Wednesday Live: Therapy Expectations for Speech Delayed Children

Foreign. Good morning, guys. Good morning. Good morning. This Wednesday, today, going live a little later than usual. And as usual, it's because of Internet issues here. Okay, so how are you? If you are on, you're watching this on the recording, please say hi. Please do say hi. And if you're live here. Hey, good morning, man. Thank you for hanging out with me. And today I want to talk about therapy expectations. And this might be like, you might think, hey, dude, Ming, you've been talking about this for a long time. What's different this time? Well, actually, I wanted to talk about basically what a parent should do and what a parent should think in terms of having a therapy. Okay, so first off, I want to start off with a story. I'm from Hong Kong and working as a therapist in Hong Kong. Let's talk about money first, okay? Like, a lot of parents say, hey, man, you earn enough with the price that you, you know, you charge and stuff, right? And I just want to be very real here. Yes, it might be a little more expensive than what you usually get, right? But what I'm accustomed to in my home country is that we. We charge around a hundred dollars USD per hour. And if you factor in that you don't work that many hours a day, you cannot see that many kids or clients or students, whatever you like to call them every day. It's not a lot. All right, so let's get that out of the way first. And the second thing that I wanted to talk about is now that we're on the subject of money, let's talk about culture. Okay? So I've been working in Asia, in China, in Hong Kong, and in Indonesia now. And I've been actually in touch with different types of parents, right? And actually I was offered to work in China for the salary. Wasn't that handsome? But at the same time, because I had colleagues and also people who used to work with me, they actually told me that now they work in China. I've got like, a friend in Shanghai and also a friend in Beijing. And what they tell me is that you can earn a lot of money in one consultation. We're talking about like a few thousand dollars or USD per week, right? And that's ludicrous because as a therapist, you know, it's just difficult to have that type of money. So you might ask, okay, so what's. Give me a sec. Okay, let me. Let me change. Sorry, let me change something on the phone. Let me get this done. All right, now we're back. Now we're back. Because I'M also streaming on Facebook. All right? So whilst Facebook is trying to reconnect, I'm gonna keep on talking on YouTube. So that is a lot of money. Is that something that I want? Probably not. And the reason why. And the main topic is actually the expectations of therapy there are very different. Okay. And the. The feeling of you being a therapist there is totally different. So as you would know or you don't know, in Hong Kong, more and more mainland Chinese people are going to Hong Kong to ask for services. And this includes speech therapy. Okay, this does include speech therapy. And why this is important I want to talk to you about is there's a difference in culture, and I feel like it's the speech therapist or the therapists, their. Their responsibility to actually tell parents about this. And that's why I'm doing this video. All right? So when the mainland Chinese people, the parents were coming down to Hong Kong to ask for sort of a service, they didn't see us in the. In the way that we see ourselves, right? They didn't understand what we were. They thought we were doctors. Right? They thought we were miracle workers. Hallelujah. They thought that we would, like, do anything for money as well, because this was our job. And back home in China, maybe, that if you give enough money, you will get the results you want. Right? And maybe in Indonesia, too. I don't know. Okay. And what happened was that in my first ever job, a lot of therapists, including me, kept getting offers to go to mainland China as a private tutorial, right? To go up there. It wasn't that far away. It was like, around one to two hours of commute. And they would give us money, a lot, and also a place to live and food. So, you know, with all that money, why did people say no, including myself? Well, it's the lack of respect, number one, and lack of understanding. And number three is the mentality is not correct. And why would I say something like that? I mean, like, usually I'm trying to encourage parents, right? I'm trying to tell them, hey, man, it's okay. Look, I've been through this many times with other parents. You just need to listen to me and try to do what I tell you to do. Right? Just try. And the reason is because a lot of times the expectations are wrong. And what I mean by wrong exactly is that these parents would come to us and tell us that, hey, let's add more time. Let's add more money. I'll give you more money. I'll give you more whatever. Please help My child. And they would beg you. And the reason why I'm saying this, one of the parents would know is because, you know, one of my students actually teach other students as well. So it's like