Why Speech Delayed Children Only Speak When Asked to

Hey. So today we're going to talk about why your child seems to be only talking when he or she feels like it. And I get this question all the time. It's like me, my kid only talks if he feels like it. It's up to his mood. There's nothing I can do. I prompt, I ask questions, I do a lot of things. But if the kid doesn't want to talk at all, there's nothing I can do. I can squeeze them, I can try to prompt them everything, every way. And I've been doing what the speech therapist has been doing, asking me to do, which is to talk as much as I can, right? As in many different ways as I can and let the child lead and play with them. But you know, it seems like it's been a year or two, right? And child still isn't talking to you. So we have a lot of these questions and I'm going to get to this slowly. I just want to go point by point. The first point is a child or a person only wants to talk to you if there is a reason behind it, right? So if every time what you're prompting or what you're trying to get your child to say, you need to think about what function it's doing. So recently we had a bunch of short videos which are cut from these videos and we've been talking about language functions. So language function just means what's the point of talking? So a lot of the times children will only talk when they need something. It's very need based. That's why in therapy a lot of times people teach I want something because it's the easiest. Because we are people who can help children to get things that they cannot get themselves. And therefore what speech therapists or parents are trying to do is to teach them a longer form sentence in order to ask for things, requesting manding, whatever you call it, right? So that's a very strong language function. The function is to ask for stuff, right? What about the other things? So to tackle the different language functions, we've got loads. If you search online language function or whatever, then you'll see speech therapy. Language function is a keyword to search for, to search for. You have greeting, you have like asking questions, asking for clarification, commenting, instruction, instructing other people, modifying other people's behavior, so on and so forth. These are all language functions. But how do you get someone to want to do that? Right. And the thing is what I want you to do is to assess in your mind, when do you ask your child to say something. Nine times out of 10 for parents, it's oh, because I want the child to ask for permission. I want them to respect me. I've been talking about this for a long time now and I feel like after working for some time, it feels like whenever a child is asking for permission for something that they're supposed to get, it gives them like a bad taste in their mouth and therefore the relationship turns sour because every time they want something, they have to talk. And talking isn't really that easy for the particular child who's already delayed. Right, so how do we go about it? Do we just give the kid something without them talking? No. The way to do it, of which I've outlined many times in the videos here and also in our free parents community with all the courses that we sold before, is that you need to give free stuff to your kid in small quantities and slowly level up the demand for language. Right? And this is no easy thing to teach you here. If you're new here, you should go to the parents community there and just watch the micro course at the very least. And you can do that@wwagensofspeech.com course, put in your email and you can just look at it. There's no catch. And you need to think about, okay, so if every time the language function for a child is to actually just to get to a point where they're asking for oh, I want whatever or mommy, give me whatever, can I whatever, it's always asking for permission, asking, like requesting for something, you're not going to go far. Right? And that's why the conventional knowledge on social media or if you go to the Asha right American Speech and Hearing association or whatever it's called, the advice is quite vanilla. It's telling you to, oh, speak more, explain, describe everything as much as you can. And I feel like the main point is that is lacking is that this advice will only work if your child is already playing a lot with you and enjoys your company. Right? So to prompt a child to speak something that he or she doesn't even want to share is besides the point because it serves no language function. It's just background noise. So imagine, right? Every time you do something, someone says something behind your back, just describing something as you go along, it's going to help you to pick up the language, but up to a certain point it's going to become distracting, annoying, and also it's also like you're trying to get them off your back and so on. So you have to think about how to have the same interest as the kid. Which is my second point. All right? When therapists always say, oh, everything starts with play. Play is a, like, a good indicator for a lot of things. It teaches, like social skills, cognitive skills, language skills, a lot of these things. Why? Because it provides a context to learn. So let me give you an example. When you're teaching language and you're treating it as a way to teach language, it's like telling someone to exercise for the sake of exercising, getting fit and getting better. Obviously, everyone wants to get fit, but children, they don't. They may or may not know that their language is delayed and they don't understand the reason for advancing. In terms of having a better language means a better social life, meaning a social life means having more friends and you can have more fun and you can share more things and tell stories and receive more recognition from other people. And therefore you can build a community. Like, this is like a whole bunch of stuff. And you can try to tell someone, explain these things to someone. But at the same time, what I'm trying to get to is that you can also get fit by doing an activity that you enjoy. So let's say if you like run, riding a bike, right? You like playing tennis with friends, you like to, I don't know, like, do things that has an activity and the fitness is embedded inside of that, then it would make a lot more sense for, like, people to get fit, right? So it's the same as language. If you have a strong context, like playing, and you can engage a child to want to have a sustained interaction with you, then it's going to be easier for you to prompt and teach language because there's a function of which, right? And I want to tell you it's the same. Although a lot of times on these YouTube videos, I'm being very broad. The reason is because if you don't understand these things, it's very hard for you to go through with the nitty gritty technical stuff because you're always thinking about, how do I teach my kid more things? And not necessarily think, how do I get my child to want to learn from me? Right? Parents are looking for a magic pill. There isn't one on the Internet. You know, like, there's one offline that what you got to understand is, how do I get someone to do what I want them to