When to Teach Children to Combine Words? | www.agentsofspeech.com/micro

Oh, hello. Today we're going to talk about when is the good or the best time to start really teaching your child to use words and sentences? And the reason why I'm making this video. Okay, so I'm going to describe what I've been getting this past week, and these kind of live videos is for me to answer your questions and to respond to the queries and also the stuff that you guys asked me. Right? So for the past week, there are a few parents who are saying, like, hey, my son can do that, do this. My daughter can, you know, say. Can say words. I want to learn how to expand their sentences. And we have videos that, on YouTube, you can just search Agents of Speech Sentences, and then you should be able to find that video. Okay, but when is it wise to start that? Because a lot of parents will try. Actually, not a lot. Right? Just maybe every mother would want their kids to speak as long as possible asap. And that might be a problem because sometimes we overlook how far, how fast a child can pick up language. Okay. And I've been someone like that before. And to be frank with you, okay, in the. In the beginning. Sorry, just making my camera a little better. Okay, cool. So in the beginning, when I started this whole, you know, therapy journey for myself, in the beginning, I was an ABA therapist, and I really thought that it was very difficult for me to know when, you know, what do I teach? How do I teach what? What's the difference between language and speech? And how do I get them to speak the way I want? Right. So after doing masters, you know, and working as a speech therapist, I realized that, first of all, we need to understand that someone will only use a certain length of language when they're comfortable with it. Okay? And they will only use words when they are comfortable with that word. If they know that word very well, they will use it. Okay? And a lot of times is that parents will say, okay, he can say this one word. He can say that word. He might be a little lazy, doesn't want to use it. He already knows these words already. It's impossible that he doesn't use it with me, you know, so on and so forth. You have these kind of narrative, these stories, these kind of comments in your head whenever the child isn't performing to what you want, right? You would think, hey, he should be speaking in two or three word sentences. I know he know these words. It's impossible. He doesn't know how to put it together. So what do you. What do you. Do? You try to push Your child to say when. They say, like, I don't know, when they want something, you want them to say the whole thing. And then you go down to the level, as a lot of speech therapists or therapists in general teachers say, oh, get down to the level, Talk to them, you know, and try to tell them word by word, slowly. Right? All these are great advice. Okay? It really is great advice. But is it. The problem is that no one ever told. Not no one, but, you know, not enough emphasis is put on how. When are we going to do that? When are we going to teach the child to speak in longer sentences? So I would say the first thing is, does your child use a single word consistently without any help? I mean, like no help at all? Zero. All right, so if your child can come up to you and say something like cookie, or come up to you and say dinosaur, come up to you and describe things around the world with one word at a time, and then, yes, we can start doing some two word phrases. Right? We can start asking the child to try two word phrases. All right, so the thing is about speech language therapy is that always find what's. What we call spontaneous. Right. And then work on that first. Right. What I mean by spontaneous means like without help, without any prompt, without you asking what do you want or whatever. Can they just say it by themselves naturally, just using one word at a time? If yes, then move on to two, two words. And then the question you would ask yourself is, oh, can my child use two word phrases consistently and like spontaneously? And then if the word if the answer is yes, then move on to three and four, therefore, like that. Okay, so this gives you a much clearer picture and a better like a milestone. Like it's like a, a checkbox. Right. Oh, does my child use like two word sentences? Yes. Right. Can he use like verb and objects like vo, Like a verb object, structure, like throw ball. Right? Verb object, throw ball. Right. Can he do that? If yes, move on. Okay. And you know, move on to other structures like sb, subject and a verb. And this is when you start to know, okay, how about when not to do it? When not to do it? I think a lot of parents will see that, you know, because the child can use a few phrases. Sorry, a few words. And then they would want them to push them to speak in sentences. I think that push is unnecessary. And if you've been to the whole micro course, you know, I will have said it many times inside the course, most probably, and I say a lot in real life as well. Is that hey, when you're pushing that two word or three word sentence that does the same thing, why would someone want to speak longer? Right? Because us human beings, we're lazy. Not lazy, I would say we would take the path of least resistance, right? So I mean, you've done the same thing and we always do that, you know, like if there's an easier way, we would use that easier way, right? And plus, you're the mother, you're the father, you should be the person who your child would think, ah, she understands me, or he understands me. I don't need to talk a hundred percent with him or her. Right? But at the same