Early intervention programs are considered by many to be vital to the future educational success of young children with Autism. One of the methods with a high level of research support is Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA). Almost every ABA program for a young child with Autism that I have seen includes a program for teaching "imitation" skills. These programs start with simple actions, such as clapping your hands, and work up to more difficult, multi-step actions. In these programs, the student is usually given the instruction, "Do this," followed by the ABA therapist doing the action. The student is then expected to imitate the action. Some degree of prompting is usually needed in the initial stages of teaching. The rationale behind these programs seems to be that children with Autism lack the ability to imitate others. But is this a true assumption?
It is certainly true that children with Autism are not commonly seen imitating other children's play or language. Many often appear to be "in their own world," doing seemingly random activities such as spinning objects or shaking a piece of string in front of their eyes. It is somewhat rare for me to see a young child with Autism readily imitating others without some sort of intervention or prompting. But, is this due to an actual skill deficit or a matter of choice?
I don't believe that we have any easy answer to this question, but I did want to share some of my observations that lead me to ask this question. I once worked with a young, non-verbal child who had an intensive program in place to teach imitation skills. He was required to work repeatedly on mimicking the ABA therapist's actions, such as tapping the table, clapping her hands, pushing a button, etc. After each correct response, this student was given a small piece of his favorite snack. It was a slow process to develop these skills. It would certainly seem that he had a skill deficit in this area.
However, during free play times, when I would sit and play with this child, he did some interesting things. He liked to drop toys and watch them fall, so I thought he might enjoy making toy people slide down a slide in a swimming pool play set. I showed him once, and once only, how to slide the people down the slide. After watching me, he was able to do the action over and over again by himself. He was able to do the same thing with driving toy cars down a ramp and activating a very cool spinning toy. There was no need to show him repeatedly and give him rewards for imitating. He was able to do this on his own.
I started to wonder if this child, and perhaps other children with Autism, really don't know how to imitate others' actions, or if they just don't understand the point of it. This child was able to imitate my actions perfectly when it mattered to him (playing with really fun toys), but did not do so without a lot of help when we were doing actions that were not so meaningful to him. If you think about it, what exactly is the point of imitating someone clapping their hands while just sitting at the table, other than to get your snack reward?
Additionally, when typically-developing children are learning to imitate, the actions they imitate often serve no real, useful purpose as well. My son (who is typically-developing as far as I know) is almost two years old and imitates many of my actions that I did not intend for him to and that serve no direct practical purpose for him, other than the social interaction. For example, he helped his grandmother and I open a package this week. His grandmother thought it would be funny to put the tape from the package on her head. My son then wanted to put it on his head too, which he did, only to discover that it was quite painful when he pulled it off. His grandmother said to me jokingly, "Well, I guess that shows you need to be careful who you imitate...they might not be too smart."
So, why don't many children with Autism imitate? Is it because they don't have the social understanding to imitate just for the sake of imitating? Are they smart enough to know how, but don't see the point? Do they imitate only when they can see the practical purpose for doing so? Can it sometimes be advantageous for students with Autism to lack the desire to imitate their peers (in cases of teasing, bullying, drug use, and other "not too smart" behaviors)? I don't have the answers to these questions, but I think that they are something we need to explore to help develop quality early intervention programs that focus on exactly what the strengths and weaknesses of students with Autism are.
Nicole Caldwell, M.Ed. of http://www.PositivelyAutism.com/
