Use your words
May. 28th, 2011 01:53 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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aanna_t asked:
This is an interesting question.
Teachers and daycare workers use this phrase constantly in an attempt to have children in their care communicate verbally (rather than, say, hitting someone or throwing something), so it was a phrase my son did hear frequently. It wasn't even always directed at him. The tone of voice in which it was used was never threatening or angry.
However, as a phrase, half of its meaning is sub-verbal. "Use your words" means, if made explicit, "communicate your feelings with words rather than violence or screaming". In order to understand how to communicate one's feelings, one has to understand that they need to be communicated. And at a certain age, children don't understand this. Any child, not just a child with developmental delays. Most children will understand the unspoken parts of the phrase by the time they hear it a lot. They can fill in the half that's unspoken, and they can focus on the act of pleading their case.
But it requires a base understanding of the fact that what they know and what the other person knows is not the same. Also? Putting an emotional reaction into words is difficult; one is a response that is entirely sub-verbal; one is an intellectualization of the cause-and-effect followed by an explanation of that cause-and-effect. Asperger children are often (but not always) precociously verbal--on tests. They know and can use a much wider range of words than their developmentally normal peers at the same age.
This doesn't mean, however, that the knowledge of those words maps well to the ability to communicate their own thoughts. Could my son use longer, more complex sentences than most of his peers? Yes. Did this mean that he understood the words and sentences? Yes. But...
I've mentioned that my son never let me finish a book without asking a dozen questions about the logistics of the story. He was particular frustrated by Goldilocks and the three bears, because in his experience, small chairs did not suddenly collapse under you if you were too large for them. But no story escaped unquestioned.
There was one element of import I discovered through reading with him: He did not appear to be able to break sentences into their component words. So, when he was two, he would say "he was still hungry" (a phrase exactly from The Hungry Caterpillar) to mean he himself was hungry. He did not change the pronoun. As he learned more sentences, he would apply them -- in their entirety -- to the appropriate situation.
So it became clear that he understood what the sentences meant in the context of the story; it was not clear to him that what that sentence meant within the story could not them be applied wholesale to the non-story environment. This would not be a problem if he could separate the verb and add a different pronoun; he couldn't. The sentence was a whole unit, for him. (This is apparently an issue with motor-sequencing). "He was still hungry" described great hunger. My son could use simple sentences with the correct pronoun "I", but he did not use the phrase "I'm hungry".
(This might be because he almost never was; he hated eating with a passion. He would eat one bite of anything. If we were lucky, he would eat two. So if we had twenty-five different things at a meal, he would get enough food. Oddly enough, we didn't. Food was an issue.)
Because the sentence was a whole unit, if he flubbed one word or syllable in a long sentence, he would start again--at the beginning of the sentence. He would start again at the beginning of a paragraph, as well.
The phrase "use your words" was used a lot in junior and senior kindergarten -- but at the time, he couldn't parse it. He couldn't fill in the missing, sub-verbal bit. My son's junior and senior kindergarten teachers, as mentioned before, were shocked when they realized that he wouldn't tell them when one of the other kids had hit him with the wooden blocks; he didn't tell them because he assumed they already knew. Yes, it's theory of mind, or its distinct lack.
I tried for two years to get him to tell the teachers if something unpleasant happened; I tried to explain that they couldn't know what they couldn't see. But clearly, that made no sense to him on a very instinctive, visceral level--and, as any small child, when he was upset he reacted emotionally, not intellectually.
So the phrase had no meaning for him until much later.
My son did not like to be asked what he was thinking, either. It made him uncomfortable. In part it made him uncomfortable--and this is entirely a guess on my part, as so much of our early parent-child interaction was--because he hadn't yet found words/sentences/constructions that resonated with the internal and as yet poorly grasped instinctive reactions. He understood--dimly--what the question was asking, but he had no way at all of answering it that made sense to him.
So yes, using words - that was the important lesson that had to be learned; but the basis of actually doing what that phrase implied was something that was beyond his grasp until he was at the edge of the epiphany: What he knew and what other people knew were not the same thing.
aanna_t asked:When my kids were very little, I often had to ask them to "use their words" rather than just glowering. That really clicks with what you explain about your son.
To take that one step farther, might that phrase be a helpful tool with ASD, too? I teach one ASD student, and my best friend's son also has Asperger's. They seem frustrated so often... I wonder if this is one reason why.
How would your son react if asked to say what he is thinking? Do you think it would be helpful?
This is an interesting question.
Teachers and daycare workers use this phrase constantly in an attempt to have children in their care communicate verbally (rather than, say, hitting someone or throwing something), so it was a phrase my son did hear frequently. It wasn't even always directed at him. The tone of voice in which it was used was never threatening or angry.
