Sept. 5, 2024

Empowering Little Voices with Jeaneen Tang on Early Intervention and Resilience

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In this episode of Living the Dream with Curveball, host Curveball interviews Jeaneen Tang, a seasoned speech language pathologist with over 20 years of experience in early intervention. Jeaneen shares her inspiring journey from Hawaii to Los Angeles, her passion for speech therapy, and the personal story of her son Che, whose resilience has been a driving force in her career. She also discusses her book “Play Dumb and Sabotage,” which offers practical strategies for parents, caregivers, and educators to foster language development in children.

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> Curtis Jackson>Welcome, to the Living the Dream podcast with Curveball. if you believe you can achieve Chee Chee, welcome to the living the Dream with Curveball podcast, a show where I interview guests the. That teach, motivate, and inspire. Today I am joined by Janine Tang. She is a speech language pathologist with over 20 years of experience in early intervention. Zero to three.

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> Curtis Jackson>And she also does early intervention all the way up to the elderly. She trains parents and caregivers how to, help kids express themselves. So we're going to be talking to her about everything that she's up to and why she does what she does. So, Janine, thank you for joining me today.

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> Curtis Jackson>Thank you for having me.

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> Curtis Jackson>Curtis, why don't you start off by telling everybody a little bit about yourself?

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> Curtis Jackson>So, I am originally from Hawaii. Now I live in Los Angeles. People ask me why I would ever leave Hawaii. you know, I was already a speech therapist in 2001, and then I decided I want to do acting. So I moved to Los Angeles. But I'm really glad I am a speech therapist because making money as a waitress trying to do acting was very difficult. so I actually was doing speech therapy in Los Angeles in, 2006 and worked in the schools here. And then in 2010, I started to do early intervention, which is zero to three years old. And it's a whole different population of children, and it's. They're so. They're so adorable and cute.

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> Curtis Jackson>And, you know, at the time, I wasn't sure if I, myself, was going to have children. You know, like, I wasn't sure I had nieces, and I was very happy being an aunt. And then, Then I decided when I was 35, I was like, well, this is a, you know, now or never am I going to have kids? And, my partner at the time, we decided, okay, let's just.

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> Curtis Jackson>We'll try. We'll have. We'll see what happens. And we got pregnant. And, so, when I was 36, I had my son in 2012. His name is Che, and he was amazing. You know, he's just, this chubby little kid, and he was just a ball full of laughter and smiles and giggles, and he was just a perfect little baby. And unfortunately, at 13 months old, he had a tragic fall from our bed, which was only 18 inches off the ground. And he hit his head in just the way that it created a very large brain bleed.

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> Curtis Jackson>And a couple days later, he had a stroke in the hospital.

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> Curtis Jackson>he had to have an emergency craniotomy right after the fall. And, the doctors said that he might never walk or talk. It was such a traumatic experience for our whole family, especially for him. But he is the most resilient person and such a little warrior in his own rights that, how could we as parents, be depressed or anything like that when we have to really think about our childhood? And so people say, how did you get through that point in your life? And I said it was by putting my thoughts into action and not being stuck in a place where tragedy took over my mindset. Because as long as you are moving forward, you are making progress. And now my son is going to be twelve years old. He's going to start middle school next week. And he still has problems, know, as far as he doesn't use his right arm or hand. He has some cognitive impairment. He, you know, has special ed services, so he has physical therapy, occupational therapy, speech therapy, adaptive pe, and he still is not able to run and jump the same way as kids his age. He can do it, but it's just nothing as agile or as balanced as you would expect someone to be at twelve years old. but he's the reason why I have this passion for working with children as well. I've been a speech therapist for longer than he's been alive over 20 years, and he's not the reason why I started to be a speech therapist, but he definitely is the passion behind why I do speech therapy now, you know, to see him interact with young children. Cause sometimes he will come to the preschool that I see kids at and he will interact with his young kids and, you know, these young kids, they just are so, you know, they're like, this child is big and he's talking to me and they, they find him as like a friend as well, you know. So I think he's learned a lot of how to play with young children from watching me do therapy. And it's the same therapy I did with him and it inspired me to also write a book and it's called Play Dumb and sabotage. And it's really about how other caregivers and parents educators can find ways to develop language in young children. So Che had a fall and, an accident.

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> Curtis Jackson>But there are so many young children who are normal, developing and physically and cognitively, but just delayed in speech. And I think by providing parents, caregivers and educators with the tools and strategies to develop language, we can help to decrease the number of kids overall that need speech therapy.

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> Curtis Jackson>So why did you decide to become.

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> Curtis Jackson>A speech therapist that goes all the way back to. When I was eight years old, my grandfather was very sick. He had lung cancer. He ended up passing away. And I remember at the time, I felt very helpless because I wanted to do more for him. I wanted to be helpful.

