. Yeah, yeah, I'm back. It's been a little difficult on, on many fronts I would say. But yeah, by the way, Kuyan, as our parent coaching thing, you need a vote for the time when we have our zoom calls. All right, be sure to do that. And the reason why, you know, like I just want to be a little more thankful because recently it's been, you know, I think it's pretty difficult to do the stuff that I do not how to say it's not physically taxing but at the same time talking to parents all over the world and repeating things over and over again. And also, you know, like just some people, that's, some people are a little bit ungrateful. Despite so many information is out there for free that I've made is, it's a little bit defeat, a little bit defeating sometimes, which isn't the best for me for my own mental well being. But at the same time, you know, work is work, you know, I, I, I, you know, there's every day I don't think that it's only you that you, you wish that you wake up and this speech delay thing is gone. Right. I really do as well. Even if it, you know, takes away my job or my livelihood, you know, because this thing, I, I've been working in the trenches for a very long time. You know, I've had people have kids scream inside of a, of a small cubicle inside of a toilet whilst I'm trying to teach some sort of like toilet training. Right. I've tried that before. My eardrums hurt to this day I think there's some, some damage, you know what I'm saying, to my hearing. And then I've been bitten multiple times. I've been scratched many times and pinched, I mean kicked. I've been bit like, I've been, you know, like my trousers were filled with saliva and whatnot. To think that you guys are going through like parents who are really trying at home. You guys are doing this like 24 7, whereas I before maybe like three, like remember nine hours a day. Right. That's still a lot. But not, not compared to you. And that's why I don't give up. Although I, I really hope that I, I, I don't have to do this forever in my life. But at this moment in time, that's all. I think I can offer this to people who really want to do it, right? And, and that's why I'm making stuff for free. I don't want everyone to be here. I only want people who truly are ready. That's why things are gonna be totally. Just watch it, right? Just go watch it. If you want to work with me, then work, right? If you want to be coached by us, then by all means, right? But don't make it hard for us, right? I've had many accounts where I had to chase down, you know, I don't mind chasing you to get results, right? But I don't like chasing for, for money, right? A lot of parents email me and ask, can I get a discount? Can I get a whatever. Can I make a payment plan and pay you like over a whole year for eight week program? And whereas, like, sometimes, you know, I feel like, yeah, fair enough, I can do that. But at the end of the day, I have to chase them down, right? Or my or my assistant has to chase them down. And some of them, we never even get paid, but we're still working with them, right? Just because, just because of the kid. The kid's innocent and I don't want to punish them. That's all right. And people think I'm stupid for taking on clients who cannot pay, which I think so too, by the way. But sometimes, sometimes I got to do what I got to do, right? When, you know, money doesn't work the same in, in the whole world, there's like people who are, how to say, people who are in Jamaica, Trinidad, there's a few in South Africa, right? You know, Filipino people. But it's really hard, you know, so that's why for the things that I, I can not charge, I will not charge. But the things that I will charge, I would charge. All right? But anyways, let's get back to the topic. Grossman Les says non verbal, makes eye contact, case directions, doesn't battle anything, okay? He's only three. Okay. Not sure if it's a result, but being isolated first views. Well, I don't think so. Like, the thing is, like, you, first of all, you have to know. You, first of all, you have to know whether there's a speech or a language problem, right? If you say that, like, if he takes direction, how much of a direction he can understand? Is it everything? Is it how much, to what extent, right? And then the second thing is, if he doesn't use sounds, does he pull your hand or Whatever. Or does he gesture or is he able to, like, you know, mime some stuff out, like mime some, like, gesture some stuff out, some proper, like pseudo sign language kind of thing? You need to think about that, right? If not, then this, this may or may not be a speech problem. And we have to start from the very beginning, which is action, imitation, and see if. How much he can actually imitate, right? And, and see how much he can actually, like, can he even make an ah sound, a vowel or whatever, Right? So yeah, unless he pulls us to what he wants to do. Yeah. So like, does he know the. Does he imitate? Does he even try, does he try to imitate actions if he doesn't imitate actions? That's where your starting point is. And in therapy, that's what we call breakdown level, right? And obviously if you search online breakdown level, you won't see anything because it's a very like internal, internal word that we use, right? So, yeah, anyways, so let's keep on going. Is consider autism. Well, you don't have to consider whether