However, as a phrase, half of its meaning is sub-verbal. "Use your words" means, if made explicit, "communicate your feelings with words rather than violence or screaming". In order to understand how to communicate one's feelings, one has to understand that they need to be communicated. And at a certain age, children don't understand this. Any child, not just a child with developmental delays. Most children will understand the unspoken parts of the phrase by the time they hear it a lot. They can fill in the half that's unspoken, and they can focus on the act of pleading their case.
But it requires a base understanding of the fact that what they know and what the other person knows is not the same. Also? Putting an emotional reaction into words is difficult; one is a response that is entirely sub-verbal; one is an intellectualization of the cause-and-effect followed by an explanation of that cause-and-effect. Asperger children are often (but not always) precociously verbal--on tests. They know and can use a much wider range of words than their developmentally normal peers at the same age.
This doesn't mean, however, that the knowledge of those words maps well to the ability to communicate their own thoughts. Could my son use longer, more complex sentences than most of his peers? Yes. Did this mean that he understood the words and sentences? Yes. But...
I've mentioned that my son never let me finish a book without asking a dozen questions about the logistics of the story. He was particular frustrated by Goldilocks and the three bears, because in his experience, small chairs did not suddenly collapse under you if you were too large for them. But no story escaped unquestioned.
There was one element of import I discovered through reading with him: He did not appear to be able to break sentences into their component words. So, when he was two, he would say "he was still hungry" (a phrase exactly from The Hungry Caterpillar) to mean he himself was hungry. He did not change the pronoun. As he learned more sentences, he would apply them -- in their entirety -- to the appropriate situation.
So it became clear that he understood what the sentences meant in the context of the story; it was not clear to him that what that sentence meant within the story could not them be applied wholesale to the non-story environment. This would not be a problem if he could separate the verb and add a different pronoun; he couldn't. The sentence was a whole unit, for him. (This is apparently an issue with motor-sequencing). "He was still hungry" described great hunger. My son could use simple sentences with the correct pronoun "I", but he did not use the phrase "I'm hungry".
(This might be because he almost never was; he hated eating with a passion. He would eat one bite of anything. If we were lucky, he would eat two. So if we had twenty-five different things at a meal, he would get enough food. Oddly enough, we didn't. Food was an issue.)
Because the sentence was a whole unit, if he flubbed one word or syllable in a long sentence, he would start again--at the beginning of the sentence. He would start again at the beginning of a paragraph, as well.
The phrase "use your words" was used a lot in junior and senior kindergarten -- but at the time, he couldn't parse it. He couldn't fill in the missing, sub-verbal bit. My son's junior and senior kindergarten teachers, as mentioned before, were shocked when they realized that he wouldn't tell them when one of the other kids had hit him with the wooden blocks; he didn't tell them because he assumed they already knew. Yes, it's theory of mind, or its distinct lack.
I tried for two years to get him to tell the teachers if something unpleasant happened; I tried to explain that they couldn't know what they couldn't see. But clearly, that made no sense to him on a very instinctive, visceral level--and, as any small child, when he was upset he reacted emotionally, not intellectually.
So the phrase had no meaning for him until much later.
My son did not like to be asked what he was thinking, either. It made him uncomfortable. In part it made him uncomfortable--and this is entirely a guess on my part, as so much of our early parent-child interaction was--because he hadn't yet found words/sentences/constructions that resonated with the internal and as yet poorly grasped instinctive reactions. He understood--dimly--what the question was asking, but he had no way at all of answering it that made sense to him.
So yes, using words - that was the important lesson that had to be learned; but the basis of actually doing what that phrase implied was something that was beyond his grasp until he was at the edge of the epiphany: What he knew and what other people knew were not the same thing.
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no subject
Date: 2011-05-28 07:05 am (UTC)If it's just over-sensitivity or stress that are inducing it, often time and space without someone 'hovering' for a response is enough to get over it, and I can come back ten, fifteen minutes, half hour later and explain what the issue was.
If it's an emotional crisis that needs expression to relieve it, I can sometimes type if I can't talk. It's a different pathway in the brain, which is why people without functional speech due to autism or aphasia or apraxia or auditory processing disorder (or combination of these) can often communicate through typed speech, PECS or electronic communication devices but not spoken language.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-28 02:30 pm (UTC)This. It's one reason why I'm thankful all the psychologists I've worked with don't mind me waiting to speak or babbling because I can't figure out how to verbalize things. I'm not always aware of why I feel the way I do, so it helps in the long term, but I can't make it go faster, so it's kind of bad in the short term.
no subject
Date: 2011-05-28 03:30 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-28 03:53 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2011-05-28 05:38 pm (UTC)I'm just an ordinary introvert with other issues here, but I love all this analysis. Thanks everyone!