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> Curtis Jackson>And I felt like, being eight years old, I couldn't help him physically, right? So I wanted, I think that was the key moment in my life where, where I wanted to be helpful to other people.

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> Curtis Jackson>And I grew up wanting to be as helpful and nurturing to other people as possible. And that, you know, I grew up thinking, oh, maybe I'll be a teacher, you know, because I think in elementary school, a lot of people want to be teachers because they have great teachers. Then in high school, I heard about physical therapy and I thought, well, that would be a great profession that could have helped my grandfather. And so I knew I needed to get a master's degree, for physical therapy at the time, now you need a doctorate, but at the time, because I'm older, a little bit older, you only needed a master's. So my bachelor's degree I actually got in english literature and creative writing because I do love to read, I do love to write. And I thought, well, if I'm going to get a science degree for my master's, why don't I get something in the arts for my bachelor's? And it really helped me, when I made the decision to, you know, when I was going to apply to physical therapy school, everybody, I felt like, wanted to be a physical therapist. And it felt like a very saturated, occupation at the time. And so someone had mentioned, have you thought about speech therapy?

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> Curtis Jackson>And I didn't really know what that was. I hadn't really heard too much about it. But when I learned that it was about communication about language, and teaching that to either children or adults, I thought that was right up my alley because it would allow me to help people. And also I could use my love for communication and language and apply it to that. That was really why I started to be a speech therapist.

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> Curtis Jackson>And 23 years later, I'm still loving my profession, and I still love working with two different populations. I work with children and I work with adults, adults, in the hospital and then children either in their home or in the schools. And I don't think I would ever work with just one population because I have such a, you know, affinity for both that, it allows me to have variety in my work week, and it also allows me to just help everybody that I could, you know, as much as possible.

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> Curtis Jackson>So, why do you think so many kids need speech therapy?

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> Curtis Jackson>I think a good percentage of children need speech therapy because caregivers and parents and educators, we over anticipate their needs.

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> Curtis Jackson>And as caregivers, we think of caregiving as making sure the child is comfortable, making sure they're fed, making sure they're dry, making sure that they're not too hot or too cold. And so we do a lot of things. We over anticipate what they need because we want to be good caregivers and we do things for them. We do things to them where we feed them, we change them. We provide, all these services as caregivers to the child. And in actuality, it may appear that we're great caregivers, but, in actuality, we are doing the child a disservice bye. Only doing for the child and not allowing that child to indicate that they might be hungry or indicate that they might need to be changed or indicate that they want to play with a certain toy or eat a certain snack. so I think it's a lot of times parents are doing things for their child rather than interacting with their child. And, you know, I had one parent tell me I didn't know I had to interact so much with my child because she thought that she was doing a great job by changing, the diapers, by feeding the child, by, you know, getting the bed ready and comfortable and all that stuff. And they didn't realize that they had to play with the child so much, read with the child so much, sing with them, be animated. Having this back and forth, I call it conversation. Even if there's no words, right, there can be nonverbal babbling, it could be words, it could be sentences. But it's this back and forth conversation, rather than this monologue of the parent does this for the child. I mean, there are children, you know, children with autism, children with brain injuries, children with down syndrome and other other disabilities and things that need speech therapy because of their disability or consequence. But there are so many children who are normal developing. They have normal physical, development, normal cognitive development. They're just late talkers because their parents and caregivers were not educated enough or at all about how, how to develop and nurture language in a very playful and very natural way. that I think that we can decrease the number of children that need speech therapy by educating, people from the get go, right? They have, you know, you, in order to have a child or birth a baby, you go to birthing class, you know, but you don't have to go to a language development class.

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> Curtis Jackson>So this is really a very conversational book, and it's available, in paperback, audiobook, and in a kindle. So in every way, shape and form, it's very simple to have this conversation, and learn strategies that they could easily implement.

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> Curtis Jackson>Well, before we jump into talking about your book, talk about some of the top strategies that parents can implement to help with language development.

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> Curtis Jackson>Absolutely. So I think one of the key, the key things is to slow your speech down.

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> Curtis Jackson>Right. So we tend to speak too quickly sometimes, especially if, you know, having an adult conversation, we're speaking very quickly. But when you're speaking with a child, if you slow your speech just a little bit, they can understand the cadence of the words. They can understand which words and syllables you are stressing or, enunciating or elongating better or more. Right.

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> Curtis Jackson>You can hear, the melody of the words. You can hear that there are different parts to a sentence rather than words jumbled together, and then clapping syllables out. So if you're saying, like elephant or caterpillar, ah, you could clap the syllables out, or you could tap it on them like caterpillar. So they can feel it. So it's like a multi sensory input of how they can hear the words. They can feel the words. They can see how it sounds like in the rhythm if you're doing clapping or tapping. so I think that's one good strategy, is to slow things down and to tap, and clap syllables out. Another thing is one of the key things as a child is able to answer yes and no is to not ask a yes and no question unless you're willing to honor that. No. Right? So if you were to ask them, are you ready to brush your teeth and they say no, or are you ready to eat dinner and they say, no, you need to honor that. No. Right?

