r/MadeMeSmile • u/bendubberley_ • 16d ago

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

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u/UserCannotBeVerified 16d ago

Iirc Einstein didn't speak until he was 4 or 5

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u/TributeBands_areSHIT 16d ago

Those are exceptions. Unfortunately most children who are non verbal by 4 require extensive services to catch up.

Rarely are these children just “really shy but fully capable of speech”. It takes WORK to get them to communicate 99% of the time.

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u/ashoka_akira 16d ago

I had a speech impediment as a child and a few years of speech therapy mostly cured it.

My problem is apparently my brain runs at 100/m an hour and my mouth can barely hit 60m/h, so a lot of my therapy was just learning to slow down a bit so my tongue wouldn’t trip over itself.

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u/Abracadaniel95 16d ago

My brain is often so far ahead of my mouth that I forget how the next thought began before my mouth can finish the current scentence and start the next. I have to pause to go back and try to piece together how it started. If the pause takes too long, the social anxiety comes in and freezes my brain entirely, extending the pause, which can worsen the freeze, further extending the pause, worsening the freeze, ect. It's awful. Sometimes, it goes on long enough that the other person picks up the conversation. There's no one to save me during public speaking.