they're getting. I keep on getting asked to do something to add more time, to add whatever, and I don't like it. Okay, so, yeah, so what do you do? Because you know these parents, obviously, maybe I'm talking to you right now, maybe I'm talking to a friend of yours. Maybe you've never heard of this before. But parents do beg you a lot. They say, hey, once they see a little results, or even if they don't, they see you as like a means to an end, right? And then they think that, oh, no, I need to ask this person to be with me for a long period of time in order for my child to succeed. And in their minds, they're thinking, what are they thinking? They're thinking, okay, finally my child is going to catch up, right? And they don't understand the huge gap that is in between what they think and where they want they want to go. In their minds, they're still thinking the child is going to university. So one of those mainland Chinese mothers are like, hey, hey, Ming. You know they don't call me Ming, right? Obviously because they're Chinese. They need to speak a little higher of me. They call me like a doctor or something, which I'm not. I've told them multiple times, right? So, and then, and then they would ask me, come on. I would, please come and help my child. That's what they would say, please help the child of our family. In exact Chinese, they would say that. And they would say, keep on saying, like, please help me. It doesn't matter the money. You know, it's anything for the kid and anything for whatever, right? And yeah, of course, at that point you're like, oh, man, this is really, really, really, really important to this mother. And I hope I can give everything that I can to the child. But now that I've worked in this field for quite some time now, I believe that, you know, when the mother asks for something like that, it's rather selfish. And they're right to be selfish. But therapists and teachers are also serving other students, right? If you take someone else's time, it means that, you know, someone else's loses time, right? If you take me, if you get more time from a person, someone else somewhere, like, time doesn't, like, just create in the universe, right? It's. That's what makes Us human, we don't have enough time, right? So if you take more time from like, someone like me or someone else or a therapist, it means that someone else is going to have to sacrifice that time. Maybe it's the family, maybe it's other children. Maybe it's like, you know, other work and other projects, whatever. So if, when the parent is asking this, a lot of times they are not thinking, right? They are in, like, help mode. They're, like, asking for stuff. And this is where you need to. Or if your friend is like this, or if you're a therapist, you're watching this, or if you're a parent who thinks this way, this is where you have to stop and let the therapist tell you what the expectations of therapy is, right? What, what is the expectation? Expectation is that therapy isn't to teach content. I'm not there. The therapist isn't there to drill in the content. We're not going to, like, teach to learn language, right? We're not learning like A, B, C, D, E, F, G. We're not trying to drill that lang that content into you. It's not more equals better. What therapy is, is that we teach the child some strategies, a way of learning so that when they go, when they try to go back to school, they would use those skills to learn more themselves, right? So they're learning strategies. They're not learning. They are not learning the content. Okay, this is what. Excuse me, this is what parents don't understand. We're not teaching the stuff, we're teaching them the how. Okay, let me give you an example. So, for example, when, when you see me talk about, like the open palm, right? Which, I mean, if you're watching this and you probably know that I like to talk about the open palm, like gestures, right? So what is the, the strategy? The. The thing that we're doing here is that they need to use gestures to communicate, right? Once they know that the gestures to communicate, they will absorb more gestures in everyday life because that's become a way, a strategy of them communicating and learning, right? So by adding more gestures in one go, let me say that I'm trying to stuff like 10 gestures into a child in one session. That isn't going to work because what I'm working on is letting them know that gestures work, not that they have to use 10 gestures, if you know what I'm saying. Okay? You have to understand that, all right? If you try right now, if you're like using flashcards to drill words into your child right now, you need to Understand why people frown upon it, meaning they don't like it that much, including myself. Because you are not teaching a way of learning. You're teaching the content, okay? You're teaching the vocab, which is a very school way. And I don't blame anyone because I was brought up that way, right? I was brought up to memorize the timetable, like the times table, you know, like the multiplication in Chinese. We have a song for it. How crazy is that? But no one ever taught you