do? The only way is to make them enjoy the process and something that. And why therapists online always talk about following child's lead and don't prompt language. Just Describe it. It's because that's the easiest thing that you can do. It's the lowest hanging fruit. And there are studies that if you do it like there's loads of studies that if you keep on doing this over and over again, someone's language will develop. Right. And I was just telling you, if someone was just behind me speaking a different language, teaching me a foreign language, as I pick it, pick up different things and I'm doing things, I'm going to pick that up. It's just a matter of time. So what I'm trying to say is always leave with play. All right? And I've talked about this story many times and I can confirm now with a bunch more examples of which I, I cannot really give you the videos or images of such because of consent from parents, but you can certainly go online to our parents community and, and watch and read what parents share. I'm not in the liberty of sharing this publicly because the group is private. The why it's private is that I keep a promise to parents over the Internet. I say that I, I won't use this for like marketing or whatever. Obviously it'll be a lot easier to spread the word if I just like use their, their faces. Right. And it's also like successful, like there's a bias of like successful parents who share their successful stories, whereas the parents who haven't had any success wouldn't share anything. Right. So I'm not gonna skew your opinion in any way. So listen up. There are loads of successful stories and they have a common thread to it. And the common thread is that the mom or the dad has now evolved into a better therapist, so to speak at home and is able to gauge the child's interests, whether it's with like rewards, whether it's with applause play, whether it's with a physical social activity like tickling or whatever. Whenever you can gauge a child's interest is where you can insert language, right? And whenever you can get someone like interested, invested and want to play with you, it's going to be a lot easier to teach. Right? So that's why it's super boring to go to a university lecture because you just. Even for me, I'll just fall asleep. But a lot of times why we need to focus on play is not because we want to teach the play skill, so to speak, is because we want to later on when they're interested, the language will come because then the language functions will come out. For instance, if you're doing the wrong thing, you're doing the wrong thing in the play routine, then the child will have to clarify, right? Will have to tell you that's wrong. If there's something missing in the play routine, then they will have to ask questions. If you don't allow the child to do something, you can teach why. Because questions, right. And all these language functions will only surface when you have a context and play plays a real big part in it. Right. Other than that, parents will ask, oh, how about the prompting? Do I prompt it to talk? How do I ask questions? And so on. You don't really do it until the child knows exactly what's going to happen next and can anticipate the next step. And that's why a lot of times when we're teaching play, teaching the context, we don't even care about what language goals we're going for. In the therapy world. This is called task explanation. Right. I just had a parent who we're coaching right now, and the kid was crying and didn't understand what's going on. And there was another parent who's on the community and she was asking, oh my God, my kid is like crying all the time during speech therapy. And the real reason behind this is because the child doesn't understand the task, doesn't understand the context, doesn't understand why they have to go through this stuff and therefore it wasn't explained correctly. So anytime when a child wants to leave is crying or whatever, there are only two reasons. Number one, the task is too hard or they don't understand why they're supposed to do it. Right. There's no incentive of which. So you have to build that incentive whether to through play or through reward. So once you get that, the child gets it. And then you can think about how to prompt the kid to start talking. Because most of the time it's not like kids don't understand how to speak in sentences or use words. They actually have the hardware and actually they know the language. Right? But most of the time that's because the why is lacking and that there isn't a strong enough context to do so. So I keep on using these words like context, like teaching, teaching the routine, letting them understand XYZ before going into teaching language, I hope I've drilled this into your brain and if you want to learn more, you can go to ww.agents of speech.comcourse to watch all the full courses, depending on your child's level. It's all free for you. And that's pretty much it for this video. It's a Quick rant. And I just wanted to make sure that you learn these mindset things before you go on into the tactical things. Because if you don't have this mindset, and of which I thought to myself when I started to teach parents over the Internet, I thought that all parents needed was like tactical advice, like, do this, do that, whatever. And I realized that if parents don't have the understanding of how we do therapy, why do we do it? And putting where to put expectations, how to make sure that the child has a good relationship with the parent. All things will disappear. The parents will say, it's not working. I don't want to do it. I don't understand. This whole task isn't going to help. And the only reason is because they're putting the expectations in the wrong place and they shouldn't be thinking about, oh, language comes first. No, it doesn't. Your relationship with a kid comes first. Right? Having strong rewards, having strong play routines, having something that you can engage a childhood child is very important. No matter if you're just jumping on trampoline, right? Tickling them, you could be spinning them on a chair. Whatever that engages the kid will be a starting point for you to inject language tasks inside. But you don't do that unless you can engage the kid. What's the point of trying to pull the kid back to the chair or back onto the whatever every time? What's the point of prompting a child to talk when they're like half leaving and half here or they're rolling on the floor, on the carpet and touching other things? Right. What's the point of describing things around the house when they're just like running around? You don't get their attention first. And in the next video that I'm going to do, I'm going to talk about focus and attention and also like behavior and compliance, which is very important. So thank you for sticking to the end of this video. Again, go to agents of Speech.com course to grab all the free courses that we used to sell. It's not all free on our parents community where we have like 3,800 people right now at this recording inside the community. Loads of great comments for a place to share wins, vent about different things. And that's pretty much it. I'll see you guys in the next video. Bye bye.