Teaching non and pre-verbal kids to read?

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Ah...! !! I am very happy to say "I told you so ! !!" in this case, PDDTwinMom. Happy for you and your little one. Enjoy the normalcy and these early years ! Congratulations !

Why so early, you may ask. I guess we taught our children to read early on, because we wanted them to be able to talk and to socialize.

Knowing what I know today, I would recommend children to be able to recognize letters right after 12 months, and read words before 24 months. (My daughter recognized letters around 18 months, I think, and read words around 27 months. She was able to read cursive writing around 2 and a half, too. By 4 years old, she was reading Diary of a Wimpy Kid, a book for 10 year olds.) Both of my children learned to read before they learned to talk. For children on the spectrum, we really ought to develop them by using their strong visual-manual channel, instead of their weak aural-oral channel. So,

typical children: socialization --> speech --> reading
children with autism: reading --> speech --> socialization

The right question for children on the spectrum should be: why do you want your children to socialize so early?

By focusing on speech and socialization only, the lives of all too many children on the spectrum have been ruined. All too many parents and therapists are oblivious to the visual-manual talents of their children. Guess what happens next when these kids go to school? When they start to learn to read by age 5 or 6, they will need to struggle with two input signals: letter patterns and speech signal, the latter incomprehensible to them. Many of these children will then slur. And that ends up harming their self-esteem. What for?

By teaching your children to read first, they will actually talk and socialize sooner, and better. Why? You may ask.

It's because the brains of the children are not damaged. They have more synaptic connections than their typical peers. In other words, they have all the physical synaptic connections in place for verbal and socialization skills. Once you know that, then you would not worry about the verbal and social part, at all. Verbal and social development should have never been a priority, for children on the spectrum. Yes, we all want our children to be verbal and social, but the right way to get there is by developing their visual-manual skills first. Don't turn the lives of these children upside-down, just because you want them to follow the paradigm of typical children. Develop their brains by using signals that they can understand (pictures and reading), not by bombarding them with noises that they don't understand.

My daughter is now 6-to-be-7, and she is fully verbal and fully social, with good leadership skills and highest self esteem. How did she get all that? I guess because she was able to read early on, she made friends in class by reading books to her friends in preschool and kindergarten. ABA also helped her social skills, but her reading and picture skills were the bedrock of her development.

Why teach children on the spectrum to read so early on? Because we want them to be verbal, social, happy, self-confident, and successful in life.

Jason

Thanks for the update! I always find it interesting to hear what happened (and frustrated when a thread just leaves us hanging!)

Not all kids on the spectrum have a strong visual-manual channel. My DS tested 2-3 years delayed in a bunch of visual processing areas. He's actually dyslexic due to visual processing causes. Learning to read was hard enough at ages 6-8, there's no way he could have done it at the ages you suggest. Temple Grandin identifies 3 types of thinkers among autistics -- visual, auditory, and pattern. I believe my son is in the pattern group.

HisMom - I will take that "I told you so" all day!! You certainly did. Thank you, thank you for laying it all out for me.

I'm not sure if teaching them to read will help their communication skills. Reading does have two parts after all, decoding the word, then comprehending the meaning. I'm hopeful that the process will shed some light on how they think. If they can decode, but not comprehend, if they can't decode or have trouble going from left to right, etc, etc. I really am just trying to learn as much about them as I can as early as possible, so that I can put the right supports in place. I'm terrified of my kids floundering and getting their self-esteem crushed due to something that could have been identified and addressed early on.

Thanks again, everyone!

I learned to read at 2 and speak at 8 and socialize at 12-14.
I think reading gave me language foundation even though I didn't use language for communication (no speaking or writing).
I am sure I didn't comphrehend 90% of what I read since I read many years ahead of my age, but reading still gave me strong foundation of knowing the meanings of individual words and simple phrases.
This meant that when I started to learn speaking from books and teachers (not speech therapists), it was easy to translate what I could read into what I could say, and by 8, I was old enough to understand the 8-year-old speech level through reading and speaking.
So this allowed me to develop quickly in speaking and become fluent in 1 year.
So reading played big role in my language development, and reading comprehension was not important.

Thanks for this btbnnyr!! This is surely the most important thing that any parent of a non-verbal/pre-verbal child should consider.

I think it's easy for a parent to give up just because you perceive your child is not comprehending!

I'll back this up and say to any parent that reading to your child is super critical even if they are not responding. Keep going.....

Last edited by cyberdad on 07 Oct 2014, 1:26 am, edited 1 time in total.

