Ming from Agents of Speech argues that focusing on what autistic children do well, rather than their deficits, makes teaching more effective. Instead of trying to fix eye contact or other weak areas from scratch, build on their existing strengths in language, play, or other skills to teach new abilities.
Autism itself affects a whole load of aspects. There's like language, play, behavior, social, all these kind of aspects that will be affected if someone is on the spectrum. So if you see your child that the language is pretty good, their play is pretty good, they have some disruptive behavior, the social ability is not on par. Does that mean that they have autism? Maybe, maybe not. No one knows. Okay? Each autistic person has their strengths and weaknesses, all right? But a lot of times, whether a child has autism or not, what you're doing is that you're focusing everything on the weakness. You're focusing on the things that they have a deficit on. You're thinking about, oh, no, my child doesn't look at me, so therefore I'll teach them to look at me that's working on weaknesses. How about let's switch it up and think about how to work on their strengths to help on their weaknesses. You have to shift your thinking. It doesn't matter if your child is on the spectrum or not. If you're doing this kind of training with them or going to therapy, Think about what they have right now in order to teach what they don't have. Don't try to teach something that they don't have from nothing that's going to end in a disaster.
