Hi, folks. Happy Tuesday. Happy April. Happy Autism Awareness or Acceptance Month, which is I don’t love those terms. They, they’re just nowhere near. Enough. Honestly, I wanna make this autism celebration month autistic joy month, autistic understanding month. There’s so many more directions we can go, go a little bit deeper than just being aware or like accepting.

It’s kind of only a tiny step beyond tolerating. Anyway so those are my thoughts on that. I’ll be sharing a lot more over the month. About being autistic, the good, the bad, the tricky, all of that. Hello, friends joining. So cool to see some familiar and some new names as well. So these Q and As that I’m running this week.

They kind of have two purposes. One is to clarify any questions people have about my affirming communication for autistic children, course for speech therapists. Number two is also a space to ask questions about what communication support looks like for autistic children in a neurodiversity affirming framework.

And you know, some of this, I go into great depth in the course and other things. There’s just. You know, nuance questions off the back of my, you know, podcast episodes. The webinar that I did the other week, which is still available, if you’ve registered for the turning affirming webinar, you should have the recording link, so that’s available till Friday as well.

I had a couple of questions come in and I thought they go really well together today.

Around speech sounds, working on speech sounds or articulation with autistic kids, which actually Christina, you and I, we’ve had a great conversation about this. And you and I have each shared online a little bit about that. So Christina being free to be me speech. So go follow her if you’re not already.

And yeah, it’s something I’ve talked about, but I’ll definitely cover this question. And the other one was a brilliant question that came in from a colleague of mine who’s not a speechy, but it was just such a really useful, it just fits so beautifully here, which is the question of is PECS affirming Pecks being PECS Picture Exchange communication system?

So we’ll go there. And first I’m gonna make sure, before I forget it, I had somebody ask me about what are the AI tech tools in my affirming communication for autistic children course? They said, I don’t really get what that is totally fair. And I think I made an assumption. I was like, oh, I know what these are, so I’m gonna just talk about them.

And. Like put them on the website, but I haven’t demonstrated them or really shown them. What I’ll say is I’m going to probably do a video today. I’ll try to do it today. Uh, a little demo where I can actually show what the AI tech tools are in action because I think that will make it make more sense.

So I’ll make sure I put that on Instagram, but I will just explain them so I’ve got them. Little. That’s my notes there to make sure I don’t forget one. Basically I have created three custom chat GBT tools as a compliment to the affirming communication for Autistic children course. It kind of answers the question of like, right, I’ve got the theory, I’ve got the ideas, I’ve got the info, but I’m so busy.

How do I actually. Like, put that into action with my clients. So I wanted to help people who are doing my course to actually shortcut the getting it into action. So I’ve got things, I’ve got templates, resources, all of those more traditional things that come with the course. And they’re awesome and I get great feedback.

But what I’ve got are these three new tools. ’cause we roll with technology. So one is the ND affirming report language bot. Now many of you. Like many thousands of you have my neurodiversity affirming report language cheat sheet, which basically takes what is more like deficit based traditional wording you might see in reports and gives an affirming reframe.

So I’ve now created an AI bot that basically has that discussion with you to help you figure out how can you shift the language that is true, but affirming for a child that you’re supporting. And, uh, it, yeah, like it’s all, don’t give it identifying information. It tells you that, like, don’t tell me identifying information.

But it can be really useful to. Tool for you to go, well, here’s a paragraph I just wrote for my client, and I’m not quite sure that this is affirming, and you can go back and forth and kind of get coached on how to make that better. Uh, the second tool is the sticky questions bot. Uh oh. I just made balloons happen.

How cool is that? Wow. That was fun. Okay. There’s sticky questions, but is basically when we’re talking about having, uh, advocacy conversations, tricky conversations with a parent or a caregiver or another person in a child support team, and they’re not quite aligned with us. It’s a tricky conversation.

You know what they are, you feel it maybe in your body. And this is basically an AI tool to help you. Use my framework to think through and plan your responses. My framework is actually called plan to go step by step to help you figure out what do you wanna do about that tricky conversation. How do you wanna proceed?

The third AI tool in the affirming communication for Autistic children course is this interest goal, matchup bot. So I love talking about pairing a child’s interests, that genuine interest, how they wanna play, how they wanna engage the, to the, the topics that they love. I wanna pair that with making it a useful learning activity.

Caution that this is separate from withholding something of interest and making it not fun anymore because we are then changing it and making the child only do it in our way with our agenda and not actually have it be enjoyable anymore. We are not doing that. We’re not trying to break the fun for kids.