time, you're also the person who keeps on like asking for more words from the kid, right? So when this happens, it becomes a little the expectations of the kid and expectations of you, there's like a difference. And I'm getting a little abstract here, not like the very concrete ones from before. The concrete advice, as I just said, if you missed it, is that if your child can use single words consistently without prompt, then move on to sentences and phrases, right? If they use some words, not always and still hand pulls you and goes like that, obviously not ready for a sentence whatsoever. Stick to single words. A concept that you may understand now is something that I teach in a micro course is that you need to set your expectations, which is at the same level of your child's ability. You cannot expect your child to be able to speak in sentences when they haven't mastered single words. All right? And us human beings, we always take the easiest path no matter what. Okay, if my phone can connect to the Internet, I'll use my phone, right? I won't use a computer, which is what I'm using right now. And you know, you know, that's how, how it works. If a child can say one word and get what he wants or she wants, why is there incentive for them to speak in a sentence? Probably not. So when you're asking them to like repeat after use over and over again, what, what's that doing? That's creating a lot of stress and a lot of unneeded sort of tension inside of the house. Instead, you should use that time to give them the model. Okay? You see a lot of therapists inside of the Facebook group or whatever, they talk about like modeling. Modeling, modeling. What does that mean? Modeling basically means that you are showing what you're expecting the child to do. Okay? So if you're expecting a child, let's say that they're able to speak in single words, you're showing them. Showing and quizzing are two different, very different mindsets. If you ask them, like, what do you want? Like, how do you say it nicely? Say the whole thing or whatever, that kind of stuff. Like you're setting up them to fail in the beginning because you prompted them after they said the first word. So in their minds, they might think that, oh, I need to say one word first. And then mom asks me, like, can you say the whole thing? And then I'll say the whole thing and then I'll get what I want. Right, so you need to change that whole story, that routine. Right. First of all. And then secondly, what you need to do is that slowly, you need to model more. Show, tell, don't quiz. Because I've said it in this live a few times already. Right. Our way of learning stuff from we were young, especially as an Asian. Okay. I'm speaking as a Chinese now. All right. When I say it probably isn't that racist, because I am. I am Chinese myself. Right. So what it is is that we get quizzed a lot in our school system. Even up to, like, I was talking before, even up to our master's degree, we didn't know much about therapy, but yet, you know, supervisors still ask us questions on stuff that we haven't been, you know, fully acquainted with. You know, we don't know that kind of stuff yet. We haven't worked enough. And same for your child. Okay? Okay. Don't expect them to be able to speak because if they could do that, they would have done it already. Right. Have you seen a three year old who. You cannot shut them up. That's what I'm talking about. If they could, they would. Well, if you're talking about like a, a child on the spectrum, it's different. But I'm talking about in general, a language delay or a language disorder. Not language disorder, a language delay or a speech delay. If they knew, they would have showed you. Okay? So let's keep going on. Okay, so what, what I mean by modeling is by telling them what you want to hear. Right. And don't expect anything back. Very simple. All right? You've heard this multiple times. If you're. This is not your first rodeo in the speech therapy world. Right. It's very, very, very, very, very common to like, as Eileen says, right. As you're with the child, narrate everything you're doing. And they will listen. Yeah, that's true. They need to listen more than they talk, and you need to talk more than you ask. Okay. And of course this kind of advice is easy to give. It's very, very, very easy to give, you know, but the problem is what, what's the problem is that parents don't see a result asap. You know, they don't see that click. And that's why they feel like, oh, I need to do more. I need to learn this. I learned that I need to throw them to aba. I need to throw them to like sensory integration or like whatever that's hit at that time. And inside the group someone talked about something about, I forgot the name. There's a lot of different things going on in this industry nowadays. I don't know what's happening. Okay, so now I'm slowing down, starting to look at some comments. So Doris says hi. Hi Doris. What's up? Shahid? Sorry if I mispronounce your name. She asked how to schedule the activities of two year old child in a day. Hey, don't sweat it. Two year olds, they have attention span of like five minutes or something. So Google that. I'm not 100% sure. Okay, let me just Google it for you. Okay, Very easy. Nowadays you can just go online and just search. All right, so two year old, four to six minutes of attention span. Okay. According to a website. Okay, but that's aligned with what I learned in textbooks and whatnot. And just working with two year olds in general. Right. So if you're a two year old that has an attention span of two to four minutes, you know, then your, your activity should be like, do something like just play