Will Speech Delayed Children Ever be "Normal" | www.agentsofspeech.com/micro

Hello, welcome to our Monday Lives on this free Facebook group and also in our YouTube channel. Today, our topic is about if. Actually, we talked about this before, but I haven't really hit the nail on the head yet. Okay, so we're going to talk about whether children will become normal or not for most of the time. And the short answer is it depends, obviously. And the first thing I want you to know is if your child is not only just speech and language delayed, there's some asd, some autism towards it, then you need to manage your own expectations because it will never, never, ever be normal. Okay? Your child, if he's on the spectrum, he can learn to cope and learn how to operate in our world, but to them it's very different. Okay? So if your child is on the spectrum already, you need a have that expectation that it will never be, quote, unquote, normal. Okay? And this topic is more about, like, fitting into mainstream school because now during the pandemic, we get to like chill a little bit and think about what we, what you should do, what we can do so that later on a child will go back to school and maybe then, you know, there might be a lot more complications. But right now it's even more difficult because children have to look at screen. Right? Okay, so let's talk about some examples of children catching up. So first of all, I've seen quite a lot of children catch up to their, how to say, age equivalent. And these are children who typically fall into two categories. Number one, they only have some mispronunciations, okay, in their speech. Like their speech isn't that intelligible, meaning no one can really understand it that well when they were young. But after speech therapy training, they get more and more exposure and they get more and more training about how to do certain sounds and correct their speech sounds so more people can understand. And then the language catches up. And the reason why their language has fallen down is because. Because they have, they lack practice. When they were mispronouncing everything, everyone would just be like, oh, I don't understand that. Whatever, right? So other than that, that's one part that's a speech disorder or speech delay. It's actually a speech delay is literally what that means that children who have mispronunciations, problems in speech, which are a little delayed and therefore have what we call a comorbid. Something that happens together with speech delay is actually the language delay. But that is actually a secondary thing. It doesn't come with the speech delay because, you know, they cannot express themselves that that's why they fall, fell low, like fell back and didn't catch up with their peers. Okay, so if your child right now is someone like that, they're like three and they have very low speech intelligibility, meaning not everyone understands what they're saying. Maybe only you can guess at times, then your child might fall into this category. Well, what you're going to do here to catch up is to see a speech therapist asap, because speech delay and disorders are, are things that require speech therapists to look through examples and see patterns and see the reason why behind they're not doing the right. Not doing the right sound. For instance, I have a, I have a student who cannot do the F sound. So a lot of times when she does F, it's just gone. So if she says flower, it becomes our okay. There's not even L. So she's missing F and L. So as she tries to talk, even if she knows the name or the word speak, specifically, if she cannot say it correctly, no one gets it, she's going to get discouraged and therefore she won't use language. And therefore with the lack of practice, her language is going to be really bad, you know, and it's not going to catch up at all. Okay, so for this you really need to know why. Is it because she cannot? And I've talked about this in many other videos, but I'm going to say it again today, is that if the few reasons why someone cannot do the speech sound right, number one is that they cannot hear a difference between if there is F or is there no F, Okay. Or if they cannot, they don't know how to make it okay? So this particular kid had to teach her how to like put her finger on her lip to push it up and become F that, okay? So that's one of those children, types of children who will in fact catch up pretty easily if they get the speech part right. So what's the other type you ask me? Well, the second type is children who are just purely language delayed. And we're not talking about disordered or anything nowadays. And like in the diagnosis, you see a lot less what they call language delay or speech delay, whatever the reason behind it is because professionals don't want to give, don't want to give the false impression that a delay means they will catch up eventually. Okay? So that's why most of the time nowadays you see, what you see is like speech and language disorder or like specific language disorder or any other term that has the word disorder inside is very Very different. Okay. And then nowadays, yeah, you don't see a lot of language delay per se. Right. But that doesn't matter. Okay? There are cases where it is literally just a language delay. And what that means is that there isn't a particular reason. There's not autistic, not autism, it's not a speech disorder. It's not like, you know, know global developmental delay, whatever the type of comorbid thing that is