will my asd son ever start talking?

[jilly78]

my ds is 2y10m and is still completely non verbal. i know speech delay is very common in autism. will he always be non verbal or will he eventually start talking? if your dc had speech delay what age did they satrt to talk?

Thanks for the detailed reply. I will try it out! The thing with my ds is that he just doesn't care. School have got him doing some basic tasks but he is soooo inconsistent. He never really 'gets' something to the point where you can move him onto the next stage. His LD are very severe (dh thinks profound) and I guess he may not progress much more. I will be amazed if he ever gets imitation....but I guess he's still young so perhaps I'll be proved wrong!

Out of all the SN kids I've known over the years, they all seem to progress and/or can play meaningfully (another key skill, absent in my ds).

DS1 doesn't really play meaningfully - or if he does it's fleeting.

The nice thing about teaching imitation is that it can be prompted. So we started ds1 off with copying dropping a toy tomato in a box. Tutor says "do this" then physically prompted him hand over hand initially.

DS1 had very few reinforcers for years. Chocolate buttons were the only one for long periods. As they progress choice of reinforcers tends to increase.

Remember also reinforcers can be physical. First time ds1 did drop the tomato in the box his tutor picked him up in the chair he was sitting in and threw him up and down. He LOVED it- brought his chair back to her to do it again.

I wonder why none of ds's professionals have ever mentioned this technique...another thing with my ds is that he an incredibly poor short-term AND long-term memory so any learning just evaporates!

Pros won't mention ABA. If you were in Canada you would get a certain number of hours a week. Ditto USA (in fact there people complain when they want to add in extra stuff).

The UK is behind.

Memory issues do make learning that much harder. But imitation is key.

People like son-rise teach imitation by copying everything the child does. But ds1 never learned that way. It was too vague for him.

LOL the SN nursery that my ds attended for about 18mths were advised to copy what he did and the sounds that he made...er, escaping through the fire door into the pouring rain with no shoes on, bashing the walls and pockmarking the plaster, smashing a window during a particularly vigorous bashing session, chewing a paint-loaded paint brush, etc. ad nauseum...somehow it didn't take off but they did have fun for awhile repeating 'b g'.

And there was no way I was ever going to perch on the handrail of the banisters (trapeze style) or summit the old chimney breast.

ooooh my ds1 perches on the bannisters as well 3 or 4 stories up No I haven't been tempted to recreate that one.

DS5 (2yrs preDx Autistic/PDD symptoms) loves it when I copy him, he may initiate a copying session maybe twice a day. He folds his arms enthusiastically, or shouts in my face - with both he waits for me to copy. Originally he didnt realise thats what i was doing when i was copying, but now he loves it, and very occasionally i can alter the sequence very slightly and sometimes he will copy me. What can i do to improve the imitation thing, now he has come this far?

Sorry for hyjacking the thread (tho its only slightly), but i read with extreme interest, as anything i can do with DS to help him would be fantastic. Thanks

Misscutandstick - I think you should just continue what you're doing. Follow his lead, copy him, wait for him to respond. Do it over and over again, then introduce a variation and see if he follows. Then introduce another variation. Keep pausing to see if he initiates continuing the game - by word, gesture or sound or even glance. It's brilliant that he's doing this at 2 ! Do you know about Floortime? It's a child-led technique developed by Stanley Greenspan in the US and its basic principle is very much what you're doing with DS5. Website is www.floortime.org I think - will check and do link in a minute. Greenspan's book is 'The Special Needs Child' - very good.

We do a mixture of ABA and Floortime with DS2, so we encourage imitation and interaction in Floortime but also teach imitation 'formally' with ABA. Like Jimjams and Davros's DSes, DS2 learnt to imitate through ABA and it has revolutionised his life - it wasn't that he didn't want to interact, it's just that he didn't know how.

