RE: Kids w/ Classic Autism, PDD-NOS & Speech Delays

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My daughter loves pizza night, she puts on a napkin, gets her knife and fork out and cuts the pizza into little pieces. She then takes each morsel on the fork and stuffs it down out throats!

Sounds pretty similar and since your daughter also has dyspraxia Its even more likely that this is what may have happened. Did he loose his speech in the same way...suddenly having trouble saying words and getting frustrated? That thing in the video is cool. I mean I know you can get your computer to talk but its not as easy to carry around unless you got one of those little lap tops with the voice. Actually that may be cheaper than this thing because you know anything they make for special needs kids they have to jack up the price a few thousand!

His words just got less and less frequent so I don't know..but he makes lots of 'vocalisations' and sometimes I think he's trying to make words, but it could be wishful thinking on my part. Thats the problem with having little or no communication with him, can't ask him

I wonder what is going on with my kid. He will say things for a few days, then we don't hear them again for a loooooooong time, if at all. For example a couple of weeks ago he started asking "Where" questions. We were thrilled. But after two days he stopped and we have not heard it since. Is this what is called "regression?" I don't know if he's forgetting it or can't be bothered or what...

We had a similar pattern, we used to write down new words he would use, but some he used once only. Words were often but not always spoken with precision e.g. chocolate was annunciated chock-oh-late with a rising inflection on the 'oh' part.
I have similar thoughts..why did he stop with each one of those? Forgetting, lack of motivation? I don't really think so, I just think he couldn't access those words anymore until there were none left.

My daughter does this sometimes. I think your son needs to decode the meaning of "where" and be comfortable using it in context, otherwise it's just parroting something he hears.

My daughter talked yesterday about Harry Potter and we were amazed. Only a little later we realized she heard a TV advertisement.

I think that it could be called regression. My older son with classic autism regresses if he is removed from his routine too long.

There were a couple of times when his speech regressed a lot. Once when he was about 1 year old when my parents cared for him for two weeks while I recovered from a back injury and once when he was 18 months old and I got really busy with work and was too busy and tired to work with him much for about a month.

I have heard of other kids forgetting skills over summer school break and any other time that they do not use the skills for a while.

I have also heard of regression when a child has been switched from a private school for autistic children or full-time private ABA to public school services.

At least one child that I know of regressed due to either overmedication or a poor reaction to Risperdal, which can impair cognitive functions but can help with agression.

Here, in the school districts around Austin, a child in special ed will qualify for summer school services if the child demonstrates regression after school breaks--winter break, spring break, etc. Therefore, regression--either deteriorating behavior or loss of skills is common.

One thing that I really like about having a whole lot of DVDs, computer programs, non-fiction picture books, and other educational materials in the home is that my older son is constantly reviewing things that he has learned. This seems to help with the regression.

(I haven't been writing for a while because I've been out of town.)

Hmmm, thanks. This is actually something of a conern for me as there are no obvious triggers. I hope he's not losing brain cells...

I have another topic I've been wondering about - generalization. For example, they may think the word "cup" only refers to one particular cup instead of all cups in general.

From what I understand ASD kids usually have trouble with this. The thing is, I don't see this with my son. For example, last weekend we were in a coffee shop and he thought the little creamers were yogurt. (He has been on a big yogurt kick lately.) This is more in line with what an NT kid would do, from what I understand. (For example NT kids first learning to talk might call all four-legged animals dogs.)

Do you have any similar experiences with your kids?

Actually my daughter has different names for cups at home but they are not necessarily conventional. For instance a coffee mug with a weird design she called "funny cup" and then one with stripes is "stripey cup". I guess NT kids her age are now classifying objects.

Ok I just happened upon this. I am not posting this to promote it but it's a good concise summary of how all the biomed stuff is supposed to work including the diet. So, basically, if anyone is going to believe that the diet actually affects autism symptoms (not just celiac symptoms) then you need to swallow all this whole like a mega-sized horse pill gagging you.

http://autism-nutrition.com/causes-of-autism

Again please take all this with a grain of baloney. They don't even link to any research articles on that page.

Right now after months of picking up my son from his high chair and refusing to put him down until he says "Mommy, put me down" he's now saying it without hesitation, but when his father is holding him he still says "Mommy, put me down" even though he knows I'm Mom and Dad is Dad, now we're going to work on "Daddy put me down". For the longest time he made a game of it and would keep saying "open" instead of "put me down", I think he found my responses amusing so he made a game of the whole thing giving me the wrong response on purpose. Today at the grocery store there was a pile of dirt on the floor in the checkout line and the janitor came to sweep it up while we were checking out and after he'd swept it up my son said to him "Thank you sir!" (the janitor said "you're welcome!) ... that was unexpected.

Cute! My son also rather likes to give the wrong answer. We have borrowed a DVD called Transporters, made for auties to learn emotions, which has quizzes on each segment (eg "Emily was swaying in the wind. Was she scared, happy or surprised?"). At first I thought my son was really bad at figuring out what the appropriate emotion was. Then I finally twigged that he was going through each wrong response first before finishing with the right answer. Why? Because when you choose the wrong answer you get a picture of a pile of smelly fish. My son likes fish (except on his plate).

I can't say I've noticed an issue with generalisation with my boy. Either it isn't an issue he has, or it hasn't shown up yet (or it's been so subtle we haven't spotted it).

I have only occasionally had this issue.

I heard of one situation where a speech therapist was working with a nonverbal child using a particular set of flashcards with numbers on them. The child was finally able to state what was on the cards but could not generalize to identify numbers in other situations.

I think the problem was that the child was not exposed to the target words in a variety of contexts and formats. I think that if you use lots of different picture dictionaries, lots of different sets of flashcards, put labels on stuff around the house, use speech videos, computer, etc., the child will be able to generalize from the teaching tool to the stuff around him or her.

Further, regarding regression, helping my son learn to read and write well seems to help his memory, maybe because he is a much better visual learner than oral learner. He can take in written material visually, and we have a library of non-fiction picture books that he can read over and over again. The more knowledge that a person has, the easier it is for him to learn new things and remember it.

Finally, regarding the child forgetting the "where" questions, teach2talk.com has a DVD that teaches "where" questions. Babybumblebee.com has a good "wh" question DVD. You can also make your own "where" question DVD if you are pretty technical. Perhaps the child needs a lot of repetition of concepts in order to really get them down.

I have figured out how to burn DVDs off of YouTube--a pretty cheap way to come up with a lot of speech DVDs.

It wasn't even something we taught him. He came up with it himself. But I only heard him say it 3 times over 2 days. I don't understand why this would happen...

He probably saw the "where" question used in a video or saw someone use it and decided to copy it. (My older son had echolalia, and this would happen fairly often--just get fixated on a phrase that he heard in a children's movie.) I think that the most important thing is that he learned how to use "where," so if he is worked with enough, he can learn to start using it again.

My older son with classic autism needed speech help all day long in order to learn to speak. I had a VCR and DVD player in his play area and would keep it running whenever I was not working with him. My older son learned receptive speech (understanding spoken words) long before he learned to speak well, and he is still better with receptive speech. It is a marathon.

Another good "where" video is "Where's Spot" which goes along with a popular children's book.

I made a whole lot of videos dealing with asking and answering questions because my own son had so much trouble with this issue.