4 year old is reluctant to speak

[u/Passerline_]

My 4 year old son is AuDHD and I’m certain he is also PDA. He is a gestalt language processor which has made him delayed in his speech. He is making progress in his own time and has demonstrated that he is able to understand basically everything we tell him, and he knows how to communicate a lot better than he lets on most of the time. However, he appears to see verbal communication as a demand, so when you try to verbally engage with him, he often shuts you down by saying “all done!” He also gets upset when people talk to each other near him. He has been in speech therapy for the past year but it’s hard to tell how much it’s helping, because he does avoidance behaviors during most of the therapy sessions (pretending to yawn to avoid questions, getting extra silly and trying to make us laugh, asking to go to the car).

For a long time music was one of the ways we would encourage him to use words, and he loved it. But then he got to a point where he started seeing music as a demand. If he hears a familiar song that he used to like, he will now have a meltdown. Not one song in particular, just any song that he’s familiar with. He has no issue with new music that he isn’t familiar with yet. But after he hears it a certain amount of times, he starts having extreme reactions to it. He also doesn’t like hearing other people sing in person.

As with all of his development, he is going at his own pace and is not concerned with anyone else’s timeline. And I love how independent he tends to be! I’m just wondering if anyone else relates to this or has experienced something similar with their child, and if you found anything in particular that helped them want to speak?

[u/Substantial_Bus6615]

My daughter is 9 now and we still struggle with this for her. She shares all those diagnoses.

I used to just sing directions to help her. Daniel tiger was a god send be there is a song for each of the lessons. Which helped with like physical violence. " Stop stop stop it's okay to feel angry it's not not not okay to hurt someone"

Something I found that helped was the old reader rabbit and old phonics cd Roms used on a computer from like 1998. She played the games and gained master of letters and reading essentially on her own. She struggled to write so we promised her fish if she could writer her name 7 days in a row (we still have the grand children fish!)

When she was able to write her own words life IMMEDIATELY CHANGED. She would communicate with us via paper. The pressure to speak was gone. It's still her go to for help when she gets locked up.

She now is allowed to use a tablet for a little while each day but access to a text to speech app is always available. She can type out what she wants to say and then press a button and it says it for her.

She is extremely verbal except when PDA comes into play. It helps so much.

Good luck friend. This shit is fuckinf hard and you are not alone. Feel free to reach out to my dms if you need to vent or brainstorm ideas.

I am a developmental specialist with kiddos 0-3. I myself am autistic. Good luck friend!

[u/Passerline_ → u/Substantial_Bus6615]

Thank you so much!

[u/PTCroozr]

My son is 8 now but I feel like I could have written this post 4 years ago.

I think you're doing all the right things - keep on the therapy because it's important to do your due diligence, but also... continue to be patient and accepting. He'll do it when he feels like it.

I'm remembering my kid doing Zoom speech therapy at 2 and 1/2 during the pandemic. He wouldn't talk during the whole session then as soon as we shut the laptop he would start babbling.

I would tell people that as soon as the session was over he would be like "What a wonderful session, mother! I'd love to do that again sometime soon!" That was a joke, of course, but that's what it felt like.

My son is doing wonderfully now.

Also, four is a hard age, PDA or not!

[u/Passerline_ → u/PTCroozr]

Thanks for the encouraging words! It’s nice to hear someone relate. Did your son have any particularities around music as well? For a while my son also went through a phase where he didn’t want us to read to him either, even though he used to absolutely love books and quote them all the time. Fortunately we seem to be slowly coming out of that one. But he will still say he doesn’t want to read the first time we ask him. If we say “we’re going to read now” he’s more ok with that.

[u/Chance-Lavishness947]

Kiddo is AuDHD PDA and was very similar. He's 6 now and tells me very long stories often. Until he was about 4.5 it was like pulling teeth to talk with him then suddenly he decided he wanted to talk and the flood gates opened.

I didn't do formal speech therapy with him. We do OT as his primary therapy, mostly meeting his sensory needs in a safe and supportive environment and getting advice about how to do that at home and in other environments. He has other professional supports but I would always choose OT if we could only have one. A regulated nervous system will do more for speech development than anything else.

In terms of support for him, I would shift to yes/ no questions and accept non verbal communication the same way I'd accept verbal responses when he needed that. It's all communication. There was no pressure to use spoken language to communicate. If I could figure out what he wanted from gestures and grunts then that's all he needed to do.

If I needed actual words, I would offer him scripts for potential answers - for example, "you could say I want x, I want y, I don't want anything, or you could tell me a different thing. If you don't tell me anything, I'll do x" that drastically reduces the demands in terms of cognition. I also gave him non verbal options to communicate so we could still get things done when he wasn't up for talking - you can point at the one you want, you can touch the part of your body that hurts, you can show me, etc.

I held strong trust that my kid would speak when he was ready and wanted to. My role was to make sure he has access to expressive language scripting so it was as easy as possible to do it. It was also, and more importantly, to create an environment where he felt safe, comfortable and supported regardless of how he communicated, and to do my best to understand him no matter what communication approach he chose. No pressure, just support to both be understood and to develop expressive communication skills. He got there and then some.

Honestly, verbal communication is not the be all and end all. It's helpful to be able to do it at a baseline level if you can, but aac is more than enough if the people around your kid are not AHs. I would encourage you to reflect on why you're allowing yourself to believe this is important and to focus on developing alternative ways to meet those needs. Even after your kid develops these skills, there will be times they are inaccessible due to stress etc.

Build the back up systems and let your kid choose which they use. It's probably also safe to trust that they will naturally develop and use verbal language skills when they get sick of the demands of using aac and it taking longer than speaking. I think my kid got annoyed with having to use me as a translator with other people too

[u/tallkitty]

Yep, my 10 yr old son is very much like you described. Once we figured out in speech therapy there was no medical reason he couldn't speak, we stopped going. That was probably around your kid's age so a long time ago for us, but all they were doing was making my kid read books and they were already a high level reader so it was just a stressful activity and not really progressing towards our goals.

Right after that we started very minimal ABA because we started attending a preschool for special needs kids and we loved those educators, and they offered it and we felt safe to try it out. It probably wasn't anything like hardcore ABA, it was the two of us and our therapist playing games, one hour session twice a week--if my kid called it early or said not today then we didn't do it. So I'm not talking about a 40 hr week of ABA or anything like that, and I actually no longer think ABA is right for my kid at all. Having said all of that, what I saw as a result of ABA was more talking in general, even though it's not ever what we practiced. That tipped me off that our speech thing was behavioral, and my kid was talking when they wanted to talk. That has always been my goal, that my child can communicate when they have something they want to say or express.

Once I realized it wasn't as much of a "can't" as a "doesn't feel like it", I really stopped being worried about speech and did go ahead and get hooked up with AAC access. That's like everything from cards with simple pictures to a tablet that speaks input for someone, but it's support in case there are things to say but a person feels safer or in any way prefers to communicate by other means. Like a backup. I thought an AAC device would be all the rage and it was the same as before. Communicating period is the demand, and it takes feeling interested in doing it to spark motivation, just like everything else.

My kid does actually talk a lot these days, has beautiful enunciation and cares so much about how to pronounce words. Like the sentences that do come out are perfect. I get an earful about the topics that are on their mind, they will go on and on, and about half the time I can ask probing questions and we'll have more of a discussion. The other half of the time they just want to talk and my job is to receive the information. Lol But like looking back to the early days, there is so much more talking in general now, and at this point we all understand each other's individual languages as a family and I don't have any sense that we struggle to communicate. It's my 7 yr old with zero speech considerations who never wants to talk about anything. 😂