Short YouTube advice segment by Ming @ Agents of Speech explaining why children resist speech therapy: often because they don’t understand the task or lack incentive, not because they lack language ability. The speaker recommends clearly explaining tasks and building incentives (play or rewards) before prompting speech.
Just had a parent who we're coaching right now, and the kid was crying and didn't understand what's going on. 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. 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. 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.