or not it's autism or not. It doesn't matter at this point in time. If you watch some of the videos about, like, diagnosis, like, there's no point in getting, like there's no point in considering or not focus on what your child can and cannot do on a functional basis. And then you go one by one. If your child cannot, the lowest level, the breakdown level, is that he cannot imitate actions or doesn't understand the reason for imitating actions, then you already have a starting point for teaching, right? You don't have to think about why yet. You don't have enough information, right? You really don't. Because let's say you get him to a specialist, right? And then they say, oh, yeah, no eye contact, right? Is there eye contact? You are saying, or makes eye contact. Oh, that's one less of a box to tick, right? By the end of the day. How do you even know if it's a speech sound disorder if your child doesn't even imitate? It's all speculation, right? The only how we do a diagnosis is only if your child can imitate sounds, and then we can make educated guesses about what it's about. But if you think about it's just autism so wide, like there's. There's no information, nothing for you to chew on. What are you going to do with that fact? Whether it is or not, right. If it isn't, oh, suddenly the only good thing is that you get a whole load of services nowadays. And by the way, service isn't as good as it was before the pandemic. The reason is because there are so many people on a backlog that people like the. The government now is starting to do my model, right, Our model at Agent of speech doing it now they're giving video lessons and I'm talking about the UK and Canada. I don't know about the usa. I only talk about the things I heard from parents. Like UK and Canada, they're now giving video. Video lessons, right, for parents. Parents watch it and then use those techniques on their children and then they get like a phone call or zoom consultation with the parent. They don't even see the kid. Right. And what we do is a little bit more obviously. Yeah, we're. First of all, those are very like wishy washy therapy techniques I would say like for instance, copy what your child says. Well, too bad if your child doesn't even say anything, then what do you do? Right. So it really depends on. Oh yeah, yeah. And then those government services, what they do is like they don't ask for videos of you and your child interacting together. Rather in Canada what they do is like they put you in a room and then they observe from. From a different room or something through a camera. But in the UK at a very. From the parent that, that told me about this whole situation was that they would just like go on a call without anything. But for us, we asked you to take videos, we watch it and you send as many as you want and there's unlimited tech support, right? You can't get this anywhere else. That's me selling by the way. But anyways, Ko Yan says I think eye contact and verbal take a really long time. It's not short term to see results. Especially complicated case like my kid. That's true. Your child's case is quite complicated. As I told you many times, observing his improvement overall eye contact and response still working in progress. Yeah, thanks Korean. It's always nice. Probably we'll make a video of. Of you working. If you don't mind, we can share to other parents about how long it took and what results we were able to attain through your training. But we'll talk about this only if, if you say okay, let me see what else you guys were saying. Yeah, you really need to try it because a lot of therapy techniques would not be applicable to you because he probably plays okay, right? You probably can talk to him for hours on end and you still won't get him responding to you. So a lot of techniques won't be effective, so to speak. So as I always say, if you're telling. If you're teaching a child who is non verbal, it's always very important to establish some form of imitation with a verbal of action and we've done that with Kuyan as well before. And then we did it so much that when the kid went to. I'm sorry, can I share this? Yeah. The thing is if we have a kid we did so much imitation right. That when he went for. What's that called? Oh, thanks, thanks. Korean. I was stalling, I was stuttering and stuff that when he went to see a assessment his expressive was better than his receptive and that's because we established his verbal imitation first and obviously we're still catching up on his receptive but it's going somewhere I guess, right? You. You tell me Korean. I. You have. I haven't heard from you for some time since I was gone and stuff. But yeah, it's very important and sometimes the stuff we do is a little unorthodox too. Right? Let me see. Yeah, let's. What others think? Well, I, I do care about what others think to be very honest, like. Well, not as much as a lot of people. That's why I put my face on. On the Internet. But sometimes it's very important for us to, you know, for me to change the whole structure of agents of speech is rather difficult for me to be very honest with you. It's a stepping out of the comfort zone yet again and to step out of the comfort zone every time. I mean it would, it would serve me the best to keep it as it is because I don't need to work so much. All, all I need to do is to sell courses online and