07/02/2021
Our apartment has an open floor plan. Shortly after we moved here in 2019, we installed this long gate to prevent Foxy from accessing the kitchen on his own, because we couldn’t (and still cannot) modify every aspect of the kitchen space for safety.
A few months ago, Foxy learned to scale the gate. He’s super strong and agile, and he grew taller, and well, here we are. It’s been a challenge. It’s also been a good opportunity to spend more time in the kitchen with Foxy, which he enjoys.
One of his speech therapists observed this gate-climbing during several sessions in our home. She’s amazing and beloved and comes up with strategies that align so well with our values. Yesterday, when I was checking in at the end of her and Foxy’s session, she showed me that she had stuck one of Foxy’s Talking Brix to the gate.
Talking Brix have one large button to play a recorded single message. This one, when I pressed it, said, “Go in” in the voice we use for Foxy’s talker.
I told her I thought it was great and asked how we could model its use.
She told me we could press it when Foxy was climbing the gate to show him another way to communicate he wanted to go into the kitchen. Sweet, sounds easy.
She also told me we could model it when we were inviting Foxy into the kitchen. Inside my head I scoffed, not able to imagine us choosing more Foxy kitchen supervision than we were already doing with this gate-climbing. But I just nodded and smiled.
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Yesterday evening, Foxy pressed the button himself. I’m not sure if he was intentionally requesting to enter the kitchen, or just pressing the cool button to see what would happen, and it doesn’t matter. I immediately hopped up, opened the door to the gate, and asked Foxy if he wanted to GO IN the kitchen.
He seemed a little in awe as he walked through the opening in the gate instead of scrambling over it, and then he began to delightedly jump and flap his way around the kitchen.
It hit me. He had been waiting to be invited. He had been waiting for us to open the door for him. He had been waiting to be included, not just tolerated.
And in that moment, the Talking Brix button wasn’t a communication support for him. It was a communication support for me. I was the one not getting the message. I was the one who needed another mode. I was the one with the receptive difficulties.
Foxy’s expression had been clear and consistant the whole time: Let me in.
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What would it be like to have receptive language goals for the people communicating with, caring for, educating, playing with, and supporting AAC users?
[image is a photo taken inside our apartment, looking into our kitchen. The background contains an island and some stools. The foreground shows part of a black fence-like gate preventing entrance to kitchen. On the gate is a Talking Brix, which is a white square of plastic about the size of a person’s palm with a green button in the center.]