here

What Sphil is describing I think is that your copying him is something he finds reinforcing and you can use that to add/alter what you get him to copy? Hope that makes sense. I also copy my DS in some of his behaviours now but certainly NOT when he was younger..... that was all the useless SLT wanted to do and us to do.... it made NO impression on him at all and I would have been turning lights on and off, taps on and off and worse.
Manny, lots of what you say about your DS are soooo like my DS when he was younger and ztill now somewhat. Severe LD, poor memory, few or obscure reinforcers but these sorts of techniques have worked wonders. Not that he is in any way near to normal but from being a child with NO eye contact, interaction, attachment, interest etc he is one of the MOST interactive of his peers (emphasise HIS peers). I put this down to teaching him something as basic as copying to start with (which isn't really basic at all) and moving on from there which really taught him to interact, listen, respond and also lots of receptive language and then his own level of expressive language in PECs and Makaton plus gestures and communicative noises. Maybe you should try just ONE thing to try to get him to copy. If it takes choc buttons then that's what it takes. Even if his behaviours etc don't change you can show that he CAN learn with the right input. Just don't try to do too much too soon, small steps.....

Yes I've looked into NIDS because he has a thing about herpes- and ds1 regressed after herpes. Biomed interventions are hard with ds1 though as he just won't take anything.

Growing Minds talked a lot about the slower developers being children who had a lot of problems with executive function &/or dyspraxia- which does seem to fit ds1. They use fast trials to help overcome that. It did work to an extent with ds1.

Out of interest, my ds never regressed, he never gained any skills that he subsequently lost. He's always been the same! How common is it for ASD kids to regress? Most? Half?

DS5 regressed at about 14-16mths (spoke a few words and pointed at 1yr, but lost again by 18mths). Although looking back he definately wasnt quite right before he regressed - he didnt sit alone until 10mths, had sensory problems as a newborn and beyond, i think there were others too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regressive_autism wikipedia says this on the subject not that its an authority, but its interesting.

I have incidently taken DS5 off milk and milk products (as advised by dietician) and it has made a huge difference in his behaviour. Hes less tired and more alert.

oops try again

I don't think my DS1 regressed, but he does not now have the facility with A-Z books that he had when he was 2 (He's 4 now). I don't think he has forgotten the words though. He asked for pinaapple out of the blue a while back, we don't regularly talk about pineapples but I think he still has the word in his mind from the book days.

Manny I don't think there are accurate numbers

PipinJo- you might find this video interesting.

A few years ago I went to an NAS conference where Gilly Baird spoke and she said that there has ALWAYS been a proportion of regressers and it is quite accepted, although WHY some regress is not agreed/clear. I think she said 10% which is probably lower than actual. My DS did not regress either and never had skills so he has always been on an upward slope, however shallow! I also have a sister with AS, poss 2 cousins with AS and 1 of those cousins has a DS with Kanners ASD. So I'm not looking for an "outside insult" although I'm fully prepared to believe they occur in AS/ASD for some.

Gilly Baird is a bit anti the environmental link though (or she always appears to have been from the little I've seen of her in print). I think the general opinion is shifting on that though (it seemed to be at IMFAR - lots of talk on environmental triggers and susceptible immune systems). There was (I thought) quite a divide between the American researchers and what they called 'the british school'. Well not a divide, but they were approaching autism in very different ways.

No, I haven't followed NIDS at all. Putting ds1 on a plane is completely out of the question tbh. I don't know - keeping an eye on his gut seems the way to go at the moment.

I'm a bit wary of many of the biomed treatments (whilst absolutely thinking they can have a lot to offer -especially when the mechanisms triggering autism are better understood)- ds1 is so hard to get stuff into that we just stick to the absolute basics, probiotics, gluten free and low cows milk, and vitamins. This seems to help. If we could add in fish oils I would, but he won't take them.

Jimjam, thanks for posting that link earlier to the lecture by Dr McCabe, very interesting stuff. My two older boys both had "toddler diarrhoea" 'til they were @4 and are still more frequent than average (judging by the amount of loo paper we get through), they also had antibiotics for bad chest infections well before they were one and are skinny. DS3 (the NT one who I may start calling the "control" child) has never had them, has normal bowels and is sturdy. They all had the MMR by the way. Uptil recently I have been putting off looking into biomedical approaches (put off by some of the less than scientific treatments offered by a few opportunistic practitioners) and also worried that it would be too hard cutting down on carbs and milk (ironically it took me years to get DS2 to drink milk and he still won't touch cheese with a bargepole).
i would be v.grateful if any of you more experienced parents could tell me how to start trying a dietary approach, should i send off urine samples to Sunderland?
Sorry if this seems like a hijack.