Tangible Difference Company Blog

Written by Michael Conteh Tuesday, 04 August 2009 00:00

Blog 08-04-2009: What Was That Again?

Communication delays.

What Was That Again?

Communication is everything. When communication goes wrong, it can ruin your whole day. A certain three letter energy company sends me a notice every month saying I owe them money, although the bill has been settled since February! When a person (or company who is driving me nuts) has issues with communication it effects everyone around them.

A lot of our children are not fluent communicators. That being said, we need to always make communication our most important goal. When I say communication, I do not mean just verbal, as signs and picture exchange programs are also forms of proper communication. Do you know how many steps it takes to communicate?

• Looking/orienting toward the speaker
• Being a listener
• Having the skills to be able to ask for what you want (and identify the world around you)
• Gaining the listener's attention
• Having motivation to attain a particular item

All of this and a word has not been spoken yet! I recently did a talk about communication for some of our parents, and here are a few of the communication delays children can display:

• Lack of attending skills - So many of the kids I meet are so distracted that they are not focusing long enough to communicate properly. Attending is the first skill of communication and, without it, proper communication will be difficult.
• How do I work on this? Reinforce things that require attention and attending. It starts with eye contact, but play games that require attending to an individual (Peek-a-boo, puzzles, matching, required eye contact before you sing a song).

• Lack of imitation skills - I haven't met a person yet who could not imitate but could communicate fluently. Imitation is one of the few skills a baby uses to learn concepts and early language.
• How do I work on this? Do lots of gross motor imitation (clap hands, arms up), object imitation (make the toy horse go into the barn), and pretend (pretend to be an anteater and eat up all the ants and have them mimic).

There are plenty more skills when it comes to communication, but that is a start. We have received a great response from these blogs so far, so keep telling people about them, and give us feedback at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it . We may be able to have a comments section on the blogs shortly - we'll keep you posted.

Of course, a blog would not be complete without some sort of video. If you watched the "The Dark Knight", you noticed Batman had communication issues. Here's a clever take on one of those scenes.