Why Speech Delayed Children Prefer English

So throughout my career teaching children, I think it's been like nine years now, Most children who are on the spectrum are somewhat delayed. They prefer to speak English, which is good for me because I speak English. That's great. But at the same time, we're dealing with a world that is becoming more multicultured and multilingual. But at the same time where English is becoming like a common language for everyone, children still need to speak their mother tongue in certain countries, in certain cities. Right. We have children who are in Hong Kong, where I'm from, where Cantonese or Chinese or even Mandarin nowadays is quite important. Sometimes children just skip that and decide to speak English only, which is, to be fair, quite depressing. And also it's not that functional because everyone, not everyone, but like most children nowadays, they speak like two languages. If you're not in the United States, all right, that's a whole different thing. But why do they prefer English? The reason is very simple. It's YouTube, it's the videos, it's the nursery rhymes. They're all in English, right. Whether you like it or not. So I can talk a little bit more about, like why English has become a predominant language and how we can navigate that a little bit. So I've worked in Indonesia and Jakarta like for some time, and I just want to tell you, you would be unpleasantly surprised, I would put it like that, that how many children from the age of two to four, they speak, speak no Indonesian at all and they only speak English. And there are parents in Indonesia who have to speak in English to their parent, to their kids. And they can't use any Indonesian and they can't use any Chinese if they were. They're Indonesian, Chinese, whatever. Why is that? Well, it comes down to what I said just now about YouTube and videos and rental grounds or whatever. But the main culprit of this is elitism. That's first of all. Second of all is like the preschool system. So preschool only happens to people who can actually afford it because a government funded program won't have a preschool. Most of the time. You might have pre K or pre nursery or whatever you guys call it nowadays. I really do not know the names. It's only for those who can afford it. Right. When I was a kid, I did go to preschool that thankfully, but that was also private. Right. So these private preschools, they do it in a multilingual setting of which most of the time it's in English and sometimes now in Mandarin. And these usually skew towards not talking in the local language. And I've asked some parents all over, like Southeast Asia, it seems like this is the case as well. And the reason why English is so like sought after is because, to be very honest, in this culture, if you speak English and nowadays maybe even Mandarin Chinese, your prospects of becoming a higher paid person just increases because you can now talk to a lot more people. You can now communicate with people who are of affluent backgrounds. So therefore this becomes a cultural setting that where English has become a norm. So to speak English. So how do we navigate this? So obviously if you're able to listen to me right now in English, it means that you're most probably thinking about this as well. If you are like myself, my background is I'm bilingual and my wife is trilingual. So our children are most probably going to speak like four languages, which is kind of scary, to be honest. But what I'm trying to tell you here to navigate this is try not to allow your child to speak and respond in English when you're speaking in the mother tongue. So there's loads of studies out there, some highlighting the strategy to have roles at home. Meaning if I'm the dad, I speak English, only the mom speaks in the mother tongue. And then we don't deviate from that. Right. But it's very difficult because even for me as a bilingual speaker, like, I would say that my Chinese and my English are nearly at the same level in terms of language literacy and proficiency. I would say that sometimes I prefer to say something in English. Like my professional work, it's very difficult for me to speak in Chinese for professional stuff. That's because all the books I read and speech therapy and like child development stuff were all written in English. So that's why that's part of the problem too. Okay. And that's why, like, most of the knowledge base is written in English if you search online. That's why English has become such an important part of our lives. Right. Because our textbooks are in English. People fled from, I don't know, like Europe or like Middle east to go to America to have a freedom of becoming a scholar or whatever. So that's why. Yeah. So anyways, is that you should, when you speak in your mother tongue, you should not accept your child replying to you in English. You shouldn't accept that. And why I'm talking about this because I just came back from Australia to visit my friends and I saw that one of the kids, his English was a lot better than his Cantonese. Despite growing up in Hong Kong and moved to Australia for like Six months. He's totally assimilated in Australia. He's have. He's loving his life. He's speaking English left and right, but at the same time he is answering his parents in English when his dad speaks in Cantonese. So that's something that you have to look out for, right? Children will prefer English for loads of reasons. Okay. And part of it is because, and I know this as well, and this is another reason is that when education, things that are written, things that are about child development are all written in English. All these things, right? The capital of learning how to be a good teacher