Speech Is Not the Only Way a Child Tells You Something

There is a sentence I have heard in classrooms, clinics and meeting rooms for twenty years, almost always said kindly, and almost always at the exact moment a child has already told us what they need.

Use your words.

It is said warmly. It is meant well. And buried inside it is an assumption that does an enormous amount of damage: that communication means speech, and that anything arriving by another route is a lesser version of the real thing, or practice for it, or not communication at all.

What communication actually is

Communication is getting a message from one mind to another. That is the whole definition. Speech is one carrier. It happens to be the carrier most adults in a school find easiest, which is a fact about the adults and the building, not a fact about the message.

A child who hands you a card has communicated. A child who types on a tablet or a phone has communicated. A child who points, signs, leads you by the sleeve, shows you a photo, writes it down, uses a symbol board, puts their head on the desk, or walks to the door has communicated. A child who goes quiet when the room gets loud has communicated something very precise, and usually something we could have prevented.

None of those are warm-ups for speaking. They are the message, delivered.

Non-speaking is not non-verbal, and neither one means silent

The word non-verbal gets used as shorthand for a child who does not speak, and it is doing real harm, because verbal means words. Plenty of people who do not speak have a full and precise vocabulary. They read, they type, they spell, they choose exactly the right word and are furious when it is ignored. Calling them non-verbal tells the next adult who reads the file that there is nothing in there to listen to.

Non-speaking describes the channel. Non-verbal makes a claim about the mind. They are not the same word and we should stop swapping them.

The same goes for a child whose speech comes and goes. Many autistic children speak fluently in a calm room on a good day, and not at all when they are overloaded, frightened or exhausted. That is not a child choosing to be difficult at the worst possible moment. That is the channel going down under load, which is exactly when the message matters most, and exactly when we tend to demand it be sent the hard way.

The cost of only counting speech

When a system recognises only one channel, three things follow, and I have watched all three.

The child is recorded as not communicating, when what happened is that nobody received. The record then follows them, and every future adult starts from a false sentence.

The child learns that the effort is not worth making. If three clear attempts produce nothing, the fourth is not coming. We then call the withdrawal a symptom, when it is a rational conclusion.

And the need gets expressed the only way left. A child who cannot get "I need a break" received will eventually leave the room, or put their head down, or something louder. We log that as behaviour and write a plan about it, and the plan is about the child, and the thing that actually needed changing was our receiving.

What I would change on Monday

Accept the message in whatever form it arrives, first, and sort out the paperwork afterwards. If a child shows you a card, respond to the card. The response is what teaches them the channel works.

Put more than one channel in the room before anyone needs it. A break card on every desk, not just one child's. A pointing board by the door. A way to ask a question in writing during every lesson. An agreed signal that means I need to leave and I am not in trouble. If the only child with a card is the child with the diagnosis, you have built a label, not a route.

Never withhold a device or a board to encourage speech. There is no evidence that taking the working channel away produces the preferred one, and there is a great deal of evidence about what it costs. Giving a child a reliable way to be understood is the thing most likely to support speech, not the thing competing with it.

Write what happened, not what was missing. "Asked for a break using her device" is a true sentence. "Non-verbal, did not communicate" is not, and it will outlive everyone in the room.

And check what your signage is promising. A laminated notice saying the school is communication friendly commits the adults to receiving, not the children to speaking. If the target you set after all this is use spoken words, you have quietly moved the whole job onto the smallest person in the building.

The part I keep coming back to

At the kitchen table and in the classroom, the children I have known who were described as not communicating were almost always communicating constantly, and with considerable patience, to a room that had decided in advance what counted.

A child telling you something three times in three different ways is not a child with a communication difficulty. That is a child with excellent communication skills and an audience problem.

Inclusion by presence is not inclusion. Change the environment, not the child.

This piece accompanies The Laminator, Episode 15: Use Your Words, and the Rogues' Blog, Episode 7.

Elaine Walsh is the founder of Autism & Me (autismandme.ie), a Waterford-based neuroinclusive education consultancy. She writes here on Universal Design, inclusion and Irish education, from the twin vantage points of the classroom and the kitchen table.