how to think in a way that what multiplication really is, you just have to memorize it. That's why we never really. That's why people just stop when it comes to, like, abstract math, right? Because it's too hard to understand the underlying stuff. So what we're teaching in therapy is the underlying principles, right? When a child doesn't know how to use sound to communicate, we teach them to imitate sounds so that they pick up more sounds and they imitate more. And then they know how to trial and error like a normal human being would do. Okay? There are some things, skills that they're lacking of, and we're trying to fill it in for them, okay? So when it comes to these expectations. Expectations, when parents say that kind of stuff, the first reaction, for me at least, is to say that, hey, listen up. It's not that. If you add more sessions with me, it's gonna help a lot. Okay? If you say that, hey, how about ABA therapy? Aba? I thought, like, every day. I thought it was every day. Yes. ABA is more like route teaching. Like, you need to keep on teaching something, right? And you don't really think about the strategy behind it. So what is it that. What is it that boggles a lot of. What I mean by boggle is like, makes, like, parents unsure about. It's like, hey, isn't more equals better? And you've heard me say before, I also said, like, less is better. Less is better. Even when you're talking to your child. So what can you do? The first thing you should think about is to absorb as many, like, therapy techniques, what works, and then replicate at home. All right? And I've said this many times because expectation shouldn't be to add more with your therapist, right? Number one, that would be expensive. Number two, that's not time efficient, okay? Not time efficient for the child and yourself and also the therapist. What you should do instead is to see what the therapist is doing. So you need to think about, like, the therapist as someone who is trying out things that will work or not work the Trial and error until we find a way that works for a child. Once we find that the ch. It works for the child, you have to keep on doing it for the child. And you say, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, just let the therapist do it, like, as many times as possible. Or the teacher to do it as many times as possible. Yes, that's great. But. But how many hours can you afford a therapist, a teacher to come over? Maybe you can do it for like, the whole day. Yeah, but what about when that person leaves? At most you can, like, let them stay for like, five hours a day or eight. I don't know if you're like, totally. If you're totally, like, you're. You're. You're hiring full time. Right. But there are still times where, you know, they are idle and you have to deal with it. Right? So what I'm trying to say here is, I'm not saying that it's totally your responsibility as a parent to do all the work, but you shouldn't. You shouldn't add more therapy time just for the sake of more practice. Okay? And I really, like. I do turn down a lot of these requests as a guy who, you know, is working. And is this my only source of income? Not okay. Right. Yeah. I have other stuff going on, which is online, like, stuff like here. But it all revolves around therapy. Right. So why do I say no? It's not because I don't like the money. I would love to be paid. That's something that is because I'm doing what I like and I'm getting paid. I'm happy. Right? But does it mean that I will say yes to every opportunity? No. And the. The thing is, some parents, some cultures, I don't know here, I'm not talking about to you. I'm not talking to you. Is that if I have the money, why not? I just keep on. I just keep on asking for more. Right. And why don't you say yes? Because you also do this for a living. So that's the. That's the total reverse of actually how it actually works. Okay? The how therapy works, how we think is that we want to get rid of you. Okay? That is our KPI. That's our key performance indicator. How fast can I let go of a student? Right? Not how many times they come back. That would be very businessy. Right? That's fair enough. But the more you can actually throw children, like, away and say that you're done, you're done, you're done, you're done. This is okay. This is Fine. Okay, we're finished. The better you are as a therapist. That's just the end of it. I don't want to see you, actually. Right. It sucks that you have a child that needs to see someone like me. I don't want to. I want to finish. I want to go on to the next person. I want to help as many as I want. But I only have two hands, right? And this is something that the mother needs to understand. There's a reason why they've been stuck there for a long time and they haven't been going on. Right? It's because the methods aren't correct. The methods aren't the best for a child, and therefore you need someone to help you try. And that's the therapist's job, right? And after you try, if you go back to those ways, how you communicate with your child at home, then you know the ratio is how much? I'm asking you, like, let's say that you come to, you go to a therapist for like an hour a week or maybe like three times a week the most. Right? Three times a week or four times a week, that's what, six hours? If you do like, Let me get My math correct. 