Why Your Speech Delayed Child Can't Concentrate and Focus

Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com in today's video, we want to talk about why your child has a lack of focus. Alright, so why we want to do this video is because, frankly speaking, there's just too many parents asking me about why their child cannot focus at all. That's one of the first ever comments or questions that a parent makes at the clinic. They say, oh, Ming, there's a lack of focus in my child. They cannot concentrate on looking at people when they need to do a task and stuff. All right? And they make a comparison with other children. They say, oh, my neighbor's kid, you know, he can focus on people's face or, like, do something really intentfully. But the thing is, you need to understand is if you're watching this video and your child is delayed in some form, maybe speech, maybe language, maybe your child is on the spectrum, you need to see if there really is a focus. Problem is, maybe your child can actually focus, but not on the things that you want him or her to focus on. So let me ask you, if you let your child watch videos on your iPhone, your smartphone, your Android, whatever, or your iPad, is your child able to actually watch the video and focus on it and actually watch the video for like 5 or 10 minutes? If the answer is yes, then yeah, they can actually focus on something, right? They can actually focus on the phone or the iPad and actually watch the thing for extended period of time. So it's not a matter of focus. It's a matter of what they need to focus on. So usually why speech delayed children cannot really focus on stuff is because they don't know that that thing matters. Okay? Only you think it matters. Whether it's focus on someone's face when they're talking or just focusing on work, on writing, on whatever. Okay? It's not important to them. So how do we fix this? We need to explain the task to them. Okay. Things aren't fun until you totally understand how things work. Okay, let me explain a little bit. So let's say that you and I were learning a new board game, and because we don't know the rules, it's super unfun, right? It's not fun at all until you totally understand how things work. Similarly, if your child is trying to learn a new toy or like learning how to play something or learning that they need to do homework or whatever, if you don't explain enough the why or how behind it enough, they're not gonna be able to focus. All right? So the problem number One is that there's not enough explanation. So not everything in the world is fun, right? Not everything in the world. There's. There's a straightforward answer to why we do it. There's no straightforward answer to why we need to do homework and learn how to write. And that's always a nightmare to try to explain to child of any age, to be honest. The number two problem is that there's not enough incentive. So if your child can actually watch a video for a long time, that means they like it and they're willing to put their focus on something that makes them happy. What you need to do is to increase incentive. So let's say that you are a boss, you own a company, and you hire someone to work for you. Obviously, after you explain everything, it's still work some way down the road, you're supposed to give a salary at the end of the month, but then you forgot, or you take them for granted and you don't do it. And it's the same with your child, right? If you do not give them a salary, which comes in the form of many things, it might be like a praise, it might be kisses, it might be ice cream, it might be iPad time, it might be a present. It doesn't matter. If you haven't given them a salary, an incentive to work, what's gonna happen? The employee, your worker is gonna go slow on. You start to not listen to, you start to protest, start to, like, not come to work. And if you think about this in this format, then it makes total sense that your child doesn't want to focus on the stuff that you want him to do, okay? It's not in his best interest. If you don't do it, it doesn't mean anything. And. And they totally don't understand why they have to do it, because it's still work. And why not? They just do something that they can just relax. Once you get those two things out of the way, whether if it's something that you haven't explained enough, for instance, like a new toy or a new board game or whatever that you want them to actually play, or you actually fix the issue of having no reward at the end of the road, then why is your child not able to focus still? So there is a number three reason, and obviously there's a lot more, but I'm just gonna talk about three, which are the most common. The third reason is you're telling your child to do something adversive, meaning something that they don't. So let me give you an example. Let's say that you really, really hate eating durian, alright? But the thing is, even if I explain all the benefits and how good it is for your body or something, or even if I explain how it tastes like or whatever, and I give you a reward at the end, I'll say, I'll give you a hundred bucks, all right? After you eat the durian, you're still not gonna do it because you just hate it, all right? And you cannot force something on your child just like that. Like, you cannot bribe them, you cannot explain, you cannot give them a reward or praise them until they would want to do the thing you want them to do. So how do you even do this? So, for example, if you have troubles with cutting your child's hair right now because of the pandemic, and everyone's at home at the time of recording, I've seen many, many times that parents just, you know, hold them down and, like, just wrestle them into place and then cut the hair without any explanation, without any rewards. And then, number three is the worst thing that they can do is to force a child to do something that they hate. Obviously, they cannot focus, they cannot enjoy on the task if it's like that. All right, so how do you do it? You need to systematically increase it slowly. You cannot suddenly tell someone to do something that they don't like and don't know to the fullest extent on the first day. Okay? So what I mean is, if I don't know how to swim and I don't like swimming because I don't know how to swim, and I had a bad experience with drowning and I had a bad experience with you throwing me inside the swimming pool. No matter what you try to do, I'm not gonna want to swim in a swimming pool. So what you do, first of all, you need to get over the fear of actually touching water and all that stuff. So you wouldn't want to put your child in the deepest end of the pool first, right? And you would want to put them at a pool where, you know, they can stand up and everything. And also you want to add rewards such as, like, water guns and duckies and toys and stuff that float on the. On the po. Now you understand that, number one, have you explained fully about the thing that you want your child to focus on? And when I talk about explaining, it means showing them a few times. Because if you're watching this, most probably your child isn't all caught up on language yet. And they need a lot of visuals and gestures and showing and telling for them to understand a certain routine, even if it's a new toy. Okay? And then the next step is to, hey, have you made it fun? Have you made it rewarding? Have you made it? Does it actually make sense for your child to do what you want them to do? Meaning, do they get a reward afterwards? And the last thing is, is it a fact that whenever you try, they already run away? So once that's the problem, you have to think about, can you simplify the task to a very, very easy, easy task so that you can reward them and slowly get rid of their fear, just like the swimming pool example? And slowly you can, as it becomes more fun and internally for them, they will understand that, okay, now it's fun. I can do it myself. It's rewarding. I will keep on doing it. Thank you for watching. I know that this is a hard topic, and obviously we all want our children to, like, accelerate the fastest way possible. But sometimes we compare our children with other children and we think that it should be taken for granted that a child should work a certain way, a child should grow a certain way, a child should have a certain focus on certain things. But that's not the real truth. The real truth is your child doesn't owe you anything. They're having their own fun. And when you tell them to focus on something when they don't understand, it's not their fault. You have to make sense for them. You have to give them a reason to do it. And last, make it easy for them so that they can actually build that habit and focus on things. All right, thank you so much for watching these videos. And if you haven't, you can go to ww.agentsofspeech.com faq. We have the eight most asked questions there on the website. And if you haven't, please like the video, share it to your friends who need this kind of information and also to comment below about what kind of questions you want me to answer. And just give me some general feedback about what you think about the content here. So I'll see you in the next one soon. Bye.