This is a picture of Tony’s current AAC device that was taken right after he requested to watch one of his favorite Tinker Bell movies early Thursday afternoon. And as a picture, it communicates even less than our little man did in the asking. You don’t know how long it took him to make these requests, if he had any assistance, that sort of thing.
Even a series of pictures won’t give you that information. In this set of pictures taken the same day during a request sequence, our little man is telling me that he needs to go potty and that he would like a certain type of Popsicle as his reward. Tony is very willing to use the bathroom…if he gets something in return for it, and he always follows up any at-home notification of bathroom needs with a treat request. You can clearly see what he was touching, but the timing, etc. is still not conveyed.
I can put up video of a similar request (and I did so below) but maybe even this might not tell you everything you would need to know to help independent communication grow in an individual with deficits similar to Tony’s.
Our son was in his underwear at that point, so I needed to crop most of him out. Still, he’s moving pretty quickly. But, I think an important piece is still missing. We don’t know how long he had been thinking about making that request before he initiated it so fluidly. Take for example the video below:
Sometimes it is easy to think that because it appears Tony is asking for what he wants so smoothly that he doesn’t understand what we are asking him if he takes longer to respond to something else. In this video, he seems to give a fluidly flowing request for TV. What isn’t seen is that I asked him two minutes prior, he didn’t make a response, so I told him. “Alright Tony, I am going to watch something for me on Netflix since you don’t want to watch anything.” That is the point he grabbed his device and asked for what he would rather watch instead- a Veggie Tales movie that we have on DVD.
I imagine it is a bit like the process I muddle through sometimes when I am trying to think of how to say something in Spanish that I am less practiced in verbalizing. I take several moments to try out possible wordings before I even open my mouth. But, to the person hearing me, they might not know the length of my formulation process if I am initiating the conversation. If I’m answering someone, they might get more of a sense of how much better I am at reading Spanish than speaking it. There is the delay while I process what they said, and then perhaps another few moments of pause while I try to switch the language I am thinking in. Perhaps they might think I was slow of understanding, or that I couldn’t communicate adequately…and sometimes they might be right depending on the subject 😉
To help strengthen the skills for independent communication in a non-verbal loved one, sometimes you have to wait them out and let them finish on their own- even if the wait feels a little too long because of your own speed in processing for that language. Below is a video of Tony making a request that takes longer. I tried to add one with TV to keep it comparable, but that video for the request from start to finish was more than two minutes, including breaks for stimming and flapping, and I got an error message stating it was too big for this blog. So, we’re going with a different video requesting food:
In this case, you can see he grabs what he wants first, then gets distracted at multiple points to run off and flap. He was in his undies, so again, I focused the camera on the device. Our kiddo definitely is highly distractible. Allowing that process to play itself out allows for communication that overall gets quicker over time.
Here’s a few videos of requests/responses that played out much quicker:
Sometimes we have to allow even more time for Tony to respond if there is a lot going on in an environment. High amounts of other sensory input can add to difficulty in filtering out our requests and responding to them. However, when we can allow him the extra time he needs, we get more of the growth we want. So if you are new on the journey of teaching a non-verbal loved one an alternative form of communication, give some extra time for processing, and fade out or eliminate the prompting as much and as soon as you can without discouraging the amount of communication he or she is willing to do. This will more rapidly lead to the communication independence your loved one is needing.
