The Non-Verbal Life

Noah doing his ‘happy hands’ while eating porridge. Like a lot of autistic children, flapping the hands is a positive response to emotional stimulus which is a sign of enjoyment. Noah eat porridge, Noah happy, Noah flap his hands.

A long time ago (although not that long, maybe a year or so), our son was described as non-verbal by his SEN teacher and I immediately had to take a step back because I didn’t know what it meant.

It turns out, or at least my understanding of it, is when they aren’t speaking yet and their verbal skills are limited to just a few sounds or words. This was quite confusing for me at the time because he was verbalising, just not very well, and I really had no comparison because he was my first child. Of course I’d been around around other children such as nieces and nephews and cousins and friends who have children and so on so forth, but when I really think about it, or when anybody really thinks about it, you’re going in blind, especially with the first one.

I was actually very frustrated to begin with because it was a phrase I’d never heard before (obviously) and it turns out there’s quite a lot of phrases in the world of neurodivergence that I was not aware of, another one being ‘stimming’, which my son has been doing since the time he could at least sit up and it’s something to do with a physical movement a child does to express their behaviour because they can’t tell you how happy or sad they are.

For this reason, as a side note, I tend to spend a lot of time letting him express his behaviour at home so that he feels like he can express his behaviour and that it isn’t wrong. By letting him express his behaviour it also means that he can maintain homeostasis and remain in a balanced state of mine. If I was to tell him to stop it all the time the energy would stay in him and it would just unleash itself in a more horrid way, and I don’t like that, so we (my wife and I), let him stim.

So my son is currently 3.5 years old and is only saying a few words, and our SEN teacher told us he will only say something when there is a reward to it.

For example, he says the word ‘cookie’ because he wants a cookie and he likes to taste and so we give him a cookie. I don’t like giving him a cookie everytime he wants a cookie but obviously the time of the day needs to be factored in.

A word he won’t say though is Bye-Bye. There is no reward for him after saying bye-bye or goodbye or any other variation of that, and it’s quite simple, he is saying goodbye to enjoyment, and who wants that? Even adults struggle to say goodbye sometimes.

He likes to point at things, that’s one of his ways of communicating, he will point at the sky, the clouds, the birds, the television, words in a book and individual letters. He will point instead of talk because he isn’t yet completely verbal. Interestingly, our night time routine was non-existent for a long time because there was a casual conversation amongst people that suggested bedtime consists of reading a book, cuddling a teddy bear and lights out by 8pm, or something along those lines, but our son didn’t want us reading him a bedtime story, but he only told us that by flicking through pages in the book and not letting me even finish each page. I would even point to where I’m reading so he wouldn’t turn the page.

This is partly why I love his diagnosis, it’s reassurance and it’s clarity and it explains so much.

Having a child who is non-verbal is stressful in the way that he doesn’t interact with people ‘normally’. He doesn’t have conversations, he doesn’t have conversations to show his emotions, everything is just physical, from his hugs, to his crying, to his laughing, to his running, to his ‘happy hands’.

In every other aspect he’s a normal, happy little boy, he likes to play with me when we roughhouse and he likes to cuddle his mum and get comfortable. He loves the park and other children and he is fascinated by other people and children.

There was an initial fear inside me that other people would get annoyed if he got to close to them as opposed to ask them a question, because my son doesn’t understand invading people’s personal space, and I know he doesn’t understand it because understanding invasion of personal space is a primitive feeling that we automatically feel, so there was an initial worry that people would become upset or bothered by it, but I noticed that adults who are happy and content (for the most part), tend to have a positive feedback mechanism that shows up when they see children and they don’t mind.

So, most certainly, having a child who is non-verbal is tiring, moreso because you don’t hear him because he just ‘does’, and he is a very active child and likes to just keep going and going and going until he wants to rest, which again, could be whenever, because he just ‘does’.

But, the important thing is to spend time with him and be around him, which, after all, is what parenting is. The more time spent around him means more time learning how he does things, how his mind works, what excites him, what upsets him, what he likes to engage in and what he finds boring.

One day he will talk, until then, we keep going as we are and look to see little improvements day by day, week by week and year by year.