29/06/2025
A beautiful piece about echolalia and communication development.
Throughout Brooke's entire life, she has spoken in scripts. Her language development was entirely echolalic, meaning that she repeated (echoed) words and phrases that she’d heard. It was many years before we’d learn the term “gestalt language learner,” but, yes, that’s our girl.
It manifested in a number of different ways. For example, if we asked her if she’d like milk or juice, she would say, “Or juice,” echoing the last thing she heard. Sadly, this led to a great deal of frustration because she may well have wanted water, but her only choice at the time was to parrot the last couple of words she’d heard.
Later, she began to repeat phrases and chunks of words from books we’d read or dialogue she’d heard and insert them into conversation. Without the ability to put words together on her own, she relied on these bits and pieces of language to communicate. Sometimes the words themselves had intrinsic meaning while other times, it was the emotional context of the scene she was sharing that was the point.
At still other times, this scripted language was simply a way to interact with those around her. To reach out, to connect, to say, “I see you,” or, “I love you,” or, “I’m here.”
Often, her scripts served as a way to reassure herself of something, or to ask us - in her own unique way, to give her the comfort that she needed in the moment. And sometimes they were just for fun.
Meanwhile, every therapist we saw, every so-called ‘autism expert,’ told us to discourage her scripts. Some — many, in fact — actually insisted that we *ignore her* (and that we make it clear that we were ignoring her) when she tried to engage us in them in order to press for more “meaningful communication.”
I used to talk about this a lot, but a while back, when a reader asked where I stand on participating in our kids’ scripts, I realized it must have been a while since I’d written about it. If you don’t feel like reading further, I’ll just tell you now: I enthusiastically, almost pleadingly, encourage it.
In her younger days, every IEP that was written targeted Brooke’s scripts for “extinction.” Until the day that we said NO MORE.
Because we had begun to understand what they meant to her … and to us as a unit. We had seen them for what they were, and still are: an integral and inexorable part of her ever-evolving system of communication.
They are her way of telling us, if we are really willing to listen, what she is feeling, what she's thinking, what she needs. It’s not always easy to discern. Heaven knows we don’t always get it right. But the scripts were, and are, her way of connecting with us, sharing with us, integrating herself, in whatever way she can, into the world around her.
Shutting them down, for the brief time that we listened to those “experts," took energy, and that energy was negative as hell. Ignoring any child's attempt to make a connection would have felt wrong enough, but ignoring a child with communication challenges who was using every tool she had available to her to create a way for us to interact — to play, to engage, to conspire, to CONVERSE — felt awful.
What message could she possibly take from that but that we weren't interested in nor willing to learn her native language, that we weren't interested in HER? Shutting down her scripts shut HER down. Ignoring her bids to interact with us meant ignoring HER. And I simply wasn’t willing to do that.
Joining her — playing our prescribed parts — allowed and allows us to engage with her in a way that makes sense to her. In a way that’s comfortable for (and comforting to) her. That feels organic and easy, rather than contrived and anxiety-producing.
It is so important to me to respect the method of interaction that comes naturally to my daughter rather than insisting that it can't be valid (or meaningful) simply because it's different from my own. Shutting down a perfectly viable avenue of interaction in order to encourage “the right” interaction is just as absurd as it sounds when you say it out loud. Seriously, read that sentence again. Try to make it make it sense. I tried for years and all I got was that agreeing that communication can’t be “meaningful” because it’s echolalic was just a flaming heap of my own subconscious ableism wrapped in a desperate lack of imagination.
Brooke's scripts are her bridge. They are her connection, her comfort, her communication, her ease, her fun, her joy, her sport. They matter to her. So they matter to us.
And that, my dears, is where I stand on participating in our kids’ scripts. If you skimmed down to get here, I’ll just tell you now:
I enthusiastically, almost pleadingly, encourage it.
{image is a photo that I shared with this post four years ago. It’s a picture of Brooke and me at one of her Unified Track meets in high school. I am standing behind her and she has taken my hands and wrapped them around her waist. We are mid-script and we are both laughing, hard. The photo is sheer joy.}