a bit and then just take a break for a long time and then play again and then take a break for a long time. You know, you can schedule around five to 10 minutes at the end of the day and then, you know, tell them a story, play, play with them a little bit and remember what we're doing. Like remember all the lessons that we talk about. If you've been through the micro course, you will know what I'm talking about. And I know that, you know, sometimes it's difficult, you have to go through a few times. And what I'm saying sometimes is like, it feels like, it feels like I'm going against some of your beliefs. That's why it's difficult and because what I'm saying here is basically is telling me, telling you to like wait longer and that's not cool. That's not what parents want to hear. They want to hear what's that thing that can like solve it. Right now the one biggest question I get all the time is like, will they catch up and how long? Well, as my lawyer friend would say, you know, how long long as a string, right? It depends on whatever, right? It depends on if they're reactive to the methods that you're using, right? If it depends on your interaction style with your child. That's why we talk about this high level stuff instead of the nitty gritty stuff, right? So you will see a lot of, I don't know, a lot of activity ideas on Instagram and whatnot. But how, like, yeah, I can give you all the watts, right? And we don't have all the what's. We need to go with the kid and learn with them and build an activity with them. It's not like, oh, I have this activity in mind. I prep so much and I see this back in the day, right, when I first, first, because I was, I was blessed with a background of therapy before I went to masters. So I'd see my classmates, they would like make all these crazy handicraft stuff and what they would do was like, oh, I've got this cup or whatever. And this is exactly what I'm talking about. Kui Yan. So my, my classmates back then, because they came from like a very scholar background like that, they're like, with a lack of a better word, they're scholars. And I'm a very practical dude, you know, like, if you see me inside the industry, I'm like, I soar, you know, I don't fit in. I'm this guy who, who talks and who's very practical, doesn't talk about, you know, all the being, being polite or whatever. I just get the stuff done, right? So they are making all these handicrafts and then at the end of the day they had this thing in their mind. They wanted the kid to do that, right? And that takes a whole very high skill level. Or you have like a very, very interesting task. Most of the time, kids don't really show interest in the activity, as you said. So Korean interest in activity. I'm going to ask you back because you already went through the whole thing. What do you think will help them build an interest towards something? All right, I'm gonna give you a very like, abstract example and I'm gonna come back. Okay, so first of all, if your child, let's say you, you wanna learn to like add exercising as, as a habit inside of your life, what would you do? You would like after, you know, be consistent, number one. Number two is like, you don't want to burn yourself up too much Right. So number three is that you add a little reward at the end so that it's more likely that you will keep on going. So it's the same for children. Remember your child, as I just said, a two year old has like attention span of four to six minutes, right? So you should insist right up to the part before he gets grumpy. Right? If he gets grumpy, it leaves a bad taste in the mouth. So analogy again. If you were working out in the gym, if you push too hard the next day, you don't want to do anymore because you remember how bad it was yesterday. Same with your kid. Don't push too far. Insistent. Like if we're talking about a child between like two to three, you're cycling toys and activities. You're cycling it and it's more free. They're free to leave or do whatever, you know, if you want them to have the interest and learn the activity in order to show a certain degree of interest. Let's say, like what I mean is, okay, for instance, if you want to have fun doing a certain hobby, let's say I'm trying to pick up like knitting, right. Without knowing anything about it, would I be interested? Probably not. So learning about it, teaching the task, teaching the activity is very important. How you teach the activity is added reward at the end, right. As I were talking about, we always talk about rewards. The reason why we added reward is there's an incentive. If you don't have an incentive in the beginning and you're trying to push activity on a kid, other than you're a great salesman, like I would say, maybe I am. I'm not entirely sure. I don't never really had like a comparison since like a few years ago because I've been working alone. But you know, are you able to take a toy and then sell it to your kid like crazy? Like what? So fun, you know, like you're playing yourself and then they just cannot help but join you, right? If you can't do that, use a reward. Right after we finish this, you can have that, right? Show them how to do it. Show them. Oh, first it goes down here and then it comes over here and then pop, it calls up. That's a routine. Do it one more time. Like after each routine, give them a reward. Wow, pop up. Ah, very good playing. Here you go. Have a snack, whatever. Like, like do that. I'm not saying that because I love this approach. I don't like unnaturalness inside of, you know, just teaching kids. Right. But the thing is, you Know like if you want to know how to make things work ASAP with your kid, use a