happening. So that if it's a pure language delay, there is a chance that they will catch up. And I've seen quite a few. And the reason behind it, we don't know. Okay. It's just that they are obviously just slower than other children and with enough input from the parents. And this is a huge part, is for these kind of children who are pure language delay, it's not really about us, okay? It's about you as a parent doing your job and giving the correct language input. Okay. If you don't know how to, or, you know, if you don't know how to do this, you can go to agents of Speech.com micro to join our micro course. There's a lot of good positive reviews from parents over there. It teaches you how to. It's very, very short videos just telling you, okay, this is what you should do, you shouldn't do, what you should say, what you shouldn't say. And then you can make the whole language environment a lot stress free. Okay? So before going on to the next topic, let's talk about, let's answer a question. Okay, so someone from Facebook says, my child hums a lot while doing tasks. Will he overcome this with time? Okay, so what is the problem with humming during doing a task? That's my question for you. If you can get back to me, that's great. I don't see a problem with humming during a task. And I don't understand why he has to overcome it other than that you think it's strange and which you cannot teach him how, whether it's strange or not at a very young age. So I'm going to leave it at that. Sometimes this is the last thing I'm going to say about this question is that you need to understand, is this something that you want or is something that the child wants? Obviously when you tell, you know, you say my child hums a lot, you are annoyed by it. That's why you want it gone. Okay, but why does he do it? You have to think about, is it because, you know, he's just entertaining himself? Then why not? If it's not strange. Okay. Alrighty. So the next thing I'm going to talk about is I want to manage expectations. All right. There is a study where they tell. They find some pre term meaning children who have, who are born before like nine months inside the mom's tummy. Right. You know that they studied them for like 10 plus years and they realized that they haven't even caught up. They never really catch up until like secondary school in terms of language and speech performance and expressive whatever, like just general how they talk. They don't really catch up until that time. Okay, whilst this is very sad, what I'm telling you is if, okay, even if your child is in the area of what I, what I described just now, right, Those two, those two groups of children, the like the speech delayed children, like meaning they only have a few like pronunciation problems. And number two is like the pure language delay kids who like obviously are just a little slower than peers. Than their peers then, you know, don't like they might still need some time to catch up. Up to primary school or even secondary school for some. Okay, I've seen some cases inside primary school where the P6, they can talk. They, you know, their pronunciation is good, but they have some problem expressing themselves. Especially when they're like writing or when they're talking. There's not enough, you know, you can't really find the main point of what they're trying to say. Okay, so my, your expectation. What I'm trying to say is, is that even if you're. You're lucky, right? Even if you're, I don't know, this is luck or not, obviously this is not about that. I used, I used the wrong word. I'm sorry. But even if it's the best case scenario, there is a chance that the child will have to catch up like after primary school, you know, sometimes and sometimes all the way into secondary school. Okay. So that's the expectation that you should have. It's a long journey, whatever how severe the case is and not to talk about those cases who are like, who are not talking by like five, you know, it really takes a long time to, to catch up and no matter how much you push, it needs to be the right way. It cannot be like I'm forcing. I just want my child to do something to like get to one place. It'll never work. Okay. Alrighty. So let me. So the. Some. That person just got back to me. She says, see, it just seems like he's having to block out what I'm saying. When does he? When he does that, it seems like he's in his own world. Yeah, well, the thing is, without enough context, I cannot give a real good, like, solution to you. Okay? I have exactly no idea why he's humming, and I have no exactly. Like, if he's doing a task already, then does he need to listen to you? Like, does he know that? The only thing that I can tell you is that if you try to get rid of a behavior that you don't like, what you can do is to praise and then reward the child when they're not doing it and tell them, hey, good job, you didn't do it, you didn't hum, or whatever. A very good example of this that tells you that this stuff works with everyone is that in Canada, they actually, in Richmond, Vancouver, they give out positive tickets for traffic instead of negative ones, meaning they won't actually decide not to, like, fine you. Instead, what they do is, like, whenever you do something right, they give you a reward, like a ticket to a movie, like a coupon to pizzas or whatever. And the same to your son if you don't want him to hum. I don't know whether this is good or bad or because you're speaking too loud, that he's trying to drown your voice or