it's kind of like the dream if you ever heard of like the four hour work week. It is exactly that. And now I'm kind of going away from that and I'm thankful that I was able to because I was going through so much family things that I haven't been talking about to a lot of my clients and finally now as I'm still dealing with a lot of stuff. But no like everyone is right. So the plan is to hire a little, a little more help for the therapy side and then what I'm going to do is to take all that data we have and get and create better, better services and products. That's all I care about for now. Shiva Shankari. Sorry if I'm killing your name but anyways, Sensory seeking behavior we do have videos about that. You know, you can go search it. But if you give me more. Give me more contacts, it'll be easier for me. Right. Instead of giving me one liners. Right. Chews on everything. Okay. Just listening to just that. Listen for that moment. And he starts chewing again. Look, the thing is, I have no idea about how to treat sensory seeking behaviors. That, on its own, is an occupational therapist's job. That's the first point. Second of all, have we ever done anything with these. Like these behaviors? Yes, we have. But I'm not the best person to ask this. Obviously, I can only tell you what has been working for us. So sensory seeking behavior. We all have. We all have sensory seeking behaviors. Okay. That I want you to know. All right. And why is it that they chew? Usually from a speech therapist or occupational therapist point of view, there's a sensory seeking need at the tmj. And what's a tmj? It's a temporomandibular joint, man. I should really study temporal mandibular joint. Where it is, you know, this is temple, right? There's the mandibular is the lower jaw. So when the temple meets the jaw, which is here, and when you press on, feels funny. And that's the place, usually speaking, when a child is seeking for sensory input is for that TMJ joint. So if you go on Google and search temporal mandibular joint, you can see where it is, and you find it on your own head. And then what we usually do is we give TMJ massages and see if it'll work. All right? That's number one. Okay. Number two is that all sensory seeking behaviors whilst you do the massages and whatnot, that's temporary. Right. And all sensory seeking behaviors can only be regulated or replaced. Right. Regulation is something that. If you've ever watched the movie called the Accountant, it's by Ben Affleck, and he's. He plays the role of a assassin slash accountant who's autistic. Right. And the way that he regulates himself is that he puts himself in a room with, like, flashing lights and hits himself and whatnot. I don't. I'm not talking about how real or true this is from a realistic standpoint. I'm just telling you that's kind of true of like how someone regulate. Right. Is that the. The person needs to take time out of it to. To regulate their own senses. So my question to you, Shiva. I'll just call Shiva, although it's a God's name. I know that. But, you know, please, Please forgive my ignorance. The thing is, if this sensory seeking behavior doesn't really affect his learning and his time with you and whenever he concentrates, by the way, whenever someone concentrates, the sensory seeking behavior goes away. All right? When they're doing something they like, these behaviors go away. So when you know this, first of all, is this behavior really that detrimental to him? Right. Or is this just annoying to you? Is it detrimental to his teeth health? Right. Is it detrimental to anything? If it's not, then yeah, there's not much point in stopping him because there must be a replacement behavior that you will give. A behavior doesn't disappear. It doesn't cancel itself. It doesn't whatever. It gets replaced. Right? And it's the same as everything. You tell a smoker to quit smoking to some extent. That's a sensory seeking behavior too, right? What do you need to give that kid? That guy, right? You need to give them nicotine patches. You need to give them like chewing gum. You need to give them something to snack on, because that's an oral fixation, my friend. So it's the same as sensory seeking behavior of any kind. You must have something else to replace. And this can also be regulated. You can have a time where you give the child as much sensory seeking opportunities as possible. Right? And the main and the most important thing that you should be doing is to teach your child to play with toys so that when they're. When children are bored, instead of sensory seeing stuff, they do something that is more appropriate, socially speaking, playing with toys. Okay? So there you go. So it's always thinking about, is it really that important? That's first thing. And then second thing is, is there anything I can use to replace it? Okay. No. And third thing is there, like, we know that if a kid is concentrated on doing something else, they would stop these sensory behavior, sensory seeking behaviors for a bit. Then how can we teach those things, which is play most probably. All right, so I'm gonna stay here for another six minutes. I'm gonna go shower. Korea. Suspecting that it's a. Okay, start to moa. Well, it means to grind his teeth when he's awake and try to repeat it again and again. Well, a lot of people do that as well. It doesn't mean exactly mean that it's. It's