Why Therapy Isn’t Enough and What You Should Do at Home for Your Child
Ming argues that 30-40 minute therapy sessions can't give kids the constant language exposure they need. Instead, caregivers should use language facilitation at home: talk to your child about what they're doing, label objects, describe actions, all without pushing them to repeat. Keep it low-stress and brief, following your therapist's guidance.
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Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com in this video, I want to talk about why just sending your child to speech therapy, occupational therapy, ABA therapy, whatever is not enough. And you need to teach at home. Number one is that language is actually something that you learn by exposure. It's all about exposure. It doesn't matter if you're learning a new foreign language or picking up your first ever language like your child is right now. There aren't people using it around you. You, you aren't going to pick it up that easily. Let's say that you're learning Japanese or, I don't know, Russian, and you're learning it through textbooks, apps nowadays, right? Websites, doing exercises yourself, right? Of course you're going to have some success, you're going to learn some stuff. But if no one around you speaks that language, the chances are you're not going to be very fluent in it. You're not going to learn the different intonations, the different words, the different sentence structures naturally, all right? And if you think about it, if you have had learned a second language, okay, or third language for that matter, nowadays you will learn different names of tenses, right? And in English, there's present tense and then there's like, I don't know what, what there are, okay? I, I've never learned the names of the grammar tenses or whatever in English or in Chinese, okay? Because I, I pretty much speak them. I, as if like a first language. So I've never really learned it. But when I was learning like Japanese and Indonesian, I would know that there's a name for this kind of tense, right? And the name for this kind of structure. So it's all about exposure. You don't need to learn about like what we talk about, svo or svoa, svoc, the distinctions of that. It's natural. We learn it naturally through exposure therapy itself. Like putting a child inside of a therapy room, in a clinic room with a, the, with a therapist with a lot of toys, making them talk as much as possible, squeezing all the words out within that 30 to 40 minute mark is stressful. When I do therapy, I can't say for other therapists, right? I'm sweating. I'm sweating. Other, like children, you know, they get tired afterwards, right? A lot of times when children are going home from my therapy sessions, they are like falling asleep on the train or on the taxi or, or whatever on the bus, right? So it's stressful and parents will think it's their fault that, you know, oh, how Come Ming can do it or Mrs. Whatever or Missy. What. Whatever can make my child talk so much. When they. When they go home, nothing really happens, nothing really changes. And they put it on themselves and think that, oh, no, it's my fault. I can't do it like them. I should get more help, therefore, right? I need to ask them to come more often or I should put my. My son to therapy more often so that they can get the. The. The. The. The training and therapy they need. There's no. That's not. You're not wrong if you're thinking that, okay? But the problem is you cannot sustain such a stressful thing 24 7, right? It's just like going to the gym. You cannot go to the gym. Physically impossible for more than, like two or three hours. If you're really doing something meaningful, you need to accept that once you're at home, if you want to continue, which is very important, by the way, that you continue the therapy work, the effectiveness is going to drop way lower, number one. Number two is that the stress level needs to be a lot lower because they're at home and they cannot. No one can live in an environment where, you know, the mom or dad keeps on asking questions, keep on telling them to talk, like pushing them to talk and then trying to get them practice talking. All right? That just doesn't work. It's humanly impossible, and that's why children get mad. So what should you do? You should do something what we. Language facilitation, or another term that's called indirect language stimulation. Okay, We've got a video about it. It's in the link below. And also, if you prefer to read, there's an article from Asha, like American Speech and Hearing Association. They've got an article about what language facilitation or indirect language stimulation is. Okay, so what does that mean in a brief, short sentence? I will tell you that language facilitation basically is just talking at your child's language level, okay. And expecting them not to reply or p. You. Okay, let me say that again. Language facilitation is when you speak at your child's language level without having to request for them to repeat or to imitate you. Okay? So it's low stress. You keep on talking. Obviously, the one who is not rewarded is yourself, because you just keep on giving, giving, giving, but it's important that you give language, okay? As we were talking about in the video last week, right, that, you know, language is all about exposure. So imagine if you were learning a new language, a Whole new language that you were so taken care of, someone would come, like, right next to you and just describe everything. And simple words at your language, competency at your level. Single words or two words that you do understand and you can identify. Let's say you hold up a bottle and in Chinese, it's just, I don't know, given, like, I don't know how many times. If you keep on hear it, keep on hearing it, what this is, every time you pick it up and you look at it, you will know this thing is a. It's a bottle. So that's what you need to do for your child. Obviously, you won't see the results, like, right away, but it's important that you keep the language learning. You keep it outside of therapy. And there are a lot of parents, especially where I am in Asia, where the. Where the moms are trying, like, really hard. They're like, oh, man, I have goals for my child. I already wrote it down. You know, like. Like a New Year's resolution, right? I wrote it down already. I gave my child three goals. I'm going to do it for them. I'm going to try my best. I'm going to sit them down and teach them how to read, write, and also talk. And then somehow talking at the end of the list for some reason, because, you know, reading and writing gets you into, like, better schools. Some want to hear that. When I see that, what I feel is that there's a lot of pressure. A pressure on yourself, pressure on your kid, pressure on the family, and pressure on the therapist as well. And I've been on the end of this kind of bargain. You know what I'm talking about? Like, oh, Mr. Ming, I. I gotta have my son talking by this time. What can we do at home? I don't mind not sleeping. I said to them, how about your son? Does he need to sleep? I think so. So chill out. First of all, I know it's hard. It's very difficult. I don't have a child yet. Full disclaimer. I won't understand how it feels like, okay, I can only tell you from a third person, like a third person's new set of eyes. I'm telling you that you should relax. You cannot. You need to teach language. Yes. You need to continue what you do. You need to listen to your speech therapist what they are telling you, right? You need to do your homework, but don't do over. Okay? One time I asked a parent to do like five to 10 minutes of very basic language facilitation. He went ahead and did it for 30 minutes a day. What happened a week after? When I started to talk to the child, the child didn't like it. It was like, mom, shut up. You know, that kind of, like, attitude. Why? Because she took it to the next level too fast. Okay. So we have to take it step by step, not stress out the child. But at the same time, we need to understand that children at home, you need to tone it down and also keep the ball rolling. Keeping the ball rolling is the most important thing. So at the end of the video, if you haven't, you can go check out our list of toys. Okay. You can go to agentsofspeech.com checklist. It's a list of tools and toys that we recommend parents if they want to start home therapy. Okay. So that's it for this video. If you have any more questions, comments, whether you agree, disagree, or whatever, you can just put them in the comment section below and we can have a very friendly discussion about that. Okay? That's it for now. See you.
