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- We’ve said imitation is a crucial skill for kids to learn—a crucial prerequisite to learning most or at least may of the complex skills you and I have learned, everything from tying our shoes to talking, so crucial that almost every autism program starts off teaching imitation.
- And here’s the mistake many, if not most, of the autism programs make, including ours until we realized how dumb we were being; unfortunately, it took us many semi-futile years to realize that.
- We have a toy truck and we give the kid one. We roll the truck and shape the kid’s rolling the truck.
- We have a toy baby doll and we give the kid one. We hug the dolly and shape the kid’s hugging the dolly.
- And we think we’re teaching imitation, but most often we’re not. Instead, we’re just teaching truck rollin’ and dolly huggin’. Cute, but not our goal of teaching imitation.
- We’ve got the kid huggin’ and rollin’; we give the kid his truck; and before we can grab our truck and start modeling truck rolling, the kid’s already rolling his. Cool? Not really. We’re not really trying to teach truck rolling; we’re trying to teach imitation. Same thing happens with hugging the dolly; he beats us to the hug.
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