reward. That's the easiest way. All right. So Koyan keeps on going. He says he doesn't complain, but then put force on the hand. He just stayed there and wandering. If a system to perform, he just follow. Doesn't feel energy on it didn't really force him. But if he was discovering or maybe doesn't understand though his brother show him how to do it. Okay. I think like number one, first of all, like I don't know what activity you're doing and plus your child, as I remember, he's like one year old to two year old. Right? One to two year olds. There's not a lot of activities you can do with them. The most you can just have those, you know, sound and light toys. Like I can press and then it just spins or whatever. Or like you have those, I don't know, those music toys or whatever that. I don't know that you press something, something happens, you know, like you hit something, something falls or why not? Right? Oh, sorry, I forgot. Sorry. I must have mixed it all up. Okay, so three year old. Yeah, nearly three year old is still two something still to something still, still, still. True. You cannot expect a near 3 year old to like a 32 month old kid to want to like do like cook, cooking cook set or you know, like, or vending machine or whatever. The only, the, the furthest you could go is a car slide, bubbles, you know, like a wind up car, drums, musical instrument toys, you know, you know that kind of stuff. So pretty or pretty, I don't know which one. Sorry. Are there any recommendations of toys? It's not really about the toys, Preeti, as I talked about. That's why we're talking about here, right? You can make a kid talk with anything you have at home. And as Kuyan says, yes, there's a checklist on my agents of speech website. But it's highly dependent on your. What's that called? That's highly dependent on the age of the child and the level of a child. Right. So you need to be weary of that. All right, so you can download that, you can check it out. But you know, for two to three year olds, I really, really, really want you to stick to like car slides. And bubbles, you know, and maybe something like a puzzle, you know those puzzles, ABC or whatever. Don't know why kids like it, but it's cool. Like puzzles are nice. And what do I do? Ball drops, balls, cars, all those things are nice for 2 to 3 year old, 3 year olds. And it doesn't matter if you know he's looking and he doesn't want to do it. Add a reward and reward and make sure that he does it. After he does it, he can have it. Make sure you're teaching the activity. Don't mix up teaching language and teaching activity. You can only teach the language after you teach the activity. Get it? So, for example, I always give this example. Do you know what offside is like in football? You know what's offside, right? So if you don't know, then I have to tell you. First of all the rules of football, right? Did you know that if you know if the furthest attacking player is in front of the last defender, that's offside. It's illegal inside of football, but you need to know that. And then when I give it a name, it makes sense. Offside. So it's the same as activity. You need to tell them the rules, tell them the routine, and then give them the name, which is the words and the verbs for it. Then it'll make sense. Right? It'll make sense. Okay. So remember, teach the, teach the activity first. Okay? So on. Hi. Hi. Hi. How are you, my boy? Start talking now. Oh, nice. One to ten. Great. Cool. Yeah, yeah. Do, do everything that we talk about, all right? Yeah, I'm sorry. I always try to drill that in you and I know that you asked many times. But what I'm talking about is if you're teaching the car slide, do the car slide first. Make sure he knows what's happening next. All right? Fatmin says when and how to start simple questions answered with the kid. I don't want anything. Too much prompting. Yeah. So if you're doing too much prompting and modeling, then don't do it. See how much your child can actually speak by himself. Then go from there. You know, if you record yourself teaching your child, you will suddenly know how much questions and prompts you're giving because you just, you can't wait. You can't wait for the child to talk and you're doing all the talking for him and you're, you're highly trying to prompt all the things that you want him to say. And remember, it's your want. Okay? So if you want to start simple questions, I would say, can he speak like two to three words by himself first? If he can't, then don't do it. Don't do it. If you ask, then just tell him the answer right away. Okay? If your child only speaks like one word at a time. Impossible for anyone to answer a question. Like I would say, for instance, if you're learning a foreign language, right? And the reason why I always use foreign language as an example is because there are some links towards it, okay? Meaning that our brain knows what we want to say, but our, our tongue cannot and we don't know the word for it. I would say that, you know, like if a person only spoke one word at a time for a language, meaning the vocab isn't enough. And then you start asking like what questions, like who questions, why questions or whatever. Dude, I only like, I'm in Indonesia for two and a half years now. I learned literally the word for how. Bagamana. Baghmana. I'm gonna embarrass myself here. But anyways, even if someone asked me how, I have no vocab to describe my day other than saying good, you know, which is exactly why you should work on teaching more words and teaching longer sentences. I remember our topic for today. Don't do it if your child can't use one word, like one word phrases at a time without any help, okay? If it needs help and you're prompting, then that doesn't count. You shouldn't go on to sentences or even questions and whatever. Cool stuff. Oh, hi, watching from Philippines. Great. I'm grateful for that. Thanks. 