Nonverbal conversations with a 10yo (who has autism)

Jman is 10yo, not 10mo, and has autism, including quite the language delay. Words don't come easy to him. It's interesting to compare SB3's nonverbal communication to Jman's.

For starters, SB3's conversations are fluid and natural, as you saw from the previous post. They are much more of a challenge for Jman, though. For example, yesterday we were eating breakfast. I happened to be glancing through the local weekly newspaper in preparation for throwing it out after breakfast. After a while I realized I was hearing a funny cheek popping/raspberry noise. I glanced up and there was Jman, looking at me and making those funny noises. He was trying to start a game with me, and I of course happily obliged. Together we took a few turns making funny noises and faces. Then we both kind of disengaged and went back to eating. With SB3, it's hard to disengage, but with Jman it's harder to stay engaged, both for him to stay engaged and for me/the other person to stay engaged as a result.

In conversing with SB3, he pulls a lot more weight in keeping the conversation going. If you disengage, he'll do something to get you back. It may be that he lets out his hyacinth macaw screech, or it may be that he studies what you're doing and begins copying you, which almost always works to gain our attention at least for a moment. But Jman has much more difficulty with doing that. It's not that he never imitates us for attention, but he has a much harder time initiating it, keeping the conversation going, or keeping up with all the input. It's hard, and he can only keep it up for so long.

Another conversation with Jman yesterday evolved out of a book we were looking at together. One page had a picture of lions licking each other (for the letter L). I commented, "Lions LICK!" and proceeded to lick Jman. (Yes, we get pretty silly sometimes!) He thought that was funny, and licked me back, to which I replied with an animated, "EEEEeeeewwwwwwwwwwwww!" A little while later our paths crossed, and I commented about the licking again. Jman wanted to repeat our silly game, and was trying to maneuver into position to lick me. When I was failing to read his initiation, he stopped and said, "Eeewww!" with a grin. That was MY line, and he used it to prompt me to lean over for a good lick up the side of my face. Now I understood, and we played our lions licking game again, including having fun making faces as we wiped our cheeks dry again. And then he was gone. That's the thing--the conversations are there, but they are short and disjointed. He WANTS to interact and communicate, but he has a LOT of communication challenges, and he can only keep up the work for so long. SB3 can't seem to get enough, but Jman can only handle so much at a time.