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> Curtis Jackson>But if I say, I'm going to. Time to. Time to get ready for bed, do you want to brush your teeth or change into pajamas first? You know, I offer them two different choices rather than a yes no question.

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> Curtis Jackson>Or if it's snack time, instead of saying, oh, do you want goldfish? Do you want an apple? Do you want a banana? Do you want to eat? You know, they say no to those things. You're going to have this endless, like, stream of questions, do you want to eat a. You want to eat, celery? Ah, you want to eat something else? So it could be very simple, like, we're going to have a snack. Do you want to eat an apple or banana? Or we're going to have goldfish. Do you want two goldfish or three goldfish? And introduce, like, different numbers as well, giving them the decision that they can. They can make that decision about what they're eating or what they're doing. We're going to get changed. Do you want to wear the blue shirt or the green shirt rather than are you ready to get changed? Or do you want to wear this green shirt? Do you want to wear this blue shirt? Do you want to wear this red shirt? And if the answer is no, no, no, you're going to be in this constant, like, series of questions. yes, no questions.

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> Curtis Jackson>So don't ask a yes no question unless you're willing to honor that no. And, it goes into articulation. So if your child is working on articulation or expanding a sentence, you know, if you say the caterpillar's on the leaf, you can't say, can you say the caterpillars on the leaf? Or can you say caterpillar? I might say caterpillar. You say it. Or I might say the caterpillar's on the leaf. your turn. You try it. so it's, you know, things like that where you're not asking them to say it, you're telling them to say it.

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> Curtis Jackson>And I think that works out a lot better when parents say, oh, can you do this? Can you say this? Would you like this? And if the answer is no, then the answer is no. And if you don't honor that no, then you're losing a little bit of trust with that child, because you can't just say, well, you're going to do this anyway, or you're going to eat this anyway. Does that make sense?

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> Curtis Jackson>That makes perfect sense.

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> Curtis Jackson>So talk about who are, the most influential people in your field for.

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> Curtis Jackson>You, I think definitely the most influential person for myself was my supervisor, my mentor when I graduated school. Her name is Kathy Maimori, and I talk about her in my book when I graduated. You have to have a clinical supervisor, your first, like, nine months of working, right? Because you graduate, you pass your tests, exams, and then you're placed in a job. But you're not completely on your own for the first nine months, you have a supervisor, to make sure that you know what you're doing.

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> Curtis Jackson>Right. And I worked in the school district, and my supervisor, I would call her almost every day, because working in the school district, and I'm sure you've experienced this. That there are so many children that need speech therapy in the schools that the caseloads of the speech therapists are so high. you know, it's just almost impossible to schedule your day in a calm way. It's like you're doing therapy after therapy or therapies and tests and all this stuff, and you're seeing so many more children than you'd ever seen in graduate school.

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> Curtis Jackson>Given a limited number of kids to work with when you're in grad school, you may be like, you have like, four or five kids.

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> Curtis Jackson>When you go to work in the schools, you have 50, 60, 70, 80 kids sometimes. And that can be very, very overwhelming. And not only working with the children, but working with the parents and, Kathy and also the other speech therapists on the team that I was working with, they were so instrumental in teaching me different strategies on how to work with kids in therapy and how to work with parents and how to create great goals and what makes a great goal. and, you know, now that I'm a parent of a child with special needs, I sometimes will rewrite goals that are presented to us in the IEP's individualized education plan, because I know that the goal could be written better, as you want the goal to be, as, you know, complete as possible. If any therapist picks up this IEP, that they know exactly what the goal for that activity, or, whatever the goal is for the child, they want to make sure that they know what it's aiming, for, what the percentage of mastery is, and what kind of queuing that child might need. And so I feel like I had a really great foundation of learning from Kathy, Maimori.

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> Curtis Jackson>Okay, so talk about your book. Tell us what readers can expect to find when they read it and why you decide to write it.

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> Curtis Jackson>So my book is meant to be as conversational as possible, right? There's no, there's no need to pull out a dictionary or some kind of speech therapy book about how to, learn certain, definitions. Everything is provided in there. So any parent caregiver educator can pick it up.

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> Curtis Jackson>Any new therapist can pick it up. And it's a conversation about how, as caregivers, educators, and anybody who interacts with children, that we are able to provide a level of guidance and practice for these children, just by adjusting different things in our own lifestyle, such as slowing things down, clapping and tapping syllables out, being super animated. I think being animated and having facial expressions and gestures is really important because the child can not only hear what we're saying, but they can kind of see how we are expressing ourselves through language, because I think that's so important. By just hearing words, that's one thing, that's one aspect. But by experiencing those words in a situation where facial expressions and gestures are incorporated. you know, I told one parent to work on, pretending to be you are like you are in a high school musical and to sing a song.

