How has Communicating Partners helped children With Down syndrome?
Children with Down syndrome are biologically determined to be slow in developing speech and in many other motor and cognitive skills. Many believe that these children are generally very social because they enjoy people and seem friendly. However, in over 30 years with over 500 children with Down syndrome, we have found that, without careful attention, they are much less interactive and have much less practice using sounds socially than other children.
A major problem we have found is that children with Down syndrome are usually not suppurated in their sound and speech development long enough. Too often people give up on speech in favor of signs, pictures and augmentative devices when a child is not talking much at 3 or later. Then the child ends up getting far too little sound practice to develop speech.
Our approach is to teach parents to make sure their childish highly interactive first with any behavior he can do. Then the next step is to make sure he becomes a constant social sounder, which means that hear nod his partner spend much time doing sounding conversation together, before pushing the child to use full word than he is not ready for. When a d child with Down syndrome only learns words for needs and for school, he will not become a social speaker. Too many of our children use language to answer questions and to perform scripts but not to have conversations. However we know many children with Down syndrome who, when conversationally trained, become highly interesting and conversational person.
Note: It really saddens me when I meet a children with Down syndrome six and older who have little or no social language. By social language, I mean words used spontaneously to communicate casually in daily interactions. (I do not mean one with words he can imitate or label mainly.) I am particularly angry when I hear, as I recently have for 5 children that therapists and teachers have said that if they do not speak by 5 they probably will not do so. THAT IS ABSOLUTLELY WRONG.
While I do not oppose signing or pictures or machines to get the child started communicating, I am extremely concerned when that is the only treatment given. I strongly encourage you to make sure that you help children with DS communicate with any vocal ways they can do. This may take 2,3 or more years but believe me; your child needs that amount of oral motor practice. Down syndrome means low motor tone and such tone problems are most affected in the fine motor coordination’s in the oral system. Most children with DS can learn to speak fully and conversationally. They may always have some differences in articulation. But if we allow them the time to communicate with sounds without giving up and depending mainly on signs or pictures or communication machines. They will, with frequent interactive and matched practice become effective conversational partners. This definitely requires that you and others have a daily habit of conversing with the chill all the time. Even when you do not understand everything they say.
Please stop thinking of speech that is not adult as a mistake for the child with DS-if a child says ’sa-su’ for ’sunset’, that is NOT a mistake. It simply is not an adult form. Think of this as a ‘developmental step’ for the child and then immediately give the child a clear matched model ’sunset’ to show the child what to do next.
It is much more important to have frequent and long conversation with a child even when you don’t understand much that to stop and correct the child. Correcting discourages the child from interacting more with you. And the key here is that the more a child interacts with people the more he will learn to communicate.
I am currently working with several children with DS who’d did not talk by 5 but who are now talking once their parents began imitating all their sounds and began focusing on playful sounding conversations rather than their prior stance of waiting for words and ignoring the sounds that are the seeds for words. They also pushed the child to produce words that he simply could not do. We constantly see adults try to get children to do impossible communications and then wonder why the chill does not try at all.
You can get more information about Communicating Partners and Down syndrome on our website. Barbara Mitchell’s five-year developmental story with Mark is very interesting and informative. By the way, that Mark is now 19, and having great conversations everywhere. He doesn’t know a stranger and if he’s there, everyone gets to know and enjoy him. A real diplomat and very empathetic.