Teaching Children to Sit and Learn With You - Works for Autistic Children
Ming from Agents of Speech walks through how to teach a child to sit and focus during home therapy. Start with a chair and table, physically prompt sitting, reward it immediately, then gradually fade rewards as the child builds duration. Once sitting sticks, move into teaching play, worksheets, and games.
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Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com we coach parents over the Internet on how to do home therapy. Teaching children to sit and learn is our bread and butter. And this also works for autistic children. We've been doing this for over five years now. Teaching parents what to do, getting their children to sit and learn with you. The first step is to set up a chair and a table. And this might be counterintuitive to your local therapist telling you get on the floor, get a bunch of toys to the level, talk to them, whatever, follow child's lead, so on, so forth. But if you want effective learning, that's the whole topic of this, right? Is to get your child to learn with you while sitting down and not you chasing your child around. The whole premise of this is that you have a place and a time where you can get your child to sit down. So set up a table and a chair. Because if you're going to do like naturalistic floor time or whatever you call it, like language facilitation stuff, it's takes a lot of practice to be able to catch the moments, talk to your child and also be fun at the same time. There's a lot of moving parts when you're doing this kind of therapy. Okay. The second thing is to reward your child whenever seated. What happens a lot is parents, they don't prompt enough. So a lot of times they might take up something that is rewarding and say come here like that. It's as if asking a puppy or my cat to come over, like that's short lived because then you're actually rewarding the whole process of them running away and also you giving that reward, right? Showing the reward, them coming over to eat it, they sit down and then they leave again. The whole thing gets rewarded. So that's why you get this loop where it's always you're holding a reward and then they come over, they eat it or they play with it whilst they're sitting. After they're done with it, they walk off. The whole thing gets rewarded. So it becomes a routine for them to only come when they there's a reward, right? The better thing to do is to instruct and then physically get them over here to sit down and then reward them. So then the act of you manipulating your child or giving the instruction, I'm manipulating the child over becomes part of the whole routine, right? Need to do is to physically prompt your child to get on the seat and then reward, okay, don't bribe them over and then let Them walk off. All right, so number three is less distractions on the floor, right? So if I want my cat to stay here with me, I cannot have too many snacks and toys over there. Or I don't really like him coming over and making me pet him or whatever. But if I want this behavior to happen, I don't want to have furniture or whatever over there or massage machines that will help him massage his head without my help. So if you get what I mean, that means getting your whole floor distraction free. A lot of times when I get to a parent's house or they take a photo for us when we're doing parent coaching, what happens is there's so much stuff on the floor, they're able to go to the fridge, they open it themselves, they get a chair, they grab something. Like, no wonder they don't want to sit with you because there's so much other stuff to do. And not saying that it's not permitted, it's just that we hope that during. When we're doing home therapy, they want to communicate in order to get the things that they want. If they can get it themselves or like playing themselves on the floor is actually more. It's actually more rewarding than spending time with you, then why would they come and sit with you? Right. Number four is randomized and fade out rewards. A lot of times parents will say, I don't want to reward use reward systems. It's very robotic, it's very animalistic, it's very behavioral psychology pavilion, whatever you call it. And there is some truth to it, obviously. But then the thing that I think a lot of people miss is that these rewards or whatever needs to be faded out. The only reason why we use rewards is to pair it up and condition. And that's a bad word. When we're doing child therapy, it's a bad word. How do you condition my child to do that? But really what we're doing is to pair up the good rewards with the experience of sitting on a chair with us, interacting with us, ready to learn with us. Another thing is you need to fade out the rewards, right? You cannot always use that as a way to get your child to do whatever you want. After you have a pairing between the rewards and what your existence. Right. Or your manner of teaching or whatever, you have to start fitting it out and randomize it. So let me give you an example, right? If I randomize the rewards of someone sitting here with me and listening, that person doesn't know when it's going to happen. When the good Thing's gonna. When is it gonna happen? Right? What am I getting rewarded? So they're gonna stay put and listen as much as possible because it might happen any second. Okay. So it's. You know how the TV shows, they have this thing in the corner. When I was a kid, I was like, oh, listen, if you find like, how many numbers on the corner of the screen and you call us, then you can, you can get a prize or whatever. That's randomizing it. And then it feels like a game for a child to sit there and they don't know when they're going to be rewarded. And that rewards also needs to be faded out. What does fade out mean? It means that it needs to be delayed. So a lot of times, children, they have this very short attention span, and that's because they're instantly gratified with the things that they do, which is. Okay, like, we're all instantly gratified nowadays with our phones and whatever. But then if you want to have effective learning, you want to be able to get them to sit with you at least five minutes. So at least five minutes of the time you're. We're working slowly towards it that the reward will come later, but then the reward might be bigger so that they learn that, oh, I just need to wait longer and sit longer, the payout is going to be bigger. And at the same time, it's randomized. They don't know when it's going to happen. All right, that's the final version of it. You still have to go through with the whole. The whole process of them learning when the reward comes. And then slowly when you get there, you can start randomizing and fading it out. All right, last part is now that you have a time that you sit with your child and you're not running around doing child led therapy. Instead is clinician led or like parent led, which is a lot easier to do, in my opinion, than to do, like child led. Because child led, you really have to be able to observe. Really, you need to look at, oh, the child wants to go here, maybe, like, what if they pick up this Mr. Potato Head? Then what should I do with that? I need to think immediately. What are the language goals or what I say that makes sense at that current situation? What if the child wants something? Am I able to identify what's going on? Right. That takes a lot of practice and a lot of work. All right, but once you have this sitting down time, then you can add play. You can teach play as much as you want. Right. And then you can add other tasks that are worksheets, whatever that parents like to do. And it's never of what you can do because there's so much stuff on the Internet of what you can do. Like you go to teachers, pay teachers. You go to I forgot Twinkle or whatever those websites or even Canva nowadays, right? You can create so many activities. You can make iPad games, search for it. You can buy board games. But the biggest problem is that you don't have a time sitting down with your child to do effective learning. And hopefully this video has helped you a little bit more. And we have really long, not really long, but like short, snappy, like this kind of YouTube videos in more detail at www.agence.com course. It's bundled up with a community of parents. We have 11,000 people inside right now. You'll learn a lot of things inside, and all the courses are free from zero words all the way up to sentences. You'll learn what to do there. All right, check out the courses@www.agentsofspeech.com course. All right, that's it for today. Thank you so much for tuning in, and I'll see you next time. Bye.
