Why Your Child is Whispering Words?

Hello, this is Ming from agentsofspeech.com today we're going to talk about why your child is whispering their words. So the first thing is language ability. When a child is not confident or they don't know what to say, they're going to start whispering. And that's the same for any child, whether they're on the spectrum or not. It's just going to be like that. And how we do it is like we don't force them to speak that full thing and we try to go down one level. Instead. What we want to do is we want to simplify the sentence or the concept or even the word so that it's in a. In a language level that they're comfortable with. And if you don't know your child's language level, obviously go to get a full speech and language assessment. Or you can use our resources and go to wweach.com course, join our community, ask some questions there, and then one of our staff or like the really experienced parents can help you there. We have more than 10,000 parents inside of them. You have questions just asked there. Okay. Second of all is anxiety level, right? Anxiety is a real thing. You might think, oh, my child can do this and do that and perform here and there. But you have to remember all things, all skills will get worse when someone is anxious, right? So something I told a parent the other day inside of our paid community, she was saying how, oh, yeah, he can't wait. And when we're outside, I was like, obviously you can't, because if you can sing alone at home in the shower, that's cool, right? You sound nice, you remember the lyrics. But then you have some friends over and you're saying karaoke together, you're going to be a little more anxious. And then later on when you go on stage in front of like 100 people, you're practically mute. You can't even say anything. So it's the same as children. And you have to understand anxiety levels do play a part when it comes to a child speaking. A lot of times children will start whispering when they don't feel comfortable. And at those times, it's in your best interest not to push because as long as you know in your heart that, oh, yeah, yeah, she's able to do that, she's just a little bit nervous at that point, then that's good enough. And the worst thing is that you push over and you lose the trust with your child. See whether if it's a child on the spectrum or not, it doesn't matter. Just a child who is like delayed or not. It's just like a typical developing child and they just say it in front of their kids. It's like my kid just doesn't whis just whispers in front of everyone. I think she's like socially awkward right in front of them to me. And I was like, I think she's fine. Don't say that in front of your child. You're going to lose the trust. And then like just a church, there's a bunch of children who would be shy in front of his or her parents. But then when like they, they see afar when they're interacting with me, my wife and a bunch of other kids, they're like shouting and having so much fun and they're like, why is it like that? Well, they're more comfortable here because, you know, I tell everyone else not to make it a scene when they whisper, when they are stuttering, when they're whatever. But we make it a conscious effort to praise and tell them that you're doing a good job whenever they are speaking up. Okay, that's important. Not saying that I'm doing it correct. I'm just saying that that's what worked for me. Okay. Anyways, the last reason is a speech disorder. So you see, this happens especially when a child needs a lot of focus and needs a lot of effort to say something. And especially for speech disorder children, there are two things that are going on that are pulling. There's one part where it's like the communication need. They want to say something, they really want to tell you something. And there's the other part where is the motoric part. This is not just a speech disorder. This is a speech delay thing and it might be a stuttering thing too. And this is true with all children, whether they have a diagnosis or whatever, is that they have a communication need and then it's their ability to speak which does a tug of war. And you see this in boys, more like girls just fly through it because they've been practicing their whole lives. You know, if you see a girl nowadays, they're just speaking like an adult already. It's mind boggling. A lot of the norms I think from 1970s would be invalid nowadays. A lot of the, you know, speech therapists, psychologists who made the benchmarks would be like the jaws would drop at seeing the children nowadays. But back to the point. So you have the want to communicate, really want to tell you something and their ability. What happens is that most of the time this tug of war, the ability to speak is going to take a huge hit. And what you see is that the stuttering will come out. If there's this thing, by the way, it's also language developmentally. It's a process that children go through to stutter. So just telling you, it's not always a bad thing. The second thing is, if they have speech issues, right, for instance, they have some sounds that they cannot pronounce or produce, those are going to come out more often, right. If they have language delay, they're most probably going to forget their words and just make up some alien language or whatever. And then the last thing of that, if they cannot say it properly, they'll just like that, and they're going to try and say something, but it comes out as a whisper, right? All these will happen. And I'm sure there are other reasons why. But most of the reasons I see is that there's a high anxiety, there's a lacking of speech and language abilities, and then there's also that discomfort, and there's a tug of war between what they want to say and how well they're able to perform at that certain situation. So that's what I would say. And the last part is how to deal with it. So just to make sure, right. You can teach your child, Teach them what's loud and what's soft. And in therapy, we do something like 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And if a child is language capable enough, we can tell them one is as if we're whispering in a. In the library. And we go louder, louder, louder, until we hit five, which is like you're trying to. In Hong Kong, we say you're trying to get the bus driver's attention to make a stop, because that's what we do. But usually it's like, oh, we're in a crowded street and you're saying hi to your friend. It's like, hey, you know what I mean? So we go from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. And then we tell them to identify in terms of language. This is the volume, right? And if you can't do the graded ones from 1 to 5, just do 1 and 5. Just soft and loud, whisper and shout, right? To teach them this framework and so that you can know. Oh, actually they can know. You can give feedback. Oh, now we're talking in a. In a number one voice. No one can hear you right now we're talking too loud or whatever. I want you to speak at 5 so that you have a reference when you're giving feedback. But does it work all the time? Most probably not. It really depends on why your child is whispering. If they're high anxiety and you say that, they're probably even going to be more anxious. But if they're having just like a language delay and they're trying to talk a lot, you tell them, okay, slow down and speak at a number five. And that's probably going to help a little bit. Okay. Anyways, so that's all. If you haven't, Please go to ww.agentsofspeech.com course to get more good information and how to tackle things at home. There we have courses that are free that go from zero all the way to, like, sentence level. Okay. So go there and check it out. I'll see you in the next video soon. Bye.