Ming from Agents of Speech explains why quizzing speech-delayed or autistic children backfires. A 12-year-old autistic girl kept telling her mother to leave until the mother stopped asking questions and matched her daughter's interests instead. Pressure to talk makes kids shut down.
A lot of times, parents are very worried. They're not having a conversation. Are they autistic? Let's say that they are. You go to autistic person and talk about things that they do not care about. What are they going to do? They're going to leave. A lot of what I see, like teachers, parents, other therapists, me, used to be as well, bombard them with conversations. They don't know how to talk, so I'm going to talk more. That's going to actually annoy the child. Right? I'm not telling you what you should do, what you should not do. I'm telling you what worked before. So back then, there was a girl who was 12. She was on the spectrum. She would tell the mom to go away. Whenever the mom tried to talk to her, she was like, go. Go upstairs, Mama. And when I started coaching the mom, I was saying, look, you're coming from a place where you want to talk to her, but she doesn't want to talk to you. Because every time you talk to her, it feels like you're quizzing her. You're asking questions that she doesn't know. You're saying things that she doesn't care about. She doesn't understand the reason why she has to entertain you at all.
