Ming explains why speech-delayed children resist imitation and what parents can do instead. Scaffolding and repetition matter more than direct requests to repeat. Realistic expectations about how kids learn to talk make the difference.
This is ming here from agentsofspeech.com and in this video, we'll be talking about why your child doesn't like talking. So stay tuned. If your child doesn't like talking to you and their little speech and language delayed, you're watching this video to think about, hey, how come no matter what I do, my child doesn't really want to talk to me? I tell them to imitate, they don't imitate. I tell them to do some gestures. As I talked about in another video, they don't do it. So what's going on? So, first of all, you have to set very realistic expectations. What does realistic expectations mean? Meaning that you need to understand they will not be able to communicate with you overnight. If they could learn that fast, then probably they would already be talking to you. So you have to have that realistic expectation set your bar lower. As a parent, I know it's hard. Why I tell you to put your expectation low is because they probably need more help than they are getting right now to get to the next level. In education, there's a principle called scaffolding. Scaffolding is teaching in a way that can support the child's learning. So I recently got a question from a parent in our community that asked, hey, Ming, look, I've done everything you told me. I. I can't seem to get my child to imitate those sounds, those words to me. And my answer to her is actually, hey, probably it's too hard. If they run away and they get frustrated because of that, it's probably too hard. So you want to scaffold it. You're trying to get your kid to say, like, want, but they cannot say it. What you should do is to cut up and simplify the word want. You can start by W or something or. Or even a. Just basically telling them that the form, the way that you say it doesn't matter as long as your intention is correct. You're using sounds, I'm going to let you have it helping them a little bit. First of all, you decrease the level of the task. Second of all, if you follow what I do, I like to use a lot of gestures. I actually taught the parent to use the open palm gesture for the child. This gesture is taught by a lot of therapists around the globe. And why we actually do it is because it's easy to actually scaffold and help support them by actually helping them finish the action so that they know, okay, this means want. We want to upgrade from a gesture to, like, a sound, like the Parent in my community we said, talked about the problem is that from a gesture to jump from like a speech is super hard. So what you want to do is to make it easier. So if you want them to say want or like give or anything like that, you can just make it super easy. You can start with vowels if you wanted to. But the thing is, even if you scaffold it like that, you make it, structure it and support it and make it like super simple for a child to follow, they will still not say it. So what do you do next? So once you provide assistance, everything like that, learning you need to understand is a process. You need to do repetition after repetition after repetition. So I'll give you an actual example from myself and I'll tell you how hard it is to actually learn a new language. For me, I'm learning Indonesian, Indonesian Bahasa. And the problem with that is because the whole, the sounds and the words are totally new to me. I was learning this word called toothpick. And if you can relate, you can tell me, but toothpick, basically Indonesian Bahasa, don't mind, my pronunciation is tusuki. In a restaurant, every time I would use a gesture, I would just like wave to the waiter and I would go like that just to get what I wanted. And then slowly I started to try, but there was no scaffolding for me, there was no one helping me. Right. Basically what happened was that I was messing the whole word out. I was missing sounds, I was getting the vowels incorrect and, and then no one could understand me until I really looked into like the sound of it and understand that by the meaning of the word literally means to pierce the tooth or something really helped me to align and link the sound to the meaning and how to use it. So if you think about it, a full grown man like myself, I needed like a few months to learn a single word that has four syllables. Yeah, four syllables. And your child is around 2 to 3 years old and they're trying to learn a single syllable word, but they are just crashing everywhere. They cannot. All you need is a lot of repetition. That's what I needed as well. All human beings need repetition to learn something and it's not a gradual growth at all. Alright, once I knew the word I could use it. But if your child is going through the same thing as I am as a kid, I then all you need to do is keep on repeating and don't think that they will be able to learn it so fast, even if you think it's easy, because it really isn't. Thank you so much for tuning in this video. Hopefully you will. All these videos are about you seeing from the child's perspective. And actually not to take language and speech development for granted, we have to take a look from your child's perspective because they are also human beings. They have emotions. They are trying to learn something hard. If not, they would have been talking already. All right, so with that said, thank you very much. If you haven't already, Please go to www.agentsofspeech.com checklist to download our checklist for home therapy. If you're trying and want to start therapy at home, given the situation right now, it's the perfect time to download it, get the tools in the house, watch more videos, and learn how to do it at home. All right. So thank you very much. I'll see you in the next video very soon. Bye.