We want to ensure that we’re supporting autistic kids around the interests and the activities that they love in a genuine way, and then using those things as a naturalistic. Context and a very functional context for them to then work on the other goals that they’re learning and working towards, whether it’s communication goals, uh, literacy goals, et cetera.

So, so much more about that. I’ve got a whole module pretty much that I share about that in the course. And what I then have is the AI tool I built, which it basically asks you what are some of the interests that the child has, what are some goals? And it comes up with creative ideas that you can just go and run with.

Honestly, they’re brilliant. Like I myself. Could never have come up with that many ideas. And I think I’m pretty good at this interest goal matching. So, uh, that is the third AI tool included in the course. Sidebar. I’m vaguely considering one day maybe giving access just to the three tools as their own separate things.

So if you’re of interest, like if you’re interested in that, let me know. I’ll just pop it in my noggin. Let me know what you think. Anyway, let’s come back to the other questions that we had today. So we’re on my note. Let’s first is around supporting an autistic child with speech sounds. Okay, so this person asked, do you have any PD resources or advice for working on speech sounds within a neurodiverse model?

I think they mean neurodiversity affirming model, particularly with children who are less interested in trying sounds and getting a reward, for example, in behavioral approach, or less able to be directed in general. I do. Yes. So one of the modules in my speechy course talks about this specifically. We talk about the idea, well, I just have to go out and say it all.

Communication is valid. So speech as much as our community generally depends where you live and the community you live in. But broadly, our community prizes speech is the best form of communication. It’s better than all the others. That’s not true if it’s not true for that person. It can be convenient, but it’s not good.

It’s not the best form of communication if it is not that person’s best form of communication in that moment, and forcing, coercing, encouraging, asking an autistic child to speak when they’re. Not really good at it. Not wanting to, not feeling like that’s what they wanna do. They have maybe motor planning difficulties.

Maybe they, they don’t even need a reason. Honestly. You don’t need a reason to not speak. We, the people around that child need to be able to adapt and adjust our communication to respect and honor their communication exactly how it is in that moment. It’s incredibly ableist to be asking everyone to communicate in a certain way and P prising that way.

Speech, mouth words as the only way that is valid or worthwhile. If you’re a speech therapist and you don’t deeply get that, please do my course honestly. Also in my evolve your affirming practice free training, which is a podcast based training, and you’re welcome to just, uh, send me a dm, EAP, evolve Your Affirming Practice, and I’ll send you the link for that in that training.

There is another, it’s like a mini episode where I talk more about this question about, you know, supporting autistic children with speech sounds. Now I’m not saying hello. Hey jam. Nice to see you there. I’m not saying never work on speech with an autistic child. Absolutely not. But if that child is not interested, if they’re not engaging, if it’s not working for them to do that kind of speech therapy, that kind of repetitive articulation, you know, the buy the book, the way that the research says it must be done, that kind of approach is not going to work for that child in an affirming way, in a compliance based way, maybe, yes, you might get the child doing the therapy. They might kind of, play along depending if they’re like kind of a compliant kind of kid and sometimes that’s at the detriment of the child.

They might be heavily masking their own. Incredible discomfort, incredible effort, fullness because they think that the right thing to do is to sit there and practice their speech sounds because everyone around them is telling them that that’s the most important thing, even if they feel incredibly distressed inside to to be experiencing that.

It’s very nuance. It’s complicated. So please do look into my affirming communication for Autistic children course. Please do also look at my free training, evolve your affirming practice, where I talk more about this question of speech sounds. But you’re on the right track. And I guess what I’m saying here is your questioning is, is it possible to do this and be neurodiversity affirming?

And the answer is yes. Sometimes you can do speech sounds, work with a child, or articulation therapy with a child who is autistic, and it be neurodiversity affirming. It’s very individual and it’s a question of is it okay for the child? Do they actually enjoy it? Do they, are they motivated? Are they engaged?

Are they enjoying that interaction with you or does it feel really rigid and disinteresting and way too effortful and. Is it at the expense of telling them that their natural way and their preferred way of communicating is actually okay? Are we just completely ignoring other ways that that child is communicating?

Because, you know, maybe it’s less convenient for us, so we need to make sure we are not perpetuating this idea that, you know, speech is the only and most valid form of communication. I do love to ramble and rant on that one. It’s so important. So there’s yeah. Lots of resources to keep going on that. I am going to turn my attention to PECS, the question of PECS, which was such a great question, uh, that a conversation I had with a colleague yesterday.