whatever. I don't know about the context, okay? I really don't know. But what you can do right now is whenever he's not humming, you can say, oh, nice being quiet, and then reward him. Okay, you're not humming. Good, good, good, good. Here we go. Is this, like, training someone who cannot, like, control himself? Yeah, it's like that. But at the same time, it's like a very concrete thing you can do. Okay. Without much context. This is all I can offer right now. Okay, so next question, real quick. Lena says my child still talks, give birth when she's anxious, angry, have nothing to do such. Well, I can't eliminate it or just stay well. I think, like, for everyone, everyone has, like, a thing to do whilst you're angry, anxious, and have nothing to do. Right? For me, it's like peeling my finger skin stuff. And everyone has different ways of expressing that anxiety. Okay? And for sure, you know, all we can do right now is to allow her. Allow her to, like, identify whether she can know when she's saying gibberish or not. Identifying is one of the biggest keys of doing it. If she can identify it whilst being anxious and angry, then probably she can stop it. All right? But if probably they're not, okay, and Lena continues and Says some teachers would ask her what she's talking about, but she couldn't explain. Yeah, there's nothing really going on. She's just thinking about something or like when she's angry and anxious. It's just something that she does. And that's what she's going to say when you ask her. I'm pretty sure about that because Lena's child is actually my student. So what I would say is this is something that we need to. Well, first of all, is it a problem that she's saying gibberish? Right. If it is, then, you know, we can change it. If it sometimes creates like a. Like how to say it's not socially acceptable when you're doing that, then what we can do is we can trigger her. Trigger her to, like, become anxious or whatever and set a rule and say, hey, you can't say gibberish at when you're. During this time. Okay. We can trigger her and tell her to control herself and also identify if she has or not. You can have three chances during that time with a timer, per se. And if she doesn't, she can get like a whole. A better reward. All right, so. Okay, before we. We're going to move on. Thanks for all the questions. The last thing I want to talk about is where to seek help. Okay. There's a lot of ways you can seek help, especially in this world right now. If you go into Google and search it, you go down this crazy rabbit hole about like, these words and professionals writing, like huge lines, walls of text. Right. If you go to asha, American Speech and Hearing association, their website is very, very useful. It only makes sense to me because I've read it, I've studied it. Right. But the thing is, for you, that might not be the best idea. So what I would say is, you know, get a speech therapist to help you. If you can't, you can watch the videos on YouTube right now. Mine, ours, I would say from agents of speech and learn more about, like, what is it that you can do at home and what your role is. Okay. And if you really want to, you can go to agentsofspeech.com micro. There you can learn about what you can do right now without me even saying, like, there are some things that will universally beneficial to everyone. Right. It's good that you do this. It's good practice that you say it in this way. So you can go here or in the title or whatever. Just go press it and take a look. Okay? Yeah. So seeking for help is one thing. And what I really wanted to talk about, about seeking for help is sometimes you as a mother or maybe a dad is here, right? A mother would be very like, suspecting that the child has a problem. And the dad would be just like, just wait for it, okay? And sometimes when the mother tries to do something about it, the dad says, hire professional, right? Even if you know that you can do a better job sometimes, especially if you're somewhere, you know, where you cannot have any speech therapists or qualified speech pathologist, whatever you call it, right? So that's the problem here. So what I would say to you is to really talk to your spouse or talk to your grandma, like your mother or father, like grandma, grandpa, right? Tell, like analyze with them, hey, this is what they should be doing. This is not. This is what they're. What they're not doing. Sometimes you want the help, but family members are just not very supportive, right? So what you can do is like, you can tell them, hey, by two years old, they should be talking in like two word sentences fluently, okay? By three, they're like talking in three to four word sentences, like four to five. They're starting to like, know how to lie. They're starting to know how to, like, tell a story and stuff. And this is something that you have to tell them. It's just a, you know, it's more of a risk, like, you know, it's a risk management thing. Risk management thing. So this is why I always tell the dads, and the dads are like, okay, fair enough, right? Because down the line, what you're doing is to reduce the risk of them not catching up. That's the thing we're doing. Okay? So that's all I wanted to talk about. If you want to know more, you can go to agents of Speech.com micro about what you can do now. It's like super, I would say it's cheap, it's good. You know, I'm not aiming to like make like crazy amounts of profit. I just want everyone to like, know, like a base of knowledge. Okay? So