Ming explains why asking questions often backfires with speech-delayed children: they ignore repeated questions, get annoyed when play is interrupted, and can't understand complex ones. Replace questions with statements instead.
Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com today we want to talk about why you should stop asking questions to your speech delayed child. Alright. And why do you want to do that? There's a few reasons you want to take notice in this video. Okay? So the first one is it's pretty useless if your child right now is ignoring you, right? Not answering your questions, or even worse, they're just repeating what you say is kind of useless. And the reason behind it is because if you keep doing the same things over and over and expect a different result, that's kind of crazy. So if you keep doing what you're doing, you will get the same results. They're still going to ignore you, they're still going to repeat what you say and it's not solving any problems because you're not helping your child at all. Okay? And another thing is it just, when you do that, it goes in an infinite loop. You keep asking, you keep asking, you keep asking, they keep ignoring, they keep ignoring. The more you want to ask, the more they just ignore you, right? Until they get frustrated, okay? And it's not great because you're actually teaching your child to ignore you. There's no response. So the learning, the learning here is when mom or dad keeps asking, I can just ignore. Nothing happens. And the reason number two is it might be annoying to your child. You're actually disturbing your child from what they're doing. So imagine when you're doing something and someone asks you a question that actually disturbs your train of thought. And that happens when, with children as well, especially when they're playing, okay? And you don't want that to happen because when you do that, you're the bad guy who's disturbing the kid. When they're doing something they like, it's annoying because once if they did answer or they didn't, they get nothing back. There's no reward, there's nothing that happens afterwards. So even if you ask them and they reply, you say, hey, what's that? And then they say, oh, elephant. And you're just like, yeah, good elephant. There's nothing. You don't want to do this because it kind of hurts the relationship. And the reason I say this is because you want the child to respond in a certain way. That's why you're asking. And it might hurt the relationship. I've seen it firsthand because my client who has a daughter, whenever the mom tries to go like, yay, yippee, all that stuff and ask questions actually disturbs the child Number one. And the daughter and the girl actually told the mom to go upstairs. It breaks a lot of hearts, right? We don't want that to happen because it hurts the relationship. Now it's much better with the daughter and the mother. My clients, they can actually have fun together. And it takes some time to unbreak those routines because back then, the mom was actually teaching the daughter to be angry at her. And the last reason is because your child isn't understanding you. It's just as simple as that. They're not understanding what you're asking. It might be too hard. The questions are too hard. Imagine if you're asked some questions in another language. What are you going to do? You're not going to try and answer it because you're going to make a fool out of yourself and a lot of speech delayed. Kids actually know that they cannot do something. And if you put them in that situation every time, you're setting them up for failure. Okay? And we don't want that. We always want them to succeed so that they want to go to the next step. The next step. Talk more, talk more. Every time if you ask them something too hard out of their comfort zone or out of what they know, then it's gonna be very hard for them to succeed, and they're gonna close themselves even more. And just like my client, it will tell the mom to go upstairs because they're not comfortable with it or they don't know how to do it right. They also don't know why it needs to be answered in the beginning. Maybe your child will entertain you when you ask, hey, what's that? How does the dog go? What's that on the ceiling? Every time you go around town and you ask these. What is it? Who is that? Where is that? These kind of questions, the child doesn't understand why he has or she has to answer. And the reason behind you're asking those questions is because you want your child to talk. And that's another. Another topic for another video. The reason why you're asking is because you want them to talk. So it's very selfish, and I've been that kind of person as well, as a therapist. So you. Even as a parent, it doesn't make sense in the beginning, but slowly you'll understand. All right, we will talk about this in another video, I promise. So right now, what you need to do if your child is ignoring you and everything, when you ask questions, stop asking. That's better. It's less stress for the child. Stop asking and start giving. Start telling them what's happening. If you want to start teaching your child at home, I have a gift for you. Go to www.agentsofspeech.com checklist. The link is in the description. Please go there and download a free copy of the checklist that I tell parents to get before they start home therapy. It's just the tools and some toys, just the basic stuff that I would recommend. Okay, Please tell me any questions if you like the video. Like it? If you want to tell me what to cover, please put it in the comment section below. Tell me what's happening. Maybe say hi or something. That's pretty much it for today. Thank you for tuning in in this video and I'll see you in the next one. Bye.