4 times 2 is 8. Yeah, there you go. Like 8 hours versus the whole week, which is what? 7 times 7? 49 hours. Whoa, I'm totally getting this totally wrong. All right, seven times 24, that's at least 100 something hours. Right? So you see, the ratio is very small. How much of an impact can a person have with so limited to time. Limited time. I had too much coffee, sorry. And you expect that someone can change a child's life in those few hours without, like practicing what is working, what is not? Well, the answer is obviously no. And there's studies talking about, like, parental involvement. There's a bunch of children who got. Who were around like 1 to 2. I'll try to link it. If you want to just PM me, I'll find it for you. And like, there's a bunch of children. There's two bunch of children. One, like two of them are two bunches. Oh, my God, what am I doing? It's like two bunches of children. Both of them are around like one to two years old, right? And then one of them, they. They didn't do anything for the parents. They waited until two or like two or three for intervention, which is still very normal, still within, still ethical. And then this over here is that they started to teach the parents some, like, language facilitation skills. Some like speech therapy techniques for them to do at home and stuff. So these type of children, they looked like six months into, like, the future. Let's go to the future. And then this bunch who has the parent training increased significantly their language skills. This bunch nearly stayed the same. All right, so what does that tell us? That tells us that parent involvement is super important. And the reason behind it is because the language environment that you give your child is vastly different between these two groups, because one is that one type is parents who have gone through some sort of training. They know what to say, what to do at home, at least a little bit, and makes them a lot more confident to give the correct language information, the environment for the child. Whereas here, because the child wasn't picking up anything already, they kept on. The parents kept on doing the same thing over and over again, and therefore no type of improvement at all. Right? So you have to think about what's the role in a parent, what's the role of a therapist, what's the role of the. Of the child, Right? And by adding more time to therapy, it doesn't solve that problem where you gain that knowledge to become a better facilitator in language. Right. And sorry if I haven't made this clear in previous videos or anything. And sorry if I haven't, like, said it in a way that can, like, make you understand. There's no easy way out of this. There's really no easy way out of this. And the ones that I can, like, graduate from, like, my services, I cannot say for other people are the parents who have helped me 100%. And am I sad to let them go? Of course. They're, like, the best students I can ever ask for. Right. The mom was, like, taking notes. She's trying. She, like, makes videos of me, like, working and then trying herself. And then, you know, telling me, like, updating me on WhatsApp, even though I'm not paid. I don't care about that stuff as long as they show me videos at home and they tell me about, like, oh, what's going on? What's going bad? What's the problem? What solutions I want to give and they try out so that I know what to change. Those are the best, and those can graduate very soon. And that's the reason behind it, is because the parent now becomes. Has the mindset to actually think. All right, when a new situation presents itself. And all I need to do is give a little bit advice in the end, right? Let's say that, you know, there was a parent in Jakarta who came to me because her child had a problem and, like, speech clarity, like this, pronunciation problems. I finished the best of my ability to like that child. Now he's done, he's gone. Right? And then. And because some of these speech problems are in genetics, the little brother has the same issue. So the little brother came once I told her what to do, I gave her like an assessment. And then it's like, hey, it's nearly as the same as the older brother. It's just this and this. And then now she's not coming back. I haven't heard from her. And the last time I checked with her, she was like, oh, yeah, it's already getting a lot better. Right? And that's because she's gone through those hoops, right? She's jumped through those. If you guys listened. I'm not saying I'm the best therapist out there. I'm totally not. There are therapists who, you know, write textbooks who are much better than me, therapy techniques. I'm just full honesty. I'm not a noob. I'm not like, I'm not a new therapist. I'm not a super senior therapist. I'm like, in the middle. I'm okay, right? So to get results is not really all about me. Myself as well. It's about my rapport with the