Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsUnderestimated, Indeed
Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2021
This is a remarkable story and will hopefully make many people question their assumptions about the cognitive abilities of a nonspeaking autistic person. For far too long, intellectual disability has been assumed to be present in students who can't speak; when really, what they can't do is complete standardized intelligence testing. The test does not exist that accommodates students who have coexisting speech and motor planning disabilities; and yet we continue to - as the saying goes - judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree.
But what if there was a way to accommodate both motor planning and speech, and in turn tap into the true communication of the individual? That is the experience this book describes. It’s brilliant in its simplicity, a story told with the evident passion of a dedicated father in partnership with the newfound voice of a son that has been released from his life of silence, and with it, the associated misunderstanding of his autism.
The use of letter boards for nonspeaking individuals has been around since the 1920’s. Stephen Hawking used a letter board in the 1960’s, and there’s even a fictional letter board user in the TV show “Breaking Bad.” The only difference between those examples, and this one? They weren’t autistic. The conventional assumption has always been that autistic people who can’t speak lack cognitive abilities. And yet, that’s not in the diagnostic criteria for autism… it’s just taken for granted. What this book shows, and what I also believe, is that we can’t make that assumption. What a wonderful thing to be wrong about!
And yet, there are detractors. They are the people who have told us for decades that there is no hope for our autistic kids, and that we are just deluded parents in denial of certain realities, willing to hand over any amount of money for just a taste of the snake oil called hope. They say that instead, we should rely on ABA, “the most evidence-based practice available for autism treatment.” They don’t respond to the claims made by the adult autistic community, who were subjected to ABA as children, and are now recovering from the psychological trauma of being shaped into someone else’s abstract idea of normalcy. They will tell you to look up “ideomotor response” or “Clever Hans effect” and will say that spelling on a letter board is an example of those. They won’t tell you about Ole Ivar Lovaas, one of the pioneers of ABA, and his use of electric shocks and slapping of children as a means of gender-variant conversion therapy. They won’t admit that their use of aversives and rewards looks eerily similar to dog training. And at no point, will ABA acknowledge the role of human dignity, neurological diversity, self-advocacy, or personal agency of the autistic person. No, the ABA community is too busy saving us parents from ourselves to pay any attention to questioning their long-held assumptions.
But I’m not going to resolve this complicated issue in a book review. I’m only adding it here because there will predictably be some of these criticisms found in other reviews. I would just leave it at introducing the idea of “least dangerous assumption,” as coined by special education researcher Anne Donnellan in 1984. It teaches that in the absence of conclusive data, educational decisions should be based on assumptions which, if later proved to be incorrect, will have the least dangerous effect on the student. So with that in mind, let’s say we choose to believe in the abilities of our nonspeaking peers and we begin helping them to establish communication. If our efforts end up as futile, we have lost our time and effort. If, on the other hand, we believe they are incapable of communication, and we later learn it had been possible all along? Well, then we’ve lost a person. Which would be the greater loss? I know how I would answer.
