Relationships Matter

Children with autism and their life partners - their parents, families, peers and educators - who are not on the autism spectrum can feel as though they live in separate, and even incompatible worlds. Communicating Partners, the result of over thirty years of clinical practice, research and professional teaching, offers an innovative approach to working with children with ASDs that focuses on developing these relationships through mutual understanding.

User Reviews about Communicating Partners: 30 Years of Building Responsive Relationships with Late-Talking Children including Autism - Asperger's Syndrome (ASD) - Down Syndrome - and Typical Developement

This book was recommended by my grandson's psychologist. He said throw all the other books away and we have, gladly! This book is our new bible. It has not only given us hope, but has made daily life less stressful and more fun. -- Great Book

This book is excellent! It's about enjoying interacting with your child, verbal or not. It's about respecting your child for who he or she is, and helping him/her become more socially interactive, not about finding a "cure." I highly recommend this book. -- Wish I had found this first!

This book was the answer to my prayers. If you want to learn more about how we can improve communication skills, it all starts here. We were concerned because our grandson was not speaking yet (2.5) and was frequently avoiding eye contact. This book gives you easy to understand principles and exercises to help increase interaction with a child, and WOW - he has made tremendous strides in communicating with sounds, gestures, eye contact and big smiles. Great Great book! -- Fabulous Book!!

I am the owner of a private practice that provides speech and occupational therapy services to children with special needs, many of them falling on or near the autism spectrum. Communicating Partners is the book that my speech therapists consistantly recommend to parents of young children looking to support their child's language development. It is also a good book for professionals and my therapists have used it as the basis for ongoing discussion about therapy provision. -- Excellant support

If you like Stanley Greenspan's DIR/Floortime approach, but need help applying it to teaching your child communication and language skills, this is probably the book for you.

Dr. MacDonald's approach is a developmental approach, where you get down on the child's level and try to get him/her up onto the next step with you. (For anyone who has read any Greenspan, this should sound familiar). Unlike ABA, it does not teach skills in isolation, and does not skip developmental steps to reach a desired "eventual" goal, something I've seen harm children many times.

To give a fairly common example, a lot of schools push children from crawling into walking before the child is ready. Just because a child is 5 physical years old does not mean they are developmentally ready to walk, and most of these children suffer from problems with trunk stability and fine motor control that are directly linked to this skipping of developmental steps. I've seen ABA programs that push for language too early in the child's development leaving kids knowing a lot of labels for things, but still having no idea of how to use words to communicate with others. Saying "red truck" doesn't mean anything if all the child is doing is labelling an object, that is, it is not COMMUNICATION. It may be somewhat meaningful if it is used as a request (for example, the child wants to actually play with that toy).

As a person with High Functioning Autism myself, I believe in Floortime and Communicating Partners as developmentally sensitive alternatives to ABA that are more meaningful to the child. As a Habilitation worker and Speech Assistant, I use a combination of these approaches with most of the children I work with.

Good luck helping the children in your life, autistic and otherwise, learn how to communicate better. -- Makes a good partner with Floortime