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Monday, November 22, 2010

Creating Openings for Communication to Happen



I am currently offering It Takes Two to Talk - The Hanen Program® for Parents, a training program that enables parents to adopt a role as their child’s language facilitator at home. During this program, parents learn how to help their child respond and initiate with greater consistency. The program focuses first on building an interaction with the child which serves as the foundation out of which communication grows. I find that most parents are excited to learn about ways to get their child to communicate more consistently either using gestures, sounds, words, signs or pictures. I would like to discuss how parents can use “communication temptations” to help get an interaction going and create “openings” for communication.


When you go to the food court of a mall or are perusing at a grocery store, are you ever enticed by a food vendor who offers you samples? Does this ever influence your decision about what to eat or how quickly you might make a decision? The same scenario might take place for your child. Sometimes when children are just learning to communicate or produce sounds, they take longer to communicate and in some cases may avoid communicating all together since it can be a challenge. For this reason, in the beginning stages, we want to tempt the child to communicate by offering activities that are enticing and seem irresistible to the child. This technique is great for children who are still learning the fundamentals of communication (i.e., gestures), may hesitate to use communication or might just benefit from an incentive. We want to make communication easy for the child.
There is a list of communication temptations written by Wetherby and Prizant (1989) who are experts in the field. Some of the really powerful temptation props that I keep on hand include: bubbles, wind up toys/other toys that activate (such as cars or trains), toys kept in ziplock bags (such as puzzle pieces), snack food kept in tupperware containers, and balloons. The technique to use is a strategy discussed in the It Takes To Two Talk Program® where we offer a little at a time and wait. So if you blow the bubbles for your child, you only blow one or two bubbles and then you wait expectantly (i.e., you act like you are waiting for your child to communicate). When we wait, we are waiting to see what type of communication the child might use to initiate. Maybe they reach for the bubbles, maybe they point, maybe they make an unrecognizable sound or maybe they produce a word depending on their communicative level.
Any activity can be translated into a communication temptation with some creativity. The key is to:
  1. Think about what the child is interested in (e.g., chasing, water color painting or playing with water).
  2. Arrange the environment so that the item of interest in not readily available or is only available in small increments (e.g., the water is in a closed container or in a spray bottle or you offer only a little "chase" at a time).
  3. Offer the item one time without expecting communication to get the child hooked in (think of the free sample of food).
  4. Offer more in small quantities holding the item out or initiating the activity ever so slightly, still withholding.
The result, most likely, will be more consistent responses of communication. You might see the child use gestures, make sounds or use words more quickly. You can generalize this activity to daily life. For example, when you give your child a bath, maybe you reach for the faucet and wait expectantly before you turn on the water. When you put the food on your child’s plate, you pause before doing so, waiting for a response. When you open a door, you pause before doing so to see if the child will initiate communication. Once the child starts to initiate more frequently, you can work with the child on increasing their communication level. 

In my next post, I will talk about how to offer choices to establish a communication interaction. Click on the links below to find out more about the resources discussed. If you are interested in enrolling in a communication training class, please see my website for information about Hanen groups that are offered in San Francisco.