The Reason Why Speech Delayed Child Can’t Focus On Learning

Let's talk about why your child isn't focusing or not like eye scanning, the things that are on the table and what and why we're talking about this is because most of the time when parents try to teach, like some home practice they have from a speech therapy or another therapy, they give you a piece of sheet, right? A four sheet of paper with home exercises, you try to do it, kid doesn't care, right? Sits there, starts looking around, thinking about other things, playing with the paper, doing exactly everything except for the command that you asked the kid to do. So why is it. I've just talked to a few of the parents who we've been coaching at Agents of Speech and the most probable reason, and the most obvious one is that the child doesn't understand the task. So you would be very surprised that a child is able to do a similar task at a therapy center for versus at home. And the reason is because the environment has changed and it has made it harder for the child to understand that this skill is supposed to be transferred over to at home. And especially the instructor has changed and it has become as if the child doesn't know that they're supposed to do the same thing with mom or dad. All right? So if they don't understand the task, you have to demonstrate it over and over again. And what does that mean? Sometimes in the clinic, it's very easy not to need to use any sort of reward or whatever because at home, it's like a home court advantage for your kids. They never had to work, they never had to do stuff with the parents to learn language related tasks. So therefore they take it for granted that they can just roll around and run off or whatever. So if you already can sit your child down to do some sort of task, remember that a reward is always very important. It doesn't matter what other therapists say on the Internet, because sometimes if you don't have something that the child wants, it's as if the kid's working on no salary. So when that happens, it's very difficult for the kid to think, hey, I've got my whole house, I can run around and get toys or whatever. Why should I listen to you? So it's always very practical to have some sort of reward or parents will say, oh, my praise is the reward. That's. Yeah, that's running on very inefficient fuel, as I would say. Because sometimes if you only praise the kid, right? Yeah, they get happy or whatnot. But at the same time, if they don't have Anything tangible that they can see and get, it doesn't signal to them that is the end of a task. A lot of times we teach parents to high five with the child in order for the child to know there's the end of this trial, end of this task. And praising also would be paired with that high five. But at the end of the day, you need a reward in order to let the child understand that there's a beginning and an end to a task. And they're supposed to do the thing. And when you're explaining the task, do, show, don't tell. Because if you're telling your child, a lot of parents are remote controlling the child with words. And I was just telling another parent we were coaching, it was like, oh, give it to me, give it to me, give it to me, give it to me. I said, like 20 times. But the kids just like pointing at it and spinning the card around or whatever. Show them how it is, take their hand, help them pick up the card and give it to you. Right. Instead of saying the same thing over and over again, hoping for a different result, it's impossible. So if you do that over and over again, your efficiency with teaching your kid goes way lower. Because the kid thinks, oh, whatever you say doesn't even matter to me. Who cares? So you need to understand, show, and don't tell. All right, second point. Child forgets about what they're supposed to do, and then they start, like, losing focus. So a lot of parents will say, ah, my kid's very lazy. They don't want to listen, so on, so forth. And when I see the videos, I'm like, first of all, it's because that you haven't been prompting or explaining the task properly. Therefore, they forgot what they were supposed to do. And because you repeated the instruction over and over again, that instruction just becomes background noise. Right. If you don't want the child to forget what they were supposed to do, there are two things you got to do. Number one, remind them about the task verbally or show them the reward that they're working for. Right. Number two is that it's not fast enough for the task to finish, and therefore it goes over for a long time. And the child can't remember, right. What they started, what they said, okay. To when they came over to sit down. So prompt, fast, let them finish, renew their memory. You still want this or you still want to play or whatever they say. Yes, do the activity again and then let them go, or reward or whatever. Just make sure that you do things fast. Because the last thing you want to do is to how to say grind it out. Because if you grind it out with a kid, children don't understand the concept of grinding, right? They don't want to be grinded, they don't want to be drilled. So therefore, if you drill them and you keep on drilling, you don't really get a response from the kid. The best thing to do is to prompt the response and then just let it be. Finish a task and do something else. And the last point is very important that the activity itself is very boring. And I see this over and over again, is that I had a parent who we were coaching from Czech Republic and she was like, dude, my kid just doesn't like the activities at all. And then when I saw the videos, it's just. It's not even play. It's nothing. It's learning to read from black and white paper. And he just sits there with not much of a reward. And then the mom would say, ah, he doesn't like any reward. He likes to sit there and just follow, like coloring or whatnot. The activity itself is boring. So think about how to make it enticing, fun. And if it's not, then be sure that there's a reward that comes with it. All right? Or else kid's not going to focus. All right, that's all for today's video. If you want to learn more, go to agents of Speech.com course, put in your email and then we'll send your email about how to sign up and sign in to our new and private parents community where you can watch all the online courses that we used to sell and it's all free now. All right, that's it for right now. I'll see you guys next week. Bye.