Hi, my 2.7yr old boy has just been diagnosed with autism and is not speaking yet. We are trying to motivate him to communicate and I was wondering if you could share some experiences of your own regarding getting your child to say their first words. My boy babbles a lot and I think the docs are hopeful he will speak. It would be great to hear from people with similar problems and let me know what their outcomes were :-)
Hi - I can understand you being unsure where to start + wanting to do the best thing to help your son. The way things happened with us was quite a long time ago now. I think anyone, autistic or not, responds much more positively if they're engaged in something they enjoy doing. My son loved Thomas the Tank Engine so we wd say single words such as the engines' names, colours, numbers etc. when he was playing with them. If he freeze framed a Thomas video because a particular bit really interested him we wd do the same. On a slightly different angle, he wd freeze-frame quite regularly, sometimes second by second to build up the sequence of events so he cd understand. I wd explain things to him. When he started talking he wd ask questions about his interests. Pics of things he's interested in can be used the same way, etc. If you already do all this sort of thing then sorry for telling you what you already know 
but that's all we did + the ST + teachers did the rest. I do think their efforts "kick started" him. Until then he hadn't tried to say anything, despite my efforts. Altho if he needed to know something, he always found a non-verbal way of getting an answer.
Hopefully other posters will have advice to offer.
Hi - I can understand you being unsure where to start + wanting to do the best thing to help your son. The way things happened with us was quite a long time ago now. I think anyone, autistic or not, responds much more positively if they're engaged in something they enjoy doing. My son loved Thomas the Tank Engine so we wd say single words such as the engines' names, colours, numbers etc. when he was playing with them. If he freeze framed a Thomas video because a particular bit really interested him we wd do the same. On a slightly different angle, he wd freeze-frame quite regularly, sometimes second by second to build up the sequence of events so he cd understand. I wd explain things to him. When he started talking he wd ask questions about his interests. Pics of things he's interested in can be used the same way, etc. If you already do all this sort of thing then sorry for telling you what you already know but that's all we did + the ST + teachers did the rest. I do think their efforts "kick started" him. Until then he hadn't tried to say anything, despite my efforts. Altho if he needed to know something, he always found a non-verbal way of getting an answer.
Hopefully other posters will have advice to offer.
