Why Children Run Away from Learning Time at Home
Ming breaks down why a five-and-a-half-year-old hits and runs from worksheets. The child succeeds by escaping the work, doesn't know when tasks end, and rarely gets rewarded for finishing. Define what done looks like, prompt correct answers, ignore tantrums, and reward completion.
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Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com and this video will talk about why children run away from work, from studying, from homework or whatever that you're trying to do at home. And we just had a conversation with a parent. Her child is five and a half and every time that she tries to sit him down, we went through a bunch of behavioral tactics such as setting a timer, showing them some token economy, some AVA stuff that a lot of people frown upon. And it's all working until things get too hard and he starts hitting the mother and running away. You think about why and when what happened was like when the child hit the mother, she would bring her him into another room and talk to him and say, look, you can't do this. What happened, whatever came back out and then still hit the mother again, right? So why is it like that? So we think about it in terms of a behavioral aspect and you might say, ming, I didn't watch your videos to learn about how to deal with behavior. That should be an ABA therapist's work, right? The thing is, whenever you're teaching anyone, behavior is a number thing that we deal with and it's the same as you. So if you come to me, I'm always going to talk about what kind of behaviors do we need in order to achieve your child's results, Right? So I need you to like, listen, I need you to do, I need to iterate, I need you to send videos and questions us. All right? So if you're a client of ours and parent coaching, this is what I'd say. This is why we do things. We look at behaviors and then we look at how to achieve those behaviors. So the same as your child, if we can't get him or her to sit down and play with you, or let's say to happily do things with you, none of the other things will happen because you haven't achieved the behavior that requires for language development, which is to talk more, to just push them enough, just a little bit in order for them to talk, right? So going back to the story, the reason I would analyze why he did it is because when things get hard, his mother, the kid would do a worksheet and just scribble. And that was bad. So what the mother did was erase everything and stop the timer. So when that happened, it triggered the son to get really angry. So I'm going to talk about this example. It might not be the same as yours, but there are some learning points. Number one, if you set a behavioral condition, or we call behavioral System, a condition that everyone does it, right. If you do this, and then whatever. Right. If you do five minutes of this, I will give you this. Right? So if you break that promise, people tend to get angry. All right? And the second thing is there wasn't enough confidence, clear rules about what was expected of the child. Right. So I don't know what you mean by finish. I don't know your definition of done. So you have to define what is done. So, for example, like, even is a parent with adults. So if I tell someone to do something, if it's my student, I would say, look, you have to do this. These are the conditions. You have to run it nice. You have to like, whatever. You have to xyz, Right? And then if they fall out of it, the feedback should be, let's say, did you do it? Correct. Did you do this? Nope. Did you do this? Yes. Did you do whatever? Okay, we just need a. The feedback should be then very specific. Then you have to do this better. As the same as when I talk to my wife, when I talk to the staff that we have at Agents of Speech, I would say, did you do this? Do you do this? If you didn't do that, then okay, then go back and do this right, because you just left it this way. Okay? And the third reason why the child got super angry is because he did something and the mother just raised it off. So that action actually made the child very unhappy. What we should do is to get the child to do the erasing himself. And it might be part of the work, it might be part of whatever, it doesn't matter. But the clock needs to still be running and it should be rewarded. It should be rewarded upon what was the correct response? Right. So you don't have any correct response because every time the child was scribbled on anything, Right? So if you don't have a positive behavior to reward on and what the definition of done is, then you have to prompt the child to do it correctly. Right. Even if it means that the child really isn't doing the work. Right. But then you have to show, so, for example, take his hand and do it correctly. And then after the timer rings, you say, look, this one is good, this one's not good, this one's good. And then you tell them, okay, out of all the five questions, did two of them correctly? And therefore, I'll reward you according to those two. Right. Okay. And then the very last reason is, remember, why would the child hit the mother? Why? Well, because they stopped working. Because right after you Know, a child