Have your child get Speech Therapy for Autism
The formative years of an autistic person’s life have an enormous effect on their lifetime. Autistic children can benefit immensely from speech therapy to help them refine their communication skills. In most cases, a diagnosis of in alignment with autism spectrum disorder will result in a referral for speech therapy. With autistic children who have limited or compromised speech, help in forming words and sentences can be a lifeline. Even for autistic children with more developed verbal skills, there often exist impediments to communication. Often when a child with autism speaks they will make errors involving misuses and misunderstanding of language. At Children’s Speech Care Center, we understand that providing an autistic child with speech therapy means treating the whole family. Speech therapy for autism requires coordinating goals and treating each child with individualized care, based on learning and enjoyment. Your family can attend between one and three times a week. You’ll experience our highly experienced and well-trained professionals providing formal and informal therapies. We cannot stress enough the importance of early intervention to address language delays in your child before they begin attending school.
Principles of Speech Therapy for Autistic Children
First studied clinically by Dr Leo Kanner and Dr Hans Asperger near-simultaneously on different sides of the Atlantic, autism and Asperger’s syndrome have been publicly known of for around 75 years. Approximately 1 in 60 children have some form of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as it has been known since 2013. It is thought to be four times more common in boys than girls, but otherwise occurs throughout all racial, ethnic, and socioeconomic groups. Though symptoms can be recognized before a child’s first birthday, the median age at which ASD is formally diagnosed is 4 years and 8 months. This delay is because autism is not a cut-and-dry diagnosis. An autistic child may have an intellectual disability, or above average IQ. Some children with autism diagnoses are completely non-verbal. Others may talk but with a singular focus, such as a personal interest they have. That focus could lead to a phenomenal faculty for knowledge on that topic, be it a television show, animals, trains, or something else entirely. Still others might be generally talkative but find it hard to build relationships with others. Therefore there is a loose framework to abide by, rather than a hard and fast approach.
- Secure functional and spontaneous communication: ensure that the autistic child has the tools they need to communicate basic wants and needs without prompting.
- Social instruction in various settings: autistic children can struggle with the intuition necessary to pick up what behavior is socially acceptable in various environments. This can be an especial handicap in school. Strategies that can assist this include visual supports, and video modeling or social stories to demonstrate expected behavior.
- Peer interactions: depending on the age, autistic children require different support for their peer interaction skills.
- Training and support for the child’s support network: family, caregivers, and teachers can benefit from the empathy they learn from working with the speech therapist. What’s more, the child gaining more practice for the techniques they learn in therapy will help their skills develop faster.
- Refine communication skills: autistic children can struggle with elements like grammar, figurative language, and asking and answering questions.
Autism Speech Therapy Techniques
There are numerous ways to communicate with a child who has special needs. Of course, each child is an individual, and nobody experiences autism in the same way. Some children have more profound developmental disabilities than others. Our approach is a holistic manner of treatment. This can require accommodations at school, therapy, medicine, and more. Depending on your child’s functional level, different skills may be prioritized by the speech therapist. Of course, the fundamentals are most important. Can your child communicate their basic needs in a free and spontaneous manner without having to be prompted? If your child is hungry, tired, or in pain, they need to be able to share that with you.
- Non-verbal communication: can involve teaching gestural communication, or training with non-verbal communication tools like Picture Exchange Cards (PECs) and electronic talking devices.
- Body language: speech therapists can teach children how to better understand social communication through body language. Dilemmas like ‘is this person joking or serious?’ or ‘is this a private conversation or is it alright to join?’ Speech therapists can also assist autistic children with unspoken rules of conversation such as the appropriate amount of eye contact to maintain.
- Prosody: this term relates to the natural rise and fall of a voice in conversation. Many autistic people have flat prosody, which can unnerve people or give them the impression that they have no emotions. Speech language therapy is able to help autistic children develop their vocal skills to hold a conversation with more typical-sounding prosody.
- Conversational skills: autistic children can sometimes struggle to participate in actual conversations as opposed to making statements. Speech therapists can assist with back-and-forth exchange.
- Social skills: the ability to ask and answer questions, assess the ‘mood’ of a room or individual, stand at an appropriate distance from a conversational partner, etc. Speech therapists can provide guidance on all of these.
Some of these techniques involve exercises that you can take home and work on with your child. Practicing conversational routines (simple, common speech cycles) is one such example. You can begin activities such as sliding down a slide by initiating a routine of ‘ready, steady, go’. After establishing this as a routine, you can prompt your child by beginning the routine and encouraging them to finish it. Finishing the routine with a reward (such as the fun of going down the slide) is an excellent method of positive reinforcement. It means children will be more attentive to conversation.
Find a Speech Therapist for Your Autistic Child in Los Angeles
Speech language pathologists (SLPs) are well-established in American healthcare. There are a wide range of insurance plans that will cover all or part of the cost. Your child’s school or early intervention provider may provide the service for free. Above all, though, a therapist must be a good personal match for your child’s needs. We encourage you to meet, interview, and observe our therapist as they get to know your child. Some therapists are more effective with verbal children, and some get better results with non-verbal children. Broadly speaking, you should look for a practitioner certified by the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). In the vast majority of cases, you are not going to be looking for a specialist in articulation or remedying stutters. Seek an SLP who tests not only for the ability to produce sounds and words, but the use of language to communicate. Does your child get jokes, get intonation, make eye contact when in conversation? The SLP should be able to engage your child to the extent that they make eye contact independent of requests. And, of course, your SLP should work to your child’s strengths. If your child is a visual learner, they will be poorly served by exclusive focus on auditory work.
Speech Therapy Benefits for Autistic Children
Autistic children often struggle in peer interactions. Where siblings can learn to accommodate the needs and communication style of an autistic sibling, classmates will likely not. However, speech therapy can furnish autistic children with the interaction skills necessary to build relationships with their peers. For example, younger children might learn play skills, practicing how to get along with other children during play. They may also learn to respond appropriately when other children use their name, or practice joint attention to ‘tune in’ when conversations or other pertinent interactions are happening. Older children can benefit from perspective-taking, understanding things from another perspective. They may also target conversational skills, looking at elements that the child lacks with typical interactions between other students and adults.
Of course, the benefit of speech therapy is not restricted to the autistic individual. The whole family will learn how to communicate better. Don’t make the mistake of imagining that the only way for your child to improve their communication skills is for them to have more exposure to their SLP. The reason that the family and educators are looped into the speech language therapy team is so that they can continue to apply and extend the methods and principles practiced in therapy outside of the clinical context. Autistic children benefit most from speech therapy when their family and teachers help them apply the skills they acquire in therapy in everyday life. This way, not only will the child benefit from the therapy time and external practice, they will reap the additional boon of their caregivers’ and educators’ broadened comprehension of their process.
You can change your child’s life today. Give them the gift of speech therapy for autism with the specialist SLPs of the Children’s Speech Care Center. Call (310) 856-8528 to find out how.