Her question was, is PECS affirming? It’s just communication via pictures, right? So I’ll say this was not a speechy who was asking this? So she was just trying to understand, you know, where PECS fits into the whole picture. So, PECS picture Exchange communication system on the whole is compliance based A, BA, it’s based on this idea that, you know, we ask a child to do something and they do a thing. It’s about compliance and control. It’s about getting the child to mold to our preferences for how we want them to communicate at the detriment of the child.

Often it’s about ignoring the way that the child might communicate in other ways. Grunt pull pointing, and we’re asking them, no, no, it’s only valid in this moment. Depends on their stage of pecks as well. But you know, we’re only gonna acknowledge their attempts that are actually handing us the card. So we talked about throwing the manual out the window and uh, my friend then shared this perfect gif.

I can’t remember what it said, but it was like a black and white GIF of like a girl, like throwing a book out the window. Perfect. I think it said, I don’t need this anymore. So this idea is. The resources, you know, images, visuals, they are inherently like neutral actually. So you can use PECS resources.

I’m going to say you can you can use visuals in really affirming ways. Visuals and visual communication boards visual a, a c devices, they can be incredibly affirming. They can be really wonderful, useful ways to support an autistic child’s communication or for an autistic child to communicate with us.

That’s awesome. It’s when it shifts to, I’m not gonna acknowledge the way you, you wanna communicate. I’m gonna ask you to conform to my rigid way where I need you to hand me the card in this way to show that you are requesting something and I’m gonna ignore all of your other attempts to communicate that are requesting something.

So, uh, it’s also really much about like withholding things of interest and, and motivating things. I’m not about that. We’ve talked about this. I’m all about joining the child in their joy, in their interest, in their pleasure, and, and just enjoying together the communication and learning It comes from.

Connection. It comes from relationship and it’s all about connection and relationship. It’s not about rigid structured decontextualize communication. Like honestly, we are here to support a child’s communication. Go back to, what is it? What is it all for? It’s just about connecting with other people.

That’s it. So how do we do that? I don’t think we do that by withholding the most interesting thing and ensuring that they give us a picture, because that’s the only way that we deem appropriate. Hmm. No we don’t. One of you said, I find some people unknowingly called picture cards, visuals, pecs. And yeah, and it’s important to help distinguish the difference.

It’s more a question of like, what do you do with the materials? And so like I was talking to my friend and I really wanted a really good, uh, analogy around this, like to help us understand this, you know, the materials versus the by the book, the manual. So the, uh, analogy we came up with not true chat.

GPT helped me because I was getting stuck. My nighttime brain was like, hmm. Finished, but I knew there was something there. So it, the analogy was a behavioral, like sticker chart, like a sticker reward chart that is like, you know, you get a sticker every time you do something good. Maybe you remove a sticker every time you do something bad.

These kind of behavioral like shame-based charts inherently not good, not good. That said, okay, I’ve used reward charts for myself as well, and sometimes I’ve used them for my daughter in positive ways in a thing that she actually initiated. So I am not saying. Nothing’s that black and white, but in a 15 minute live, we can only do so much.

But what I’m saying is these behavioral sticker reward charts generally non affirming. But take the stickers off. Use the stickers for whatever the heck you want. Get creative, make it pretty, make your life happy and joyful. Have fun with them. Then it’s affirming. So that’s the analogy we got to. So thank you all so much for joining this, this time goes fast when I get excited on these topics.

One of you said, how do you model to others if they have a non neuro affirming therapist? I mean, like, you know what, I’m actually, I love that question. I’m screenshotting it. Because I’m gonna tackle that one tomorrow. That’s gonna be such a great one. I’m gonna talk about this idea, like any questions that anyone has about like collaborating changing the minds of other people who are supporting a child or how we go about working in with a team that’s not fully affirming.

Please do feel free to, uh, throw those questions at me and I’ll address that one tomorrow. How do you model to others if they have a non neuro affirming therapist? I love it. Uh, thank you. Thank you so much for joining Speech Therapists. My course affirming Communication for Autistic Children is open until Friday, the 4th of April.

So, uh, like 1:00 PM Sydney time. So pretty much when this is coming out, it’s like doing the mass three days. Wednesday, three days, three days away. Depends when you’re listening. If you’re listening after the fact or watching after the fact, go and check out the information anyway, because you’ll be able to see, get on the wait list or see when it’s available.

Next. If you’re on Instagram, just comment ACAC as in for affirming communication for autistic children, those four letters, ACAC, and I’ll send you the link, or my robots will do that for you. Otherwise I’ll share. That elsewhere. Thank you for joining. I’d love to hear your questions. What else comes up for you?

And I will catch you tomorrow. Same time, same place. See ya.