Helping My Son Communicate His Needs

When I set about teaching my son to communicate his needs, I realized that there were two distinct processes involved in communicating needs:

1. Recognizing the body's needs

2. Communicating these needs

Recognizing Needs

We experience the world through our senses. Sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell are the five basic senses. There are three additional senses that are recognised now, bringing the total number of senses to eight:

1. Visual sense

2. Auditory sense

3. Tactile sense

4. Gustatory sense

5. Olfactory sense

6. Vestibular sense

7. Proprioceptive sense

8. Interoceptive sense

Many children on the spectrum suffer from sensory processing issues or Sense Processing Disorder (SPD) which affects the way the brain interprets the signals it receives from the sensory systems, leading to "abnormal" responses.

A lot of issues faced by kids with autism, like behavioral issues, feeding issues, potty training issues, motor coordination issues, and so on, can be because of sensory processing issues.

The sense which allows us to recognize what is going on within our bodies is called interoception. I did various activities with my son to help improve his sense of interoception.

You can read more about interoception and the activities that you can do to improve interoception at The Inspired Treehouse

Communicating Needs

When my son was non-verbal, he would communicate basic needs through gestures. It was easy for me to understand these gestures because I was with him 24/7 since the day he was born. However, it was not so easy for others to understand his gestures including his father. I wondered how I could help my son communicate his needs in a way that others could understand. My son loved colors so I got an idea. I made color-coded cards for all his needs. For eg: red for hunger, orange for thirst, yellow for potty, blue for tired, purple for sleepy green for all okay, and so on. I wrote the need in capital letters on the card, so that he would start recognizing the word as well. We sat down together and created the cards, with me explaining to him what each card represented, so that he would be familiar with them and feel comfortable and excited to use them. We laminated the cards and made a mini book out of them which he could carry with him anywhere. When he wanted to communicate a need, he would show the concerned person the equivalent card. This worked really well for him.

As he grew up and was able to recognize and communicate his needs with ease, I introduced the concept of degree to him. I again used colors for this. For eg: green = not hungry, yellow = slightly hungry, orange = moderately hungry, red = very hungry. Once he became adept at using colors to convey degrees, I switched to numbers. I used 5 point scales to start with, then moved to 10 point scales and percentages.

Now, when he tells me he's hungry, and I ask him how hungry, he will say, I'm at 6 or I'm at 8 or any another number between 0-10 depending on how hungry he is, 0 being not hungry at all, and 10 being starving. If he's not feeling well, he'll say, I'm not feeling a 100%. I'm at 50%, and so on.

Love,

Preeti

DISCLAIMER: Please note that I am neither a doctor, a therapist, or a special educator. I am the mother of a young man with special needs. Everything I write is based on my personal experiences with my son and should not be taken as or in place of professional advice.