let's look at some questions real quick. And then we're gonna end this. This thing here, then this live. So, Zahia, I'm sorry if I'm getting your name wrong. She says, my child is. He's five. Sometimes he talks, sometimes one word, two word. He's just repeating words. Okay? So my advice, I don't know. There's not enough context. Go to agents of Speech.com micro. Check out the micro course. Okay? There might be some tips that can help you actually, I'm sure there, there are, but without any context, I cannot, I don't understand what is it that you're trying to express here? So someone else from the group, I guess, says, my son has been diagnosed with severe phonological disorder. He. He has, is slow becoming, able to repeat a range of sounds in isolation. Therapy doesn't use them or select the correct sounds by himself or in general. How can I help him with this? Yeah, so this phonological disorder stuff, what is it for other people means that they have a problem like understanding or, you know, comprehending different sounds within language. So for instance, a very easy way of saying it is that sometimes when children, they can't hear the difference between a T and a K, they will say something like they have a confusion, right? They will say tog instead of dog. That's exaggeration. But anyways, given that situation, I would say you need to continue what they're doing in the therapy right now. Okay, keep on. This is all about practicing, okay? And I'm sure if it's a phonological disorder, there's, there must be some type of like, what's that called? Minimal pair. This discrimination. That's a crazy long word. But what it means is you didn't know which sounds your child is confusing with what sounds. Okay, let's say it's an L and like a W. Then you need to do more of what the therapist has, like, given you. If you only see the therapist for like one week or like one week or one time a week or maybe twice a week, that's not enough. You need to do it every day. Okay? Because when. If you're telling me that he's only starting to say like a range of sounds in isolation, that means he has quite a lot, bit of to do. Okay? So just continue it, Continue what you're doing, but don't. You must remember that you need to have a reward at home when you're doing this kind of stuff because it's boring, it's stupid. If you ever learned an instrument, just think about how frustrating it becomes, right? Think about that, okay? And then just keep on, keep on, keep on, keep on doing it. Praise him. Give rewards. Make sure he knows how long you're doing every day. Maybe like five minutes or 10 minutes in the beginning, at the start, and that's probably it. Just continue what your therapist is doing. Trust him or her. Because a severe phonological disorder, there's nothing you can do without analysis. You need to analyze their speech sounds, what sounds they have what? Have what? Patterns. Phonological disorder is all about patterns. Okay? So you need to know that these patterns has been identified by your therapist. Just trust her. All right, next one. Aisha says, my child is four and a half. He is diagnosed with ADHD and pragmatic language disorder. He. He starts speaking two word sentences and need based sentences. Okay, how many months of therapy required to achieve reciprocal communication or how to teach him to initiate? Okay, so this question is cool, I think what you mean by pragmatic. Okay, so for everyone who doesn't know, pragmatic language disorder means they have something wrong with their language use, meaning they don't know when and where to say something. Some you would say that they're socially awkward. If, if adult has a pragmatic language disorder, they would say the wrong things at the wrong time and don't know how to like, you know, don't know how to initiate communication, you know. So what I would say for you is that he needs to go. How many months of therapy? There's no, like, if you think about how many months of therapy required is exactly what I talked about, like, about your expectations in the live just now. Okay, okay. You cannot think that, like, oh, there's a month that you can achieve it, right? Impossible. You think about, it's all about progress. If you think that, oh, I can get this done by like one or two years, you're definitely going to be disappointed. Okay, if you think about, oh, it's going to be in months, especially for a pragmatic language disorder, that's going to be difficult because there's something that they don't understand. Okay, so let me tell you something here, Aisha. The best thing you can do right now is to, for adhd, get him, get him to a doctor who specializes in this stuff and get him some medication. Okay? And why I say this because when my students who have ADHD come to me, they always need, the first thing I ask is, have they taken their meds yet? The reason why is because you want to stable them to a baseline where you can work with them, where I'm not trying to sedate them or anything. I just want them to be concentrated, then the therapy will be useful. So what I would say right now is that Aisha, give him the meds that he needs, find a specialist in ADHD if you can, if you can afford it, please go ahead and do it. If your government service needs to like queue up, go do it. You must do it. Okay, and then how many months? I don't know. Therapy. I would say that, you know, find a speech therapy, especially one with a group therapy, so that he can interact with children of his age and ability. Okay? And