going to be related to like tmj, right? It doesn't automatically mean it. Okay. As long as it doesn't. Doesn't affect anything. Just let him be. Says to demand words for any of his fave actions. Well, the Thing is, like, yeah, stubborn to talk, undergo speech therapy, extremely not interested to playing toys. Have you thought about. Not. Have you thought about using, like, a reward to. To teach toys, right? And if you demand or you, like, you try to force words out of a kid, that's not going to work, because kids gonna hate playing with you, and you're gonna go nowhere. So I strongly disagree with demanding words, right? Demanding words out of. Out of something that he. How to say? You can only set up a toll gate if that person really wants to drive through. And that's what's happening, right? You are setting a toll gate, like, saying, oh, you must say a word, meaning you must pay with money. And then I'll give you. Right. See, he cries a lot, but never says a small word. Then your whole approach should be to use rewards that he likes to teach some sort of play routine. And you can watch the stuff on our YouTube channel for the play routines. Okay. It doesn't mean you have to stick to the same toys. A lot of parents are like, oh, can you do this with this toy? That toy. Whatever toy, dude, I can do unlimited amount of toy videos, but you will see that I'm doing the same damn thing over and over again. Because the structure is similar, right? And it really depends on you learning the structure and learning the thought process involved instead of, like, instead of thinking about, oh, I got to follow this to a T. Because if you. There's nothing you can follow to a T. Even, like, the coaching programs which I have made. What's that called? A protocol, so to speak. That protocol, like, 70% of the time works, 30% of the time, you need to send videos over, and we need to take a look at it, right? And for each kid is a little bit different, and therefore, there are nuances there. You must conquer. Okay, all right, then. Then that's all for tonight, guys. For. I'm gonna sign off. And at this point in time, there's a lot that I am working on. So, you know, like, if I'm slow with the emails or whatnot, please give me, you know, give me a pass. And literally just came back from Bali from our. From our wedding thingy, and then in the process, got Covid, which is kind of crazy. The second time, it's a lot better than the first time, I would say. It's just that my voice is a little crap and I'm a little bit tired, I would say. So, you know, like, give me. Give me some time. All the courses will be free for everyone, whoever who has bought A course with us. We will honor your. The. The money that you have given us before as a discount for any coaching services that you may get in the future. All right? And to those lucky people who has. Who have got, like, lifetime deals or whatever, if you want to contribute, you know, just let me know. You know, like, it's not like we're gonna charge you, like, full amount or whatever. It's just like, if you want to contribute, I don't mind that either. And we'll definitely set up that as well because we wanna get some, like, sponsorships and scholarships to. To parents who are in places where money doesn't work the same. All right? And so that's it for now. The roadmap for agents of speech is that we're going to move onto a platform where all the community and the courses are there, and then from then on, only. We will only charge for parent coaching. Whoever has the resources and time and stuff to join, by all means. But it will be only by application. Obviously, we're gonna. I'm gonna earn a lot less money, at least in the beginning, I believe. I don't know, let's see how it goes. I don't really mind anyways, but at this moment in time, you know. You know, economically, monetary returns for me isn't the most important thing. The most important thing is that we have a good service, we have a good product. We. We provide good resources for. For parents. The. The way that I see it, if from my account at least, if I can see people recommending our stuff and that there's a lot less recurring questions that are very similar, right? If people start to actually use our resources, search and learn and stop asking the same questions over and over, then I see it as a win, right? Collectively speaking on the Internet and the whole wide world, if people are able to just learn and have those silly questions. Questions, Not. Nothing silly. I'm just saying, like, for instance, this eye contact thing, I get this question every so often, right? So I don't want that anymore. You know, like, learn it at your own time. That's it. Okay. If you have any questions, leave it in the comments. I'll try my best to get through them. And if not, then my assistant will. And as we're building up a team later on, our therapist will also help you out. Okay. Last thing I want to say is do something about your child. Because especially now, there are, like. If you want to try to find a therapist, it's very difficult even if you do find a therapist, from what I hear right. Not everyone's a good fit. And sometimes cases are so difficult that you must have the parents involved. All right? If you treat therapy as extracurricular activities, you'll get results. Like an extracurricular activity. All right? That's all good.