Intervention Considerations for Promoting Friendships Among Children who Use AAC and their Peers

Marika King

12/10/2016 9:08 PM

Certainly, increasing peer interactions among children who use AAC is an important step in improving children’s social competence. Yet, being able to promote meaningful, quality friendships is a broader, long-term issue. The probability of a child adapting to AAC as a means of communication is contingent on how well their surroundings respond to their communication via AAC. Timely and appropriate responses to the child’s communication are some of the factors that influence the child’s likelihood to use AAC. Given that the child who uses AAC spends the majority of her time with her parents and her classmates, how should interventionists decide what vocabulary should be made available on the Speech Generating Device with the consideration of the child’s communication, physical, nourishment, and communication needs without friendships losing its importance? How might current intervention programs promote the development of friendships?

Within this post, we have shared some of our thoughts on this topic below, and hope to get your feedback on this as well.
Although intervention research in this area is limited, the available evidence suggests that interventions to promote friendships may be most successful if they focus on three key areas: the child using AAC, peers, and environmental/external factors. Understanding how individual characteristics influence the peer interactions of children who use AAC can play a critical role in informing interventions. For example, interventions that target linguistic abilities may provide children with the skills necessary to establish and maintain a friendship.
Interventions must also encompass peers of children who use AAC. Current research suggests that helping children develop healthy attitudes toward their peers who use AAC and supporting their partner communication skills may also be viable intervention strategies. Evidence suggests that even limited peer training that focuