Ming from Agents of Speech explains that home speech therapy needs less fancy toys and more caregiver presence: enthusiasm, tone, gestures, and letting your child lead. Withhold toy parts or activation to prompt requests and build interaction.
I'm inside my clinic room trying to tidy up all these toys for my next client. And I just wanted to make this video real quick just to tell you what the parent asked. So she said, hey, Ming, it's easy for you to make a child talk with all these stuff here, alright? It's very messy now. I'm sorry, but it's very easy for you to make a child talk with all these toys here. How do you expect us to replicate what you do at home? And I told her, hey, all this stuff here, it doesn't matter if I didn't have it, I. I would still find a way to talk and communicate and play with your child. It's not about all these things. What it is about is your enthusiasm, it's your tone, it's your gestures, it's how you present yourself, it's how you talk to your child and letting them lead you whilst having some control. Okay, so how do you do that? That's a mouthful. Right? So first of all, you don't want your child to have all the bells and whistles, all the goodies in a toy. You don't want to let them have everything. All right, so what do I mean by that is that if you are playing with like for instance, this vending machine here, right? You don't want them to have all the coins, not have all the cards, all the drinks, and you don't want to turn it on that often until they ask for it and they want to talk to you and they know the routine. All right? The routine should be they want to learn from us, they listen to us and they have fun. All right, so this is something you can implement at home right now. Is there anything at home that you can, you know, withhold from, from your child a little bit and you know, teach them to level up the play slowly to make it even more fun so that they feel that you are more resourceful than they are and they want to play with you. So that's my advice right here. My little tip. You can implement it right now. Let me know if in the comments, what do you think about this? And share it with anyone who needs this advice right now. Okay. My name is Ming, who hopefully you will see more videos like this. If you have any suggestions or questions, feel free to just put them in the comment section. I'll get back to you real soon.