kids and also the parents role, the rapport of the parent with the child, and most importantly, the rapport between me and the parent, whether the parent will understand what I'm talking about. Like how you are listening to me now and internalizing some of the stuff that I'm talking about. Right? And yeah, this is. This topic is totally not about parenting. You know, it's totally not. And a lot of people would say, and I've heard it before, is that, hey, hey, Ming, you're not a parent. You don't know what's. What's. What we've been going through at home. That's why I don't give that type of advice. Usually what I would tell you to do is to actually set your expectations correctly. Because this is a long fight, right? If you're watching this and you've been like, watching like many of the videos of me or other therapists or whatever, and doing like, online learning about speech delay or ASD or whatever, then, you know, you need to know, understand that this for the long run, and people can help, I can help, but to an extent that I cannot live with you, right? To extent that you need to change your mindset now because mainstream education will not help Your child, it probably cannot help your child in many cases. So you need to help them to build strategies to understand things that we learn. Not explicitly. No one ever told us. No one ever told us that when some we talked to someone, we had to say hi. No one told us that when we talk to someone there's a physical distance. There's a rule. Right. There's a rule between us that's like that. No one told us that if we have a lot of ums and likes and whatever in our speech, it becomes hard to listen to is from the subtle feedback from our teachers, from our parents, from peers who make fun of you, then we understand. Oh, we should be clearer and try not to use so many ums and likes and ahs. Right. So speech delayed children do not catch on these clues. They need specific feedback. Right. They need rich, rich, rich, rich language input, stuff that don't put them down, like words that actually encourage them to talk and try and fail and then try again. And that's why you are a facilitator. You are not a teacher, you are not a therapist. And mothers always say that, oh, I'm not good at this, I'm not good at that. I'll never do whatever you do. Yeah, look at me, look at me. I was, I was not going to become a therapist. Right? Right. I mean like if you look at my field, speech therapy or whatever, like teaching children, a guy like me, very rare, I would tell you. Very, very rare. So don't let whatever like you think become like the, the reality, shall we say, it's now become like some sort of self help stuff here. Right. But it's true. Don't let what you, your own self image project onto how you do things. All right? Especially when you have nowhere to escape. You really have nowhere to escape because you're living with that child. And that's what you have to do from now on. Yeah. So, yeah. So to tell you, actually I didn't want to make this video. I actually made this type of video before. Right. But I'm more explicit about how I feel about things and how I feel that parents and therapists should have what kind of relationship they have for me. At least we don't work for money. Right? We do work for money. Like we do get your money, we're very happy to receive your money, but we don't work to become rich. I mean, like this is totally unscalable. Like me with a child. How many children do I need to do? That sounded wrong. Let me try again. How Many children do I need to work with until I become a millionaire? The answer is nearly infinity, right? It's just impossible, right? So if you think about that, then, you know, do not try to, like, don't like. Chances are, if you're working with me already, you already know this, right? But if you're going to. With. With another therapist, do not try to, like, push those values on, like, someone who works with special needs children, okay? I just feel like sometimes I do get complaints from other therapists saying, oh, the parents are trying to, like, twist our neck, you know, tell me to travel to their place every day. And then, you know, like. And it feels very dispense, like I forgot the word, suddenly feels very, like, pushed around a lot, right? So please do treat therapists with respect. That's number one. Treat yourself with respect. Be brave, be courageous about what you can do with your child. Because as I said from the study, right? Parent involvement is number one. On number one, if you don't have parent involvement, no matter what they do, they can fly, they can, like, hold a speech. They. They can do whatever they can, like, I don't know, inside the clinic room, they can do anything. Back home, they're the same. Again, no point. Absolutely no point. And that's my cat. Stop it. Good, right? There's absolutely no point. Your child can come to me in my room, listen nicely, learn to say words, learn how to read and write, and back home, they're the same. Then what's the point? Right? What is the point? I have a client who nowadays, I do go to her place, and that's because