“Pretty nate.” Isaac points at the snake we are watching on YouTube.
“Do you mean ‘snake’, buddy?” I ask.
Isaac nods.
“S-S-S-S-S-S-NĀ-K,” I say, modeling for him.
“S-S-S-S-S-S-NĀ-K,” he says.
“Way to go, buddy!” I tell him. We high-five.
When dealing with a speech delay like the one Isaac has, you get used to modeling tricky words over and over. You praise when the words get spoken correctly, and console when the words are mispronounced. For over three years now, my wife Heather and I have been working with Isaac on his speech therapy homework. Heather is a master at doing this, given her experience teaching pre-K for seven years. She knows how to cajole, encourage and push Isaac to work his hardest on the exercises we have been given for the week.
Here’s the catch: Isaac is really, really smart. Crazy smart. His knowledge of the world around him has outstripped his language abilities almost from the moment he could speak. And he knows something: he knows that he struggles with many different sounds. He also knows that speech therapy is very hard work. Unlike most things in life, proper speech does not come easily to Isaac. Except for his speech, he isn’t used to struggling to master any skill or idea. And it means that he tends to resist the hard work of speech therapy, because just like most people, he’d rather not do hard work if he doesn’t have to.
Tae Kwon Do is Isaac’s current sport, and he recently passed his Red-Stripe belt test. He had to perform his poomsae (forms) and board breaking in order to pass the test. He spent the past six months training for this test, and he did a tremendous job. Heather and I know that he is capable of working exactly as hard as he wants, when he wants to.
That’s the challenge—getting a smart, strong-willed boy to do hard work when he doesn’t want to. Heather and I know that if Isaac isn’t pushed to work on his speech delay, the problems he has now will only become more deeply ingrained and difficult to correct later on. While his speech delay does impact to a degree how he interacts with others—and I’m speaking here of those who are not with him all the time—his delay has not yet created an overall reduction in his quality of life. But that will change: classmates and teachers alike will grow to have less and less patience with listening to Isaac, which means that he will struggle to be really heard.
During one week of the COVID-19 Stay-at-Home order, I was helping Isaac with his “g” sound. I struggled to get him to focus and he just didn’t seem to want to work. In a rare flash of insight, I grabbed a bunch of his Poké-balls that were filled with his tiny Pokémon. I sat with him in the living room, and tossed the balls in various places. After each set of speech words that Isaac successfully completed, I’d have him go “find” a Poké-ball, just as if he were a real Pokémon trainer. He would explain everything he knew about whatever creature he had just “captured”, and when we finished the entire assignment, had a small Poké-battle, just like the characters do in the show. It was awesome! And for one day, Isaac attacked his speech homework with as much passion as his does any of his favorite activities.
I wish that was the end of the story. But, the next day, when we went to do the same routine, Isaac was so excited by the Pokémon portion of the activity that he couldn’t focus on the speech part. So we reverted back to a standard model-and-repeat session of speech homework. Isaac was frustrated at not being able to have fun, and I was frustrated that our new approach no longer worked. We ground through his assignment, but it didn’t feel very productive.
In the end, we managed to finish the assignment. Dragging each other across the finish-line, grumpy and moody, we made it. Maybe we should have waited until a ‘better’ time to finish the lesson. I don’t know. There are days when I wish we could just let Isaac slack on the speech homework, or that I didn’t have to model the word “spoon” for the 10,000th time, but if I do that, I’m making the world harder for my son, not doing him any favors. And so we push. And we struggle. And we try (foolishly, I sometimes think) to explain adult concepts like long-term benefits to Isaac in the hope that something we say will inspire him to keep working his hardest, even when therapy gets to be too much.
By establishing a habit of digging in and completing hard work, we are teaching Isaac how to tackle the things in life that are hardest—and usually the most rewarding. I also know that we are teaching him exactly how much we love him, and even though he won’t think of this as love until years down the road—when that moment comes—he will know that above all else, no matter what challenges he faces, he is loved.
There is no more important lesson that a parent can teach a child.
As the proud father of three children, as well as an MFA graduate and published author, John spends most of his time trying to balance the demands of being a writer and a parent all at once. Most of the time, it’s an uphill battle. As the parent of a child with special needs, John tries to use his talent for writing to bring inspiration and hope to his readers.
For more information about John Will you can visit his website at the Writing Dad, Here and Facebook page Here.
Cover Photo: Nemuiro