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> Curtis Jackson>And, because her daughter used to love Disney songs, I said, you know, if you're in a high school musical and you are performing this song, because her daughter used to jumble all the words together in the song, over exaggerate the words, and you elongate certain syllables and create gestures to create, this experience, then your daughter will be able to understand that these words are actually broken up into syllables and these sentences and these songs are actually words that are making up an actual sentence rather than just a melody of sound.

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> Curtis Jackson>and I think that, parents, when they're given a blueprint about how to engage language, at the end of every chapter, there is how to apply the strategy that's written in the chapter into your daily life. There's one chapter about not asking yes no questions unless you're willing to honor that no. And at the end of the chapter, it helps you to write down some questions that are not yes no questions, but provide opportunities to make a choice between two things or how to write a statement rather than ask a yes no question, at the end of the chapter about sequencing, because sequencing is so important, like with organization and, you know, having a schedule.

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> Curtis Jackson>I'm sure your son has a schedule for the day, right?

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> Curtis Jackson>He knows what the periods are for middle school, and you, know what needs to happen in every aspect of his day. And so, you know, we don't think about organizing. I mean, I have a paper planner, and I have to have things super organized, but some people don't. They just have to kind of fly by their day, right, knowing what's going to be happening. But if you actually write down every event that happens, important event that happens in your daytime, then you realize that there are so many different things that we take for granted about different meetings with people having lunch or, going to the gym or other activities that we try to, lead our child throughout the day by saying, we need to do this and this and this, but not really having them involved in what's happening at an early age. I taught my son, you know, I would expose him to sequencing and organization by saying, like, okay, we're going to do this first, this next, and this last.

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> Curtis Jackson>And after we did those things, I would review it. I said, okay, we just did, you know, we just brushed our teeth, we changed our clothes, and we, then we put on our shoes. Okay, now we're going to get in the car, we're going to go grocery shopping, and then we get to go to the park. Okay, so after we got done grocery shopping, it's, oh, we did. We finished our grocery shopping. What are we going to do next? And oh, we're going to go to the park.

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> Curtis Jackson>Great. So it helps in with memory, helps with organization. So there's, you know, in the chapter I help to provide, examples, for the parents on how to organize the child's day so that the child is able to understand that better.

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> Curtis Jackson>So tell us about any current or upcoming projects that you're working on that listeners need to know about.

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> Curtis Jackson>Absolutely. So I'm currently working on, building an online training and online conference with some other educators as well. And I'm reaching out locally. I'm in Los Angeles. If anybody's in Los Angeles, reach out to me. I'm doing some local trainings with parents, and also some educators at preschools, at the YMCA, at some other, early education centers. And, you know, I would love to, I'm going to put it out there within the year. I'd love to do a Ted talk. I think that'd be a great opportunity to plant the seed in the so many minds around the world that language development is really important and that we can create better communicators and more confident speakers, if we are able to develop language at an early age.

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> Curtis Jackson>Okay, well, throw out your contact information so people can keep up with everything that you're up to.

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> Curtis Jackson>Perfect. You can contact me on my website.

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> Curtis Jackson>It's play dumbandsabotage.com.

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> Curtis Jackson>and the links for my book is in there as well, as well as like a contact. They can fill out a contact page and ask me any questions or if they want to book me for an online training or local training. That'd be amazing.

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> Curtis Jackson>Okay, close us out, with some final thoughts. Maybe if that was something I forgot to talk about that you would like to touch on or any final thoughts you have for the listeners.

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> Curtis Jackson>I think in order to work with children and interact with children, you need to be able to be vulnerable and be silly and create a rapport with the child, in order to have them feel that they are a part of the interaction and communication and that they are affecting you as if, and you are affecting them. It's this back and forth communication.

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> Curtis Jackson>So don't be afraid to be silly. Don't be afraid to be super animated and really make them feel that you are invested in the communication.

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> Curtis Jackson>All right, ladies and gentlemen, play diamondsappetage.com. please be sure to follow rate review share this episode to as many people as possible, especially all the parents out there. Jump on your favorite podcast app. Give us a follow and a review. If you have any guests or suggestion topics, Curtis Jackson 1978 is the place to send them. Thank you for listening and supporting the show. And Janine, thank you for all you do and thank you for joining us all.

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> Curtis Jackson>Ah right. Thank you so much, Curtis. Thank you for having me.

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> Curtis Jackson>For more information on the living the Dream podcast, visit www.djcurvefall.com.

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> Curtis Jackson>until next time, stay focused on living the dream.

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> Curtis Jackson>Dream.