of the virus, that we both stay safe. And also that, you know, she is having a huge problem of regression, right? Of the child becoming worse in terms of speech and language, basically. And so I went to her place because at my place, she would always listen to me. That kid, he would always listen to me. He was like a little kitten, right? He would listen to everything I say. But back at home, he was a tiger. So I only went there to show the mother what was possible. And now finally, the kid is, like, listening to the mom and everything's back to okay at home. No more tantrums, no more throwing fits after I showed the mom and also, like, giving me as, like, a cue, telling them that, okay, like, you listen to me, you also listen to mom. That's the package, right? So now they kind of understand a little bit more. All right? So parent involvement is number one, right? It doesn't matter. And, you know, you can also look at Those, like, if you don't even, like, sit into, like a therapy, you really don't sit into any type of therapy or they don't let you. It's going to be very difficult for you to, like, understand how to do anything at home with your child. So what happens a lot is that the parents say that, hey, look, this is the session notes from another therapy I went to. I look at it and it's like, well, it sounds like it writes that your child can do everything that you said he couldn't do. Meaning, like, how is this possible? And you're not inside to see if it's correct or not. You're not inside to learn if the therapist has found a good way to teach your child or not. So therefore at home, you're not going to have the same results. It's just as simple as that, right? So now the, another analogy is that, you know, if you are going to a gym, right, like fitness, you would, preferably, if you have a personal trainer, he would push you very hard, right? But whereas if you try to do it yourself at home, you will never push yourself as hard as he can ever push you or you can never push yourself. So therefore, what you need to do is to slowly incorporate your life, not to push yourself like crazy to screw up your life rhythm, shall we say. It should be like building habits should be a small habit at a time, small changes at a time. So of course, the easiest way, the easiest way out for a parent, for a therapist, for anyone, is to pay someone else money, take out your credit card, your debit card, your cash, give it to someone and ask them to solve it for you. And the easiest way is to put your child somewhere and leave them there and just walk out of the room as well. So what I'm telling you to do, and I know there are therapy centers that don't let you do that, but if given the chance, do walk into the therapy room, okay? It means a lot to the therapist. It means that you're committed. And if you do want to ask for more, it would make more sense for the therapist to say yes. If you've always been there, listened, and, you know, tried everything that the therapist said, it would be 10 times easier for the therapist to say yes to your, to your requests because he knows or she knows that whatever change that you asked for, in good hands, okay? So the respect is two ways, all right? If you don't, like, at least for me, if, like a parent doesn't, like, show up, she walks out, she uses her Phone during therapy, I asked her to do something, she says no. And, you know, and worst case scenario is I tell her to do something, she does the opposite and does it, like, 10 times worse, like, increase in time. Like, I tell them to do, like, five minutes, to do it for 30. And then what's worse is that, oh, they see that I'm using a toy that, you know, a child never played before, and they like it. And then they're like, oh, Mr. Ming, what do you buy that? I want to buy that. And then they buy it, and they just let the child play it without doing the language and speech work. They come back and they don't want to play anymore because they've been bored about it. Then what is the therapist going to think? Right? Especially when I'm ranting now. Right? Especially when I told the parent, hey, don't let them have free access to that toy without them talking, without them doing, like, language tasks with you. Like, without you bombarding them with, like, the appropriate words and sentences. If you don't, they'll just be in their own world and that's it. Right. It will be the same story again. Said it many times. Right. Do parents change? Yes. Most of them. Some, yeah. Full credit to those who are listening. Full credit to those who are doing the best that they can. And disclaimer again, I'm not like some guru or some, like, some person who writes, you know, speech therapy textbooks. I don't teach at university. I'm rather. Still rather young, green, you know, so listen to me, don't listen to me. Doesn't matter. As long as you come back, you go away from this, like, little live session. Is that you know, is that you know that you as a parent is very, very important. You should look at what's happened, what's wrong, what's working, what's not working from a therapist. Like, he's the