The Sure-Fire Step-by-Step Method to Teaching Eye Contact for Children with Autism

Hey, this is ming here from agentsofspeech.com I'm a speech therapist and today I want to talk about eye contact. Just because a lot of people have been asking. So if you haven't, you should watch the video about eye contact. The truth behind it, what I think about it in terms of should I teach it or not? The video will be linked around here. And the reason why I want to make this video is because there are some parents who are asking for a step by step process. First of all, I wanna repeat what I said in the other video. First is that I do not think teaching eye contact is that important. All right? Parents are usually overly attached to eye contact. They believe if a child isn't looking at you, they're not paying attention, they're not being friendly, they're not being social, they're delayed. Okay, that doesn't really make much sense, to be honest. But anyways, if you do wanna do it, I don't want to, I don't want to discourage you and I do not want to confuse you. So the method I talk about here is very structured so that you can actually follow through at home. So let's talk about shaping first. All right? So what is shaping is that we do not give a lot of feedback when shaping happens. So when you're teaching an animal, you are using shaping. All right? And the reason why we want to use shaping this time is because it's easy to understand for both parties, for you and the child. So when we do shaping, it means that you're teaching a seal to cross over a hoop. So in the beginning, you put the food right in front of them. If they walk 1cm towards the hoop, you still give it to them. The more the seal moves towards the hoop, the bigger piece of food it gets. The ultimate prize, of course, is over the hoop, right? So as they go closer, they understand, oh, I understand now. So the more close I get to the hoop, I get more food. So there are shaped to actually increase that behavior and become smarter in order to get the bigger prize, they do the correct behavior. So we're going to use it for eye contact for your child. And why we want to do this is because there are some things that do not work for sure. The first thing is that if you are holding your child's head and going like that, that's not gonna work because you are actually just prompting their neck muscles, right? You're just prompting them to like, face you in this way. But doesn't mean their eyes, their eyes could Be here or like this, right? They're gone. You cannot literally poke your fingers into their eyes and move the muscles and look at you, right? It's just impossible to prompt physically for the moment in time, okay? So don't do that. Doesn't work. Second thing, that doesn't work. Stop calling their name, okay? If they were to look at you when you call their name, then they would have already. It just doesn't work. Don't do it. In fact, it makes the whole experience of working with you very annoying. Without, with a lack of a better word, don't take this as offense. So it becomes repetitive, it becomes like, let's say your child's called Sean, right? You keep on Sean, Sean, Sean, Sean. Look like that. That doesn't work. Don't do it. All right? That just becomes annoyance. First of all, you want to set up the task so that you're only, only, only, only targeting eye contact, okay? So you want to start up with food because that's easy to understand. We put the child on a chair somewhere, like stable, on a sofa, wherever. And then you just wait. You just wait, all right? No matter what they do, they snatch or whatever, just don't care. And how you shape it is by actually, if they move their head towards you, their eyes, their head towards your body or towards your general direction, you give, alright, you reinforce, you give the food, all right? And you just wait. It's just a matter of a waiting game. You're teaching them a very structured way, a very slow way, but sure fire way. The more they look at you, remember the seal or the hoop. The more they look at you, the more accurate it becomes, the bigger the price. So slowly, you want to slowly, slowly, slowly help them to achieve this. And a lot of therapists do this. They tell you to put the thing near your eyes, right? Now that's a prompt, all right? Remember that. That's still okay, I think, but you still have to slowly, slowly fade it away. And the reason why I don't really like it sometimes is because let's say that you're prompting here, right? You put the food here and your child looks at you and then you give it and you say, nice. That's the best looking ever. That's right. But what if you put it down here? They're gonna start looking at the food again, all right? So instead what I like to do, I still use it sometimes, but I don't use it every time, right? So as long as they look at the general direction, I will reinforce. And we're not shooting for that. They're gonna look in the first week. This is a long game. We're gonna talk about, like, maybe a month, right? With a whole month of doing this and slowly shaping their behavior when they turn their heads toward us as the seal goes towards the hoop, right? These kind of things that slowly makes them understand the correct way, you know, like looking at me equals good stuff, equals good experiences, good food, fun. All right? And you want them to understand that this is the way to go. So I would sit them down every day for five to 10 minutes just to do this. I'm okay. The sole purpose is to do that. If you really want to. Okay. If you really want to. And there are only certain times where I would actually do this. And that's because if the only thing, the biggest obstacle in the child's communication is actually speech, and there's an and to it. So, like, it's only speech, and they're not looking, and it's because they're not looking at our mouth shapes to get the best in information they can, then I might actually do this kind of activity just to start training them in terms of speech. If that's the biggest obstacle right now, if there's other obstacles, like they're not talking, they're not using language the correct way. They're having behavioral problems. You know, they cannot follow commands. They cannot really answer questions. I would scrap that. I won't even touch eye contact. All right, so with that said, thank you so much. If you have any questions about it, please let me know. Because eye contact is very tricky. It's super hard to actually train as a single task. So I would urge you to ask me any questions that you have and use only five to ten minutes only, please, to do this, or else it's going to be very stressful because your child's going to be very puzzled, very, very puzzled why they're not getting that food when they're doing everything that they know. And I've seen some children actually trying everything that they know before. Like, when this happens, you know, they will start clapping hands, start singing, start, like, tapping you and all that stuff until they start turning their head towards your body and looking at you, and then you're reinforced. The timing is crucial. Okay? So with that said, thank you so much for watching. And if you have any more questions, anything you want me to add on to what I said about today, then put them in the comments and let me know. Because I make my content geared towards the questions that I get from my email from YouTube, from Facebook, whatever, from Instagram, and to answer your questions correctly so that you know you get the best help that you you can get right now because you cannot really go to a clinic. And even if you were, your child would be on a face mask and your therapist would be on face mask and you wouldn't have time to actually ask them because we're all scared. Thank you again and I'll see you in the next video real soon. By.