r/MadeMeSmile • u/bendubberley_ • 16d ago

Wholesome Moments Autistic non-verbal boy speaks directly to his mother for the first time.

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

47.3k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

955 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

34

u/Chubbstock 16d ago

I guess mom and everyone must have been continuing to just speak to him for years and years before this happened

This is extremely important. When a child is non-verbal, or even delayed in communication, people just treat them like furniture, and it makes things so much worse.

My son has autism and is delayed in communication, he cant' answer questions very well at all, and doesn't really interact unless it's a very basic conversation. He is obsessed with the app Super Mario Run and I was looking at it on his tablet a few weeks ago and noticed he had tons of rally tickets and coins, and he was also repeatedly clearing his progress from the app. I was talking to my wife with him right there next to me about how I didn't know how he was getting so many tickets after deleting progress, hoping it wasn't being purchased, etc. I just kept saying "I have no idea how he's doing it."

He suddenly came over and sat down next to me and said "lookit, daddy" and walked me through this whole process with how he was redeeming free rewards and stuff. He showed me he knew exactly what I was saying even though he couldn't really tell me. I cried a lot.

2

u/TealCatto 16d ago

That's such an amazing feeling to receive confirmation that our kids understand us, when it's not something we experience on a daily basis. I know exactly how that moment must've felt!

My daughter has Snijders Blok Campeau Syndrome, and speech disorder is one of the main symptoms. People with that disability have much better receptive language than expressive, so they get underestimated a LOT. I hear from her teachers how she sometimes has the best insights in the class and shocks them with her knowledge and observations. I guess it's normal to come to conclusions based on the facts that are presented (that a child's understanding is equal to their expression) but it's so important to talk to disabled kids at age level. When I bring her to activities where she's a new participant, and the staff there don't know her limitations yet, they talk to her like any other teenager. For example, they make requests like asking her to sign in (write the time by her name on the sheet) and she just DOES it, because she isn't expected NOT to.