As a baby, Riley grew and developed right on track. He seemed to hit all of his milestones like a champ. There was one thing that we noticed that seemed different from other toddlers his age… his early development of speech. He babbled early on. He began saying “mamma” and “dadda” at around 8 months. At 11 months, he would say “t-anks” (thanks) when given something that he wanted, and his language continued to progress from there. At 12 months of age, he began walking and his talking increased. His pronunciation was incredible. Hearing him say words such as “Elmo” and “milk” when he was so tiny was fun for us. By 16 months, he could sing the alphabet, say all the animal sounds, count to 5 and much more.

But around 18 months of age, his language took a steep decline. By 23 months, he had only a few words in his vocabulary and he was officially diagnosed with autism. It was devastating for our family. However, we decided that it was time to get to work trying to recover as much of our Riley-man as we could.

Our first encounter with speech therapy was our journey through the Picture Exchange Communication System (PECS). In the beginning, it seemed to work well. After a short time, he could find his picture and bring it to us. The struggle came with discriminating between preferred and non-preferred items. We presented items including a piece of candy and a piece of broccoli. Riley would reach for the picture of broccoli, and when handed the piece of broccoli, he would simply play with it and let it entertain him. It was clear he wanted the candy, but it did not upset him not to get it. Even when working with his “most preferred” items, he just did not seem to care much about which card he handed us and what the result was of his communication. Another roadblock we hit was trying to find pictures of each of the things he could request, therefore giving him options. We ended up with hundreds of cards and a binder full of options, with no real functional way to use them. Add to that, carrying around the binder with all of the pictures, and PECS, just did not pan out as a functional communication option for Riley.