person or she's the person who tries stuff to try strategies that work or not. Once you see what strategies work, stick to it like glue at home because you spend the most time with your child. And if you keep on doing it, it's going to work. All right. And Anita asks, so parent involvement is the most important thing, right, Ming? I would like to think so. Right. Parent involvement is number one. But for it to work, you got to have a working machine. So analogy is like, parent involvement is fuel, right? It's fuel in a gas tank, but you have to have a running engine. So some children, they don't have a running engine, meaning they don't have a system that works, that teaches them stuff, okay? So that's why when you don't have an effective way of teaching, what you're doing is just pouring gasoline on nothing, right? You're wasting your gas. That's a saying in Cantonese, by the way, right? You're wasting your gas on something that doesn't run. Okay, Even if it runs a little bit. You found a way, the therapist, or you found a way that. Okay, actually using, like, these rules, right? Oh, by teaching gestures first, by helping them understand using mouth shapes or sounds that are easier than words, or that you're teaching them how to answer questions a little long, a little better, a little more difficult along the way. Or you're teaching them through stories, or you're teaching them stories with action figures instead of pictures. That would work. Then you have a working system. Effective teaching. The key word is effective teaching, Anita. That's what it is. You already have it. Anita. We did talk about it before. Thank you for. Anita is a great parent. She sends me videos all the time. She tells me about what's going on. She listens, she tries, you know, it works. It doesn't work. We try again. I tell her some feedback, she tries again. And until it works. So. So, Anita, you have a working system ready. You just need to pour more gasoline into it. Okay. All right, so more gasoline doesn't mean like 30 minutes, right? I just mean like five or 10 minutes, but rapid successions, like, make that five, 10 minutes. Very, very fruitful for a child, Anita. For other parents, I cannot say. Okay. I don't know. I haven't seen your child. Haven't seen you as well. All right, so once you find something, you have to add gasoline. But if you don't have the. If you. If you, as a parent don't have that, then you cannot add much gasoline. Right? And if you're asking. Yeah, then I would put the therapist or a teacher with my child for a longer time. That would. That's pouring gasoline, right? That is. That is. But how much, like, how much are you pouring? Not a lot, right? If you're doing three times a week already, you add one more. One more day per week, how much is going to add? That's like. Yeah. And there's also something called, like, diminishing returns. You cannot. And what diminishing returns is, right? You pay for something as. The more you pay, the less you get, right? The less you get by function, by, you know, by function, by, you know, the yield that you get. I'm getting a Little too technical here, but there is a diminishing returns. So Ponita asked, should they learn names, Learn sign language, very basic sign language instead? That's very hard for me to answer you, Bonita. I need to know how much your child can speak right now. Okay. If your child is talking already, using some basic sign language can help them increase. Then help them increase sentence length, because now you've taught a bunch of signs for them as a cue for them to speak certain words. So you can check out one of my videos about, like, increasing sentence length by gestures. I forgot the name. Sorry. Right. But basically I would do that. I would. It depends on how long your child does it and what kind of situation is your problem? Is it. Is it a speech problem? Is it a language problem? I don't know. So there's this dude on Facebook who does, like, apraxia. He's an adult now. He's had. He had a speech problem since young. And. And like, he. He uses some gestures that I picked up when he was doing some lives like I am right now. But obviously he has a lot more people watching because he's this guy who struggled as a kid, and then he became someone who could start talking and go to, like, university or something. Right. Very inspiring. But that aside, what I want to talk about is gestures help a lot, even for speech. So what he does is like, whenever he does the S sound, you can see his hand going like that at the background. So he's trying to cue himself as he's trying to kill himself. That's the best way. If you learn how to do that, you need to teach your child how to do that so that they can cue themselves. Okay, Cue themselves. The. Cueing themselves is the best way. It's the holy grail. I talked about this before, right. If they can cue themselves and have a self awareness about when to give them self help, you don't need to do a lot of therapy anymore. All right? You just need to choose the level of difficulty correctly and then they will. They will be happy. All right? Yeah. So that's pretty