hits the mother, brings him into another room and talks to him. What happens in that room? I can tell you, not working, right? It doesn't matter what they're doing inside of that room. They might be talking, they might be doing other stuff. He might be crying, they might be hugging, they might be saying sorry to each other. It might be like really cool inside, like a lot of emotional relationship stuff going on. But there's a lack of the work that was asked to be done. What does that mean? It means that by slapping the mother, by hitting the mother, he got to evade the work that he didn't want to do. So what happens when they go outside, when the towel is triggered again, when there's work in front of him, what is he gonna do? Right? Just think about it. It's pretty obvious the child's gonna slap the mother every day and twice on Thursday just to avoid work, right? So it doesn't matter how much consequence you give the child, because getting scolded versus not working, which one is better, right? So if the hitting does happen, the worst thing you can do is to stop the work, right? Because that's exactly what the child wanted you to do. Okay? So. And that's the same with a lot of things. Even if your child isn't at a stage where you're working with like worksheets and whatnot, even if you're just doing like non verbal stuff, whenever there's a tantrum, do not stop the work, right? Think about how to help the child finish the work despite the tantrum. Finish the work and then they get rewarded. They get to stop working when the work is done, not when they. Not that or. The flip side is that they get rewarded for the tantrum because it stopped the work. So there's a difference then. I hope that I have described it in a way that you understand, right? Let me give you an example. So let's say that I go to work, right? Every day I go to work, I get angry when my boss says something to me. I'm saying, I'm not doing this anymore. I don't care about your salary, I don't care. I'm just going to go. So what happens is that because I go, right, I don't need to do the work that was assigned to me anymore. And that in turn has a carryover effect because the next day I come over when I don't want to do the work, I'll just say I can't do it. And there is a real example that I just thought of. And that's FedEx. You know how FedEx can send your stuff within 24 hours or 48 hours or whatever that they promised? They went from incentivizing the hours work to. And everyone can go home when everything is done. All right, so there's a difference. If you're giving your child on an hourly basis, like the reward sort of thing, and you're thinking, oh, man, after this time, they should be like, they need to sit here for five minutes and do the worksheet, and then they can take a rest or whatever. Think about FedEx, right? The reason why they're so efficient, why people are happy at the jobs and they feel like they're doing something okay. And not that you rarely hear that from. From FedEx, is because they are incentivized to finish the work and then they can go home and they get rewarded, and they also get paid when the thing is finished instead of getting paid by hour, of which the FedEx promise was not achievable. Right. But once they change to that kind of incentive structure, it worked for them. So think about that. What. What can FedEx teach you about teaching your child something? Right. Okay, so reward the finished work, not the work, the hours and duration of work that is done. And then when the child tantrums don't allow them to stop working, think about a way of incentivizing them to finish the work and then allowing them to go. I'm sure when you do that, the tantrums will go away. Because every behavior has a function. There is a reason behind everything. Okay? And although here at Agents of Speech, we're speech therapists, we also have to think in this way. Because at the end of the day, the behaviors, the habits, they create the backbone to language learning. Because if we don't have that, we will always have to think of new ways to motivate a person to do stuff. A routine, a structure, a clear mindset about how to get children to do our bidding is very important because we cannot put on a Disney Channel every day. You can't go, wow, whatever. We can't throw out the best toys around. Like, we can't go around and buy all the toys we have. And at the end of the day, excuse me for saying, a lot of times that's what happens with the children nowadays. They get pampered so hard, and they don't know what it means to do a lot of hard work. And that's further away. Like, that's more than those children who are on the spectrum or need special attention. I'm talking about all children. So that's what I observed. Anyways. So if you liked this kind of video and you learned something, I'm sure you'll learn even more in our private community. Then go to www.agentsofspeech.com course. Go there and check out the courses we have. It teaches you to be the therapist. It goes from zero all the way to sentence building for children. And you'll learn a lot there. And you'll find a friend because there are 1200 people inside of that community. And that's all for today. I'll see you inside the community. Thank you. Bye Bye.