and stuff is in the United States, believe it or not, right? So really is to be very honest, like all the theories have come from there, you know, all, all the great teachers, all the good stuff are from the Western world, maybe not in the United States, only in UK and, and stuff. So when a teacher, and I myself was from English school myself, my teachers were super nice to me. I would prefer talking to an English speaking person or white person than to a Chinese teacher because a Chinese teacher is also so always so strict and not nice to me and have very high standards to me, but the white person, because of their culture and stuff. And I'm saying this not to be racist, man, like I'm trying to be as candid as possible. I preferred more that kind of teacher more than. More than the Asian one. Right? And therefore your child would as well. And if you have the resources to bring your child to such a multicultural setting, your child's going to like that teacher more. That's just the end of it. That's just a cultural thing. So that's why they prefer English even more, right? So anyways, talking about my friend's child, my friend's child also talks about how many the teachers he likes are all, you know, Western. And then he does do some schooling in Chinese. He tries to, but he hates it because in his own words he's like, oh, these people, they're very hard to talk to apparently. So that's why children prefer English more. The education standard is written in English most of the time, you know, like all these things add up. So you need to do your part because at the end of the day, if you just allow your child to only speak English when your child's 18 or 16 or whatever hits puberty, you need a heart to heart talk. I find what I saw is that the parents in Indonesia couldn't express themselves as well as they could in English. And this is also true for my wife, by the way. When they have some stuff to talk about. My mother in law would want to speak in Mandarin, but then my wife and also my sister in law cannot express themselves as well in Chinese. And so that's why it's very important for you to start to accept only to speak in the language spoken to, right? So your child should speak in the mother tongue stuff. So whether this, how like this diminishes, you know, a lot of doctors, a lot of parents, they do not agree with what speech therapists are saying, that bilingualism doesn't cause speech delay. Like having more than one language won't confuse your kid. Like all these things are still like there's loads of research. You just go up out there and look at it. I mean like I've made a whole video and loads of speech therapists who have, even developmental pediatricians, those people who have higher credentials than myself, who have done research all their lives, would they all agree on the same thing, which is like more than one language does not confuse a child. Because when a child is learning a language, when a child is language delayed, they're delayed in the whole acquisition of language. And then someone would say, oh yeah, then why give them more than one language, right? Then as confused them even more. There's like slight truth to that. But at the same time, when you're acquiring a language, it's more about learning how to use the grammar, learning how to acquire new vocabs in a more efficient way and that. And obviously different languages have different grammar and stuff. And it's okay for children to mix all the grammar up and it becomes a hot mess, right? That's totally fine and acceptable for children who are what we call like L2 or whatever, like L1, L2 first language, second language, or true bilingualism. It's totally okay to mix it up. It's totally okay to transfer some of the, the mother tongue grammar into the second language grammar. That's totally fine. That's totally acceptable, right? And so I'm looking into, and it will become a problem later on, is that children, as they grow older, they only speak English. And I grew up with a bunch of people who only spoke English despite living in Hong Kong for the majority of their lives. And it became a fact that they cannot actually have a proper and serious conversation in their mother tongue with their parents. So if you don't want that, I think it's worth it to go through the pain and suffering and also like the development of using both languages at home and have a strict rule on it. Because at the End of the day, speech delay and language delay will not be made more severe by using more than one language. In fact, it actually might help because you're exposing your child to more different types of languages, and therefore it's easier for them to decode and learn, you know, like certain ways of saying things like tonality, the culture behind it, and so on. Right. So I really hope that this will help you a little bit and let you know why children prefer English and how to tackle it at home. And at the same time, don't be afraid to tackle it, because if you only speak English at home, it's only gonna bite you back later on. Right? I can be like, totally honest with you. If you're English isn't as good as your mother tongue, I think you're going down a really slippery slope. If you're only doing English at home with your child just because he or she has language delayed, you're going to have a hard time. I've seen it firsthand. All right, so that's it for this video. If you haven't, Please go to www.agentsofspeech.com. course you can watch videos and video lessons of me that was used to be paid. Now it's all free. On the platform, you can learn to take your child from zero words all the way to sentence building. All right, so that's it for now. I'll see you guys next week. Bye. Bye.