much all I wanted to cover today. And this was sparked because I feel like. I feel like parents are asking more and more and more and more when something works and there is a glimmer of hope. Right. Because that's what we do. What we're selling, right. In a very businessy type of conversation, is that what we're selling to parents isn't the. Yeah, it's the service. The highest thing we're selling is also not the results, obviously, the results are also cool, right? Of your child talking. But what we're selling is hope. Because a lot of times the parents aren't. They don't see any type of hope, right? They're trying to get some type of, like, type of satisfaction expectation that their child would become something that they want to be. At the end of the day, it's selfish of us to think what we want for the child, but it's also very natural for a mother, for a father, to think that way. Okay, so at the end of the day, I understand. Because what we're selling, as a teacher, as a therapist, or whatever you like to call it, is hope that, you know, my child is going to catch up, catch up or improve. Right? And yeah, when we do say that, when we say, when we do give hope, whether we want to or not, we're just doing our job. Parents want more of it because, to be honest, it's. It's like a dopamine hit, right? It's. What I mean by dopamine hit is like, it feels good. It feels good. Finally. Oh, it's finally my. My child's turn. I got it. This is it. I gotta add more sessions. I'm gonna give this, you know, this therapist everything, like, pull them over into my world and make him or her, like, the person that, you know, helps me out of this situation. But what. This becomes a blinding light, right? For parents, they don't understand that to get to the next level, they need your help. The child needs your help. What got you here won't get you there. That's very important for you to understand. The first few sessions I'm doing simple vowels. Do you believe that I will keep on doing simple vowels until they start talking? No. You got to keep on increasing the levels. And when they're here, they need a lot of help from you. It's not just from me, obviously. I did talk about children improve in step by fashion, right? What that means is they get an inspiration, they get an insight, Boom. They literally just overnight, they know how to do something, and then they plateau again, and then boom again, right? So how do you have those inspirations for a child? You have to help out. You have to keep on trying to different things. You cannot rely totally on the therapist. Obviously do rely on us. Right? We really like that. But don't overly rely on us and believe that you cannot do any work as I did. Talk about. You guys are better than me, you as a teacher, miles better than I am. Right? You get what I mean? Right. Miles better than I am. Because you have more time, you're more emotionally invested. You will do whatever it takes. For me, it might be a passion, it might be interest. It also is a job. I also, like, need it for my, you know, for, for living. But doesn't mean I'm on the same level of commitment as you are. You understand what I'm saying? So hopefully you understand after I've been talking for like 40 something minutes about this topic of expectations. Your expectations, to sum it up, should be that therapy is a way to give you a road to, like, how to get there. Right? Someone will help you trial and error. Someone will tell you what your child can and cannot do and then come up with a plan to make sure that they go there. Okay? But parent involvement is very important. Now, parent involvement is like gasoline. As I did talk about before, when you pour gasoline onto a fire, explodes. But if there's no fire, there's no engine that works. You don't have a way to teach effectively. You're just wasting your energy and gas. All right? So therefore, you need a speech therapist, whatever therapist to help you. Hi, amicia. To actually build that systematic way of teaching, effective teaching. In the end, that's what it is. That's what we do. Right? And then you apparent involvement, pouring gasoline on it. That works because now that you have a system running, all you need to do is to keep doing it until you hit another plateau. And then you need to reevaluate, change the system and go up to the next level. That's pretty much what therapy is. All right? And then in a high level, kind of, you know, a process to think about it. Okay? So with that said, thank you so much with, for hanging out with me this morning. Please do drop down the comments, whatever you like to ask me. You can, you can say, hi, email me or something. It's MingAgents of Speech.com and I'll be doing another live on Friday morning. And yeah, probably like that. Maybe I will actually do it on. On Instagram instead. I don't know. You tell me where you hang out. Okay? So thank you so much. And also, if you haven't, you know, you haven't joined my Instagram, it's Mingfeng speech. So you just search for it and just follow me there. Okay, so see you guys on Friday morning. And that's all I wanted to share today. Bye.