Understanding unspoken language

I am writing today about understanding, reading and observing unspoken language. This means pre-verbal communication skills: Gestures, facial expressions, posture, behaviour, verbal utterances or approximations.

Throughout my career as an Instructor Therapist I have seen my fair share of behaviours with children diagnosed with ASD. Melt-downs, screaming, kicking, biting, spitting, hitting, punching, scratching, flopping, head banging, crying, pushing and self injurious behaviours. I have been taken down by behavioural 3 year old and suffered black eyes, bruises, cuts and scrapes and a sore body to go along with it!

Now there are two ways of looking at this. The first one is the behavioural approach. This is when we just deal with the behaviour that is presented. So for example the child starts hitting another child, then we would correct that behaviour. Behaviour intervention is a huge part of what we do from day to day. Teaching these children to handle these situations in a better way. For some children, this might mean removing them from the situation, as it becomes a safety issue for the people around. For others, we use special techniques to help the child to stop acting out. Sometimes, we have to simply ignore that behaviour because it is attention seeking.

The second and almost more important approach is the antecedent. What happened to cause this? What does it mean? What is the child trying to tell us? How do I help them?
This part for me...is much more important. Most often a child will demonstrate some sort of "sign" through pre-verbal skills that something is wrong. Their body language changes, they start to get agitated, eyes change, their focus becomes clouded. The hardest part for most people is "seeing" this and being aware that something is not right...before the behaviour occurs.

We all need to remember that for many of these more behavioural children, verbal communication is limited. They don't have the verbal skills to communicate their frustrations, feelings, thoughts or desires. For these children, they are communicating the best way that they know how to. It has worked for them up to now, and so they continue.

For a therapist, we have to "read" and try to figure out what is going on with the child...and hopefully prevent violent behaviours before they occur. This can be a huge challenge if you have not connected with the child. Even if you have connected and paired with the child and built a solid relationship...this can still be difficult. Paying attention, reading the non-verbal cues and observing is critical for some success to occur.

Even with all of this, behaviours will likely still occur. The hope is that they decrease, or become less intense as the child better learns to cope and communicate.