you want to say like reciprocal communication or how to teach him to initiate communication. These are all covered in our micro course. But I'll give you a real quick thing, okay? If you want him to initiate communication, you should always be the one who temp. Who's tempting him, okay? Give him something. Show him something he wants or likes, and then tell him that. Who you need to do something in order to get it, which is talking, right? This is something you should do. And don't just tempt him once. Tempt him multiple times, right? If you're playing like a. Like a, let's say like a. Like a car park, keep all the cars to yourself. You know, keep the batteries to yourself. Make, you know, make it so that it's kind of like broken. He needs your help to fix, you know, all the things you need for him to, like, initiate communication. You cannot, you cannot teach communication initiation if there's nothing to talk about. All right, let's imagine you and a stranger, nothing in common. You're from, I don't know, are you from India? I'm not sure. You're from India or like someone's from. From Greenland who doesn't even speak English. How are you going to communicate? There must be some common interest or someone has something of your interest in order to do that. Reciprocal communication. Also, you need to have an interest and a routine so that you have a common basis to talk things. Talk about things. All right, I hope I answered your question. All right, next one. Julie says my nephew knows how to count, but you can't talk conversationally. What could you do to encourage him to conversationally? I have no idea, Julie. There's not enough info. But if you mean. I don't understand what you mean by can't talk conversationally. Okay. I think it's the same question that you and Aisha are asking. All right, first of all, you have to have something that he wants or he likes in order to talk to you. Okay? It's like talking to a man about cosmetics. Talking to a woman about football doesn't always work. So therefore. Therefore you should really see what he likes and try to build communication from there. All right? Yes. You're welcome. Sorry. Aisha, you're from Pakistan. Sorry for my ignorance. Okay, so someone asked, My 7 year old has difficulty pronouncing the letter L. Are there any exercises I can try to practice at home? Yes, you can try to see if your child. This is a question that I can actually, like, give concrete advice because it's about L. Okay? So if. About a certain speech sound and very specific. I'm losing my speech. All right, so what you should do is to see if your child can put his tongue up or not. Okay. If you can do this, then that's the first step. Okay, Tongue up. Okay. There's a bone right behind the front teeth. There's a bone right behind it. If the tongue tip can go there. Good. Then start there. Start there and go. And then go la, right. And see if you can go la li lu length. And then try all the L sounds. Okay. If he cannot, then work on making his tongue go up to that bony area. Okay. Work on that like that. If he cannot go up top and it's impossible, start with like left and right first. Like that. Okay. And slowly make him go up like that, ever so slightly inch towards the top every time you're doing left and right. Okay. And if these aren't the case. Right. And he actually, as someone said before, a phonological disorder, which are patterns. Is there a pattern in which what he says of like L becomes something else? The most common is L becomes a Y. Okay. Which is easy. All you have to do is to take two pictures that are like, as minimally different. Meaning, for example, like, like and yike. You can use a word if he can read, or you can just make up a picture or whatever. Okay. And then you tell him, like, oh, which one is yike? Which one is like? And then tell him to point. This kind of training helps them to, like, listen into the subtle differences. Okay. Once you can do that, and then you can go back to trying to put the tongue up as a like. Okay. This is like a pre speaking phase for the L sound. Okay. Hopefully that's useful. And thank you for everyone for tuning in today. If you have any more questions, you can, like, post them in the comments below and I'm sure that we'll get to it, but just not, like, instantly. Like right now. I just need. I just want to summarize about, like, being normal or. Or being mainstream or whatever. Okay. I know it's difficult for. For you guys to understand that, you know, there might. It might take a long time to catch up or for some, in some cases, if there's a disorder, especially for the parent who has a adhd, some with adhd, it will never be as normal as you want to be. Okay? But there are ways to. In order for a child to cope, right? There are ways that you can teach them to at least function in this world in their own way. And I'm not talking about them using AAC, like iPad stuff and picture exchange to talk or to talk like Stephen Hawking. What I mean is that if you, like think about what he can do and cannot do and focus on the strengths of a child instead of the weaknesses, then there is a way that they're going to cope. All right, there is a last question here. I'm just going to really quick talk about it and I'm going to get offline. Okay? Okay. So Shu says my son has a speech delay. We have therapists. Let him talk. He rubbing it. Is that okay? Yes, it's okay. Go use the evaluation. All right, so that's all for tonight. Thank you so much and I'll see you next week. Bye.