Why "It Takes Two to Talk"- Hanen Program, Doesn't Work

Hey, so it takes two to talk. From the Hannon program is something that I recommend a lot. I used to lend out It Takes to Talk the book to parents. When I started as a speech therapist. I would photocopy some of them within legal means. Okay. I do think it's a great program for parents, but as I progressed as a therapist through these 10 years, I found that it's something that I wouldn't recommend to parents who are just starting out. All right, My name is Ming, a speech therapist from agentsofspeech.com and today I'm gonna talk about how I think about the Hannon program now. And don't get me wrong, it's still great. There's loads of good ideas and thoughts inside of the program. The main problem I see is that a parent has to have the soft skills to observe and to identify those communication opportunities that come out and to see when to interject, when to let go. This is a crazy hard skill to learn, even for junior therapists. I struggled a lot with it. And the main reason why therapists can get away with it is because we already have a language goal behind and the language understanding about where the child is as a level. Maybe when I'm going in, I will know, oh, this child, I can say. I would know when they will say certain things, what level they will. They will try to do, what they will actually attempt to say what they like. These things parents may or may not know. The reason is because, like, for me, a therapist, right, I've seen many children, at least I'm being conservative, at least over 200 from my experiences, right? That's just how it is. And I can identify when a child is about to say something, when they would like something, when they want to continue to play, how to add value to a play situation and make it more fun. And for a parent who has one child or two children or three children, the biggest problem is that when dealing with a child who is on the spectrum or speech delayed, the play and the communication opportunities are different. All right? Some children on the spectrum have very narrow interests. Children who are only speech and language delayed, they might have a huge they. They like a lot of things, but the only things that they will say are also very limited. So parents also need to learn what words are appropriate, what play can create those opportunities to come out. All right? And it takes two to talk. This book, I do recommend you getting it. It's quite expensive on Amazon. I don't know why, but the core lesson is to ask parents to slow down, right? It's like owl by O W L, which is observe, wait, and listen. Okay? That's very passive. And it's actually like when I rented out or lent out those books to parents in Hong Kong. And as you can see, this is Hong Kong. It's very hard for parents to digest because it's, oh, I came here to make my kid talk, and you're telling me to wait. It's very difficult, especially when I'm working in the private sector, where it's a private clinic that parents come to and they want to pay me to make their children talk magically. Right. It's counterintuitive. And also it's slower. Right. And the reason why I say it's hard for beginner parents is that there's not enough structure. So recently, one of our coaches from Agents of Speech, actually Coach Ina, she went to take a hand in program certificate. And I was like, okay, so what can we learn here that can benefit our coaching clients and make our programs better? And she said, talks about how to identify communication opportunity to parents, right? From a therapist to a parent. How do we communicate that? And I felt that the structure was a lot better. When it's the paid program, the book doesn't cover those things. And we're gonna get coach Ina to share a little bit more about what she learned, maybe on this channel or if you're on a newsletter, to go to agentsofspeech.com to sign up to our newsletters. And you'll learn more probably from Coach Ina about the Hannon program. And I just wanted to say why Agents of Speech, we care about so much about structured tasks. And structured tasks is defined as sitting together, right. Doing something that is we're learning one goal together rather than letting them run around following child's lead. All those good advice. Why do we put structured tasks as a first is because we're teaching parents yourself. You. You need a structure to build on so that you know what to do. Okay. Once you know what to do and you can, and you have the confidence that your child is under instructional command, right? And then you go into those pci, parent child interaction, language facilitation. There's loads of words for these, but basically just naturalistic language teaching. You will know what language to shoot for, what stuff your child likes, right? Bring in those language goals from structured tasks and put it into real life and help them that way. So the biggest thing is that parents go in to these just walking around following the children blindly, don't know what the heck's happening. I've tried that before when I just started working. It's super hard. You don't know what's going on because your brain is thinking, oh, they're picking up this toy. Should I bring another toy? No, I shouldn't. Should I interject? No, I shouldn't too. Should I say something now? They said something. How do I reply? If I reply, they don't answer me. Should I push them and make them say more? I'm observing, I'm waiting, I'm listening. But at the same time, it seems like my child is not talking no matter what. So there are a lot of things that is going on. Is increasing cognitive load, as we say in the therapy world, but it's on the parent. And it's hard because if you have the structured task and you know that your child will listen to you under instructional command, you will actually be able to have a better grasp when it comes to teaching. All right. The other day I was doing a training with the parents inside of our community. If you want to check it out, you can go to www.agentsofspeech.com course in the community training. I said, look, this is how I do it, how we do it. We want to do more structured stuff first before heading into, like, naturalistic stuff. Obviously, this is a little bit frowned upon nowadays. And American parents said, hey, I've been to therapy to three centers in America and there in the usa. They don't talk about anything structured. It's all about child led. It's all about like playing on the floor mat, seeing what they want, giving them what they want, talking over them, like describing everything and anything. And they were like, is this like a therapy philosophy that is different? First of all, every. Everyone started off with structure tests. It's now a. It's not as if the whole world has shifted towards naturalistic. Right? Which is okay, which is