Intervention Reflections

Autism comes with challenges in the area of communication. Not just "talk", but all aspects of non-verbal communication, including reciprocity, referencing for information, attention shifting, attention sharing, processing tone and inflection, interpreting context, gestures, and processing past experiences.

Turning off "talk" in order to go back to help our child experience all that non-verbal "stuff" has been an interesting journey, the complete opposite of how we began our autism intervention, by working on rote memorization of words while ignoring reciprocity.

We are experiencing more and more verbal reciprocity with our daughter -- without ever working directly on dialogue and conversation. Focusing on the non-verbal prototypes of dialogue, with non-verbal conversations, built a foundation for the "talk", and dialogue flows naturally from the nonverbal practice.

Trust development. Easier said than done. Definitely worth the effort.