10:32am July 25, 2013

➸ Urocyon's Jaunts: [tw: ableism, ABA] Things I've learned about working with children with autism:

youneedacat:

emetophobesunite:

silversarcasm:

goldenheartedrose:

girljanitor:

deducecanoe:

purplewowies:

that-music-girl-with-short-hair:

- echolalia: when a kid repeats everything you say in place of an appropriate response

- When a kid cries because they want…

The one that could get a near violent response out of me is “use your words". Always delivered in a condescending, commanding, expectant tone that makes my blood boil. IF I’M NOT USING WORDS CHANCES ARE I’M NOT ABLE TO OR IT’S TOO DIFFICULT. Demanding someone do that before you listen to thorn is rude. And believing if people can communicate in other ways they won’t use language? Not backed up by science. This is what keeps kids from getting effective Aug comm. This exact mentality. Not cool.

Definitely. I was boggling enough at a couple of the other tactics there, that I pretty much forgot about that one.

And this set of attitudes is not even limited to people known to be autistic. (Besides the slightly different bad history of resistance to sign language for Deaf kids, etc.) My aunt, as far as I know, still hasn’t been diagnosed with anything other than “she’ll talk if she has to" (well, and depression later). She wasn’t talking at all when it was time for her to start school, in the ’50s, and the doctor wouldn’t sign her off on starting for another year. Apparently, she was only having a speech delay because she didn’t need to talk. Because her family was actually paying attention to other kinds of communication, and not refusing to give her things when she pointed at them, etc.

My grandparents didn’t follow that advice, because it was obviously mean. Ignoring other ways of communicating is not automagically going to make somebody able to do verbal communication. Also, late talkers are not exactly rare in my grandfather’s family, so nobody felt any need to panic; they just wanted an extra year so that maybe she would start speaking before she got put in a classroom. (And, yeah, she did start on her own after she was in school. Not easy on her I’m sure, but way better than actually being diagnosed with “childhood schizophrenia" or whatever back then.)

That kind of approach is not any better now, and especially coming from people who actually know that there are very real problems with verbal communication there. If anything, it’s worse, because they really should know better.

My parents were told the exact same thing because of my initial speech regression. That if I needed to talk, I would, and they needed to stop listening to other forms of communication if they wanted me to talk again.

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