fine. That's all cool. But at the same time, there's a change also towards parent coaching. And I believe, like our company Agents of Speech have. We're one of the different ones where we give advice that is a lot more structured rather than something more vanilla. Oh, you got to talk to them at their eye level. It's not very. It's actionable, but it's not. Not con. It's not concrete. It's not very. I can do it right now, that kind of thing. It's something that I. You can do it easily, but when I do it, when the parent does it, it's very hard. So this shift in philosophy happened because I was talking to one of the American parents. It's like they don't even get the child to sit down at the table. They think they should honor the child whatever they want. But a lot of times what therapy and teaching is, and I was telling this American parent, I was like, in Hong Kong, where I am, or in Asia, people pay me to solve a problem. And if a lot of times these kind of things are out of pocket, it's going to be expensive. And if you pay me like $200 for 45 minutes USD and I'm playing around with your child, what would you think? And if I can't get your child to do very simple tasks that are related to the milestones that made you scared in the very first place. For instance, not responding to your name, cannot understand commands, not saying, only saying single words, not phrases. If I'm not dealing with those and you're paying me and you're coming every week, then what's the point, right? And if we like therapy and teaching on its own is us pushing our values onto children, so to speak. And a lot of times we have to enroll them. And just as I am enrolling you in into this philosophy and I'm pushing my values onto you, and hopefully, if you like it, then you like it. If you're adult, you can, you have a choice, you can go away. But for children, if you don't have a, there's no choice. There's not yet. Children must depend on us, right? So we have to take leadership and tell them, okay, this is what I want from you. Of course, obviously there will be incentives. And it's not like it's on a condition. People always say, oh, if you put conditions on children, that's like not respecting them or whatever. But the problem is they didn't ask. Children didn't ask to be delayed. They didn't ask, put their hand up and say, I want to be delayed. I want to be language delayed. I don't want to talk. That never happened. The problem is we know better than your child, right? We know better. We know that you should speak more, you should play more, you should socialize more. Because everything that you want in life is on the other side of what someone else has. And to get that, to obtain those experiences or whatever, all you got to do is ask more, right? Jump through hoops, socialize, talk to people, have fun, play. All these things tie in together. That's why we want to push therapy onto them. Or else we don't have to do Anything right now. I'm not saying that all therapy needs to go. I'm not telling that. I'm a long answer to that American parent, that father. I was like, is there a difference in philosophy? I do think there is. But at the same time, in order for the naturalistic stuff to work, you the parent have to understand what language level your child is. Where do they break down? What are they gonna say? What do they like, what are they gonna do? How can you guess what's gonna happen when they touch that toy? You can only know that if you've done structured work with them, alright? And you will only have the confidence to go up to them, disturb them, describe to them at their language level at a little bit over, right? How to praise them, how to whatever. All these need to be taught within the structured task to you and not to the child because you don't know how to do it. So I feel, and this is, I'm coming all around, I'm coming full circle, coming back to tell you it takes two to talk. The Hannon program, these are great programs as long as you get the full context. A lot of the times when therapists, teachers or whoever give you a book, it doesn't tell you how to identify those, those opportunities, how to respond to them. These soft skills require a lot more instruction and experiences than hard skills such as structured, the structured method, right? Because at the end of the day, all therapy, all behavior, all language, whatever, you can chop it down into small steps. It's just behaviors that you have to learn in order to become good at that. But doing naturalistic approach, doing the naturalistic approach, playing with children, doing child led therapy is super hard. I'm just gonna put it at that. Anyone who says that, oh, you know, we have to put parents number one, we have to teach them this, teach them that. Yeah. Did you coach them, did you give them the time to spend with their child and talk and demonstrate and everything? If you haven't, then don't just give them piece of paper like some of the governments are doing right now, as I heard from the, from our coaching clients. And this is happening in Australia and the United Kingdom. And what happens is like, because there's a shortage of therapists, they would have a piece of paper with the stuff and a hotline to call the therapist. Oh, this is how you do it. And they have zoom sessions or they bring you for one hour into a room where there's a single one way mirror, as they call it, and they're looking at you interacting with the child and they're like giving instructions and whatnot. Those are cool, but you need hands on, right? How do you even know what the language goals are? A lot of parents are reporting back to me that it's very confusing and I think so as well. And it's sad to see something that so special. The Hannon program, it takes two to talk more than words. All these programs are excellent. It's just not delivered correctly. It's a little bit half effort. I'm holding back my language here. Like it needs to be full effort. It needs to be, I teach you the parent, X, Y, Z, whatever, right? You, the goals are like this. You need to do that. If you are confused, if I'm confused how to teach you and then the parents confused how to teach the child, then the child will be confused. Everyone needs to be on a straight line, on a straight path. Okay, so that's all what I'm going to share today. And we're going to have more of this conversation as we go into the next month and the new year about like naturalistic approaches, child led, where the therapy world is going, what you should think and do as a parent and take or leave it. So that's it if you want to hear more from me. And we'll have special trainings, free courses, a huge community of 13,000 parents on the Internet, the biggest so far. Go to www.agentsofspeech.com course. All right, Go there, check it out and interact there. I'll see you. Bye. Bye.