22 month old son. Learn to say work, then just stop. Stop saying for a few weeks maybe, maybe not. I don't know. I don't know if it's normal or not. If you ask me like that, you know, it's very difficult to say. I cannot, I will not say that kind of stuff like, oh, it's abnormal. No, I wouldn't say that. I would say that your son is still rather young and usually what we say is that can he use mama directly to describe you or does he use it for everything? And then we will count it as a word if he talks mama to you. We won't count it as a word if he keeps on saying mama to everything. And stop saying it. I don't know about that. I'm not sure. I'm not sure what I can say is that, you know, teach them the gestures. So as I always say, I'm about to like die from saying teach gestures first. Teach gestures first, right? I'm about to die from it because I've been repeating myself so much. So teach the gestures first because that is very easy to come and go, right? That's very easy to learn. Sorry. And words will come and Go. That's for sure. If you're confused that you teach both languages, we do talk about that in the micro course. But I'll sum it up for you real quick. If you need join our micro courses. Agentsofspeech.com micro for both languages, probably not. But don't mix up the grammar. For instance, if I'm speaking because I only speak English and Chinese fluently, Cantonese fluently, I can tell you don't mix up the grammar because it's confusing. All right, so a lot of parents in Hong Kong, back where we are, back where I was, a lot of parents will mix up the grammar, and it's horrendous to hear. For instance, they will say, actually, whatever, whatever, and it sounds obnoxious, first of all. And second of all, it's really confusing. So you can mix up, like, you can mix both languages, but speak in one sentence in one language and then go to the next language in this, in the next sentence, you know, you get what I'm saying, right? So you don't do it in the same sentence. Yay. It must be how you're teaching him, Eileen. That's. That's perfect. Okay, cool. So if you have any more questions, I'll be staying here for, like, a few more minutes, and I'm going to wrap up tonight's live video. Thanks so much, guys, for being. Being a subscriber, you know, to the email newsletter, for joining the micro course, for watching my videos. I'm very grateful and I think now really, I'm really happy because this whole thing has become quite, you know, quite useful to a lot of parents who are under the pandemic. And we're getting loads and loads of good stories. Okay. It's not only just because of number of people joining or like, number of people watching or whatever. When I first started, there was literally only one person watching and probably is my mom, you know, and now it's like, you know, we got a few people watching and a lot more people watching on the recordings and also joining our Facebook group and, you know, asking me questions on email and stuff. So I'm very happy about that. Hi, Ashley, how are you? And we are, you know, tomorrow is going to be a public holiday for some of us for me and like, in Indonesia and also for people in usa, I would, I would believe. And so, guys, don't stay up too late. Have a good night's sleep. And the last question from Ashley, you just showed up at the right time. Cool. My son can point and say car ball, but he Just won't call me any. How can I guide to call me? All right, Ashley, go to. You're on YouTube search for how to teach your child to call Mama or something. Or say Mama. I forgot which one. Okay, like, type like Agents of Speech Mama or something. And then you will see, like, a video of, like, how to teach your child to say Mama, call you Mama, whatever the title is. All right, watch that and then tell me about it, because it sounds to me it would be very easy to teach. Very, very easy. All right, so, guys, stay safe. The pandemic is. I was saying this at the beginning of this whole, you know, agents of speech thing. And I didn't start this because of the pandemic, by the way. Anyways, so, you know, if you're India, we have a lot of Indian viewers here. I just want to say, like, you know, stay safe. Prayers to you guys. And that's probably it. Guys, I'll see you next week. For members inside of the agents speech micro course or any other courses inside, we are having just a housekeeping before I leave, before I forget as well. On Wednesday, Wednesday night this time. Wednesday this time we're gonna have the members Q A. All right. And Q and A. Does it, like, involve this, Aileen? Yeah, maybe. Am I vaccinated? Not yet. Not yet. The reason is because we don't have a lot of supplies here, and I'm a foreigner, so they don't really. Obviously they're going to take care of their own people first. But, you know, not every place on the planet is like, as. As good as, you know, USA or Hong Kong. You know, I know that USA is like free vaccines and whatnot, and it's pretty cool. And you get to choose here. You don't get to choose. Right. You have it, you take it. Some people don't take it. Doesn't matter up to them. Free country, last time I checked. I would. I would love to get a vaccination. I would love to. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for that. All right, guys, see you guys. And talk on Wednesday inside of the members group. If you're already in the micro course, if you haven't, go join. That's all I'm going to say. Goodbye, guys.