Joint attention: the early skill that comes before words (audio overview)

A free audio overview for families, derived from Special Learning's course "Social Skills Part 1: Toddler to Preschool Social Skills" (presented by Michele LaMarche, BCBA). It is a synthetic voice, not a person, summarizing one session of the course; it is not the session itself.

Download the MP3 · Read the article version

Episode notes

• The article version of this overview: special-learning.com/blog/joint-attention-toddlers/
• Free tools and guides, no account needed: special-learning.com/free-resources
• The ABCs of Autism guide, free and written for families: store.special-learning.com/free-abcs-of-autism.html
• The full session, and the rest of the series, is in Special Learning's Video CE Library, written for professionals: special-learning.com/for-behavior-analysts

Transcript

This is a free audio overview from Special Learning. It's a synthetic voice, not a person, and it's summarizing one session of a training course — it isn't the session itself.

The session is called "Social Skills Part One: Toddler to Preschool." It's taught by Michele LaMarche, a board certified behavior analyst, and it's the first in a series about social skills.

Here's the idea it's built around, and it's the kind of thing that sounds small until you've watched it happen.

When a very young child is learning, it's easy for everyone around them — parents, teachers, therapists — to concentrate on the skills that are easy to see. Imitation. Following directions. Sitting. Those matter. The session's argument is that when a program leans hard on those, it can skip past something more basic: joint attention.

Joint attention is the moment a child shares something with you. Not gets something from you — shares it with you.

The session uses an everyday example. A child wants a drink. They look at the drink. Then they look at you. Maybe they look back at the drink again. In that moment the two of you are attending to the same thing, together, and the child has communicated inside an interaction rather than around one. You hand them the drink, because of course you do.

And then the session makes a distinction that's worth the whole episode:

The child might be asking for the drink. Or the child might be reaching for you. Those look similar and they are not the same. One is about the object. The other is about the person.

That's why, in early teaching, the session describes deliberately building the social half in — looking for eye contact, making some interaction part of what's expected — so that what's being practiced is a child connecting with a person, not just a child getting an object.

The session also spends time on pretend play, and it's careful about what the research does and doesn't say.

In studies where children were matched for verbal ability, children with autism did engage in pretend play. What differed was symbolic pretend play — using one thing to stand for another — and the differences showed up both when children played spontaneously and when they were shown a model first.

That is a description of what researchers observed. It is not a prediction about any individual child, and nobody listening should take it as one.

There's a second finding the session returns to, from work on what it calls socially synchronous engagement. When young children begin *initiating* joint attention, shared positive feeling — the enjoyment going both ways — tends to show up at the same time. The two travel together. And both appear in the research alongside later expressive language and non-verbal thinking skills.

Again: they travel together. The session doesn't claim one causes the other, and neither does this recording.

On how any of this is actually taught, the session is unglamorous, and that's a point in its favor. Prompting. Reinforcing. Shaping — a bit closer each time. Start in a structured setting, then move it into ordinary life with new objects and new situations, so the skill doesn't stay stuck to the table it was taught at.

The instructor is direct that this is slow, and that you may not see a change quickly.

And then there's the part that has nothing to do with technique, which is the part parents tend to remember. There is a limited amount of time. A young child's day only holds so much, and every skill you choose to teach is one you chose over something else. The session's point is that if you know roughly how fast a child is picking things up now, you can think honestly about where a few years of that rate would take them — and choose what to spend the time on with your eyes open.

That's a planning question, not a clinical one, and it belongs to the adults in the room.

If you want something to use today rather than something to buy, Special Learning's free tools and guides are at special-learning.com/free-resources — no account needed.

The full session, and the rest of the series, is in Special Learning's Video CE Library; the link is in the episode notes.

This has been a free audio overview from Special Learning.