Ten things every child with autism wishes you knew

"You can't rush art." Bryce turned his bottomless blue eyes on his first-grade teacher and delivered this zinger as she hustled the class to clean up their paints: "Quick-quick-quick! It's time for music! Brushes in the sink! Line up at the door! Let's go!" Bryce had just discovered the wonder of mixing orange and green paint to make brown for his version of Van Gogh's Sunflowers, and he didn't appreciate the hurry-scurry. His teacher couldn't wait to repeat his remark to me because "of course, he is right." What she didn't know was that he lifted the response wholesale (words, inflection, and tempo), right out of Toy Story 2. Bryce had a breathtaking command of a verbal behavior called echolalia, repeating chunks of language he'd heard from others. When his own limited vocabulary failed him, he had split-second retrieval of functional responses from the encyclopedic stash of movie scripts stored on the hard drive of his brain. Echolalia is common in autism. It can be immediate (child echoes something that has just been said to or near him), delayed (child repeats something he's heard in recent, mid- or distant past) or perseverative (child repeats the same phrase or question over and over again). For many parents (including me), echolalia incites a piercing sense of panic that foments when exchanges of fact, feeling, and thought cannot flow freely among ourselves, our child, and the rest of the world. At the time of the can't-rush-art incident, ninety percent of Bryce's speech was delayed echolalia. He employed it so skillfully that it was largely undetectable to anyone but our family. Still, I was desperate to squash it--a common, understandable but misguided desire for parents in my position. Because the speech isn't spontaneous, it can seem like (since we're quoting movies) "what we've got here is failure to communicate." (Cool Hand Luke, 1967) Echolalic speech often doesn't seem to have any relevance to what's happening at the moment, although to the child, it does. He may be three or four associative links ahead of you, making it your tricky but necessary job to discover the correlation. Excerpted from Ten Things: Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew by Ellen Notbohm All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.