A short instructional segment by Ming (Agents of Speech) explaining how to replace children’s hand-pulling with a tapping gesture to initiate communication. The speaker recommends changing routines, teaching a simpler tapping gesture first, reinforcing and then gradually increasing communicative demands (gestures, sounds, words) until the child can use more complex signals.
The key is to change the routine. Make the child understand that you don't have to start the whole conversation by pulling your hand. Secondly, teach a better and a more efficient way of communicating. And that's usually by talking, just like how I'm talking to you through this camera. It's more effective. It's easier than signing in. Once you've caught the tapping gesture, you can slowly increase it towards different gestures. Something that you can do at home is like seeing how much your child can actually imitate. Once you get them do a tap, you can imitate like open. You can tell them to do open palm gesture. Your child masters tapping. You can increase the difficulty. Difficulty level is that now they understand, oh, okay, so if I tap, mom will give me that tension right away. What can he do more in order to get more of what he wants? It means like using sounds, using more gestures, using words. So you have to slowly increase and see where the breaking point is. Where the child thinks, oh, this is too hard. I don't want to work for it. Where you can meet them halfway and say, okay, if you use this sound to communicate with me, you will get more stuff. It needs to be logical.