Sometimes, therapists or teachers talk crap when you tell them that a hyperlexic kid is reading advanced stuff years ahead of their age.
They'll say, "but she doesn't understand what she's reading!"
Yeah, but at least she can read it, the other kids aren't even reading it, and if they did, they wouldn't understand it either.
It's like they always need to find something wrong with the poor autistic child.

My younger son reads and writes but doesn't use writing to communicate and doesn't seem to have very good comprehension. I do kind of wonder if it's really that good... I mean I'd rather he knows how to read than he doesn't know how to read, but him knowing how to read doesn't seem to change anything as far as I can tell. We still don't know what he's thinking because his writing is just like his speech- directly echolalic, or scripted from a movie/radio ad- he doesn't write anythign original or anything that appears in context, so nobody else knows what it means. That's not me trying to take away from his accomplishment of reading at 2, it's that I just want some functional skills. I hope it's benefiting him but all I can do is hope, which is frustrating. Hearing you say it benefited you is nice to hear though, and the long-term hope here is one day my son will be able to confirm...

Edit: Also I don't know how I missed your video PDDtwinmom, but: awww how cute! His interaction looks great to me. He definitely looks like he'll be talking soon.

My son HATES books. When I say that he HATES books, I mean he just absolutely hates them. He screams when he sees any of us approaching him with a book in hand, and this has been very difficult for us. We now have a simple goal that he will look at simple baby books for about 45 seconds at a time (he is 5). It's hard but it's a start.

I read somewhere that children on the spectrum learn written language before they learn spoken language (which is the opposite of NT language development). Since he is still very delayed in his language development, I hope that reading and writing might help at least a bit. I do want to presume competence, but when he screams at the mere sight of a book, it just crushes us. But thanks for the warm words of encouragement to keep on keeping on. Much appreciated.

I really don't understand the debate about teaching kids to read early. It seems like there is only upside, right? It may help their speech and language development, or it won't. But it certainly can't hurt, right? What am I missing? Maybe folks are concerned about putting too much pressure on the children? If so, that's easily managed by taking it slow and going at the child's pace. I dunno, this particular issue is so confusing to me.

bbtnnyr - I am so glad to hear your thoughts on the subject. I love the connections that reading early helped you make. If we can get any portion of that over here, I'd consider it to be a win!

HisMom - I'm sorry to hear that books are such an issue. Do you think the book itself is the problem, or could your son have a negative association with them? By that, I mean like, maybe every time you read books to him, he sat on your lap, and the lap caused a negative sensory experience. Or, the texture of the pages bothers him. Or maybe all of the colors overwhelm him visually. I don't know, just brainstorming, and if there is an association or sensory issue, then that makes this a solvable problem.

Waterfall I was going to suggest signing as well - we used it for our NT daughter before she spoke and it worked very well.

As for teaching a child to read the best method is to read to them - not just books you think they can read either but books with big words too. Also books on tape/computer is another way for them to get more exposure to words.

I think it's kind of like "toilet training" a 2 month old. Sure, you can attempt to toilet train your 2 month old, but chances are pretty good, they won't be fully trained until 2 years. You could also just start at 2 years and rather than take 2 years, take 2 weeks to do it... So basically you're just making the process take longer. In my native country, school starts at age 7. So you'd think 8 year olds there would be way behind 8 year olds in North America, since North American 8 year olds have been in school since they were 4-5...but they're not! The reason is, they learn to read faster at 7 than they do at 4, because they're more ready. So they just spend less time at it to achieve the same accomplishment. Obviously that's "on average" though and I guess most ASD kids are not the average, so that may not apply to them... But in general that's the argument against early reading programs.

Ahhh, got it. The toilet training analogy really resonates with me, especially since we haven't mastered that yet, either!

Thanks, WelcometoHolland! And thanks for your compliment about my son.

It is the pressure and the fact that kids and up getting falsely labeled as having reading issues, when they are just a year a two away, and they will just catch up naturally then. They don't want to wait until 7 or 8 to start remediation b/c by age 8 or 9 they are having to take standardized tests.

I am of the mind that earlier on, reading should be lower-key and focused on enjoyment. If some kids can read, then let them read. If some kids like to be read too, only, without the pressure, then do that with those kids. They have reading groups early on, anyway, so it would not be hard to customize the experience.

Makes total sense! We're taking a veerrryy low pressure approach. Right now, we can only get through three pages of a learn-to-read book before they're off. It's a little strange because they can sit through a whole book when they're being read to. But, that's okay! We'll just play it by ear. Thanks, ASDMommy!

It's not really the reading that caused me to naturally learn to speak though. It was that reading was a foundation of language on which specific training was applied so I could learn to speak and communicate explicitly. If I was left alone to read and people thought I could naturally pick up speech one day, I don't know when that would have happened.