Listen to the Quiet People by Becky Wood Yesterday my nine year-old autistic son made a bee-line for me as I was eating lunch and started making urgent, pointing gestures towards his stomach and then in the direction of my plate. Just as I was about to ask him to point to the specific part of my meal he wanted, he said “eeese” (i.e. ‘cheese’) and so I gave him a small piece of my cheddar. My son doesn’t appear to talk very often and so when he does so, we make a big deal of it by responding in some exaggerated fashion (“Oh, do you want some cheese? Good boy, for saying the word ‘cheese’!”) and then rewarding him (“You can have some cheese!”). The fact that – due to some pretty severe gastro-intestinal issues – he is on a strict dairy-free diet is only relevant to the extent that it shows the high value we place on his spoken language. Later on, and still buoyed up by this unexpected spoken word, my husband and I repeated the cheese anecdote, laughed about it, discussed, over a glass of wine, the details of his utterance: was it ‘cheese’ or ‘eese’? I even had to resist the urge to tell everyone on Twitter: ‘My son said the word ‘cheese’! And he’s on dairy free! lol #autism’. We also decided it was high time to ask our son’s doctor about re-introducing dairy foods into his diet. All this, from one, part-word. As I write this, I can feel again the ripples of sadness and frustration as I watched the flickering and fading of my son’s spoken language from the erratic toddler years to increasingly mute older boyhood. With his very early speech having developed slowly but just within a typical range, we then saw an explosion of language reflecting his interest in colours, shapes and wildlife (‘tropical bird!’ was a favourite) as well as indicating his feelings about therapists (‘go away’, ‘tired, can’t’). Read more: blog.talkaboutautism.org.uk/2013/07/listen-to-quiet-people.html
Posted on: Tue, 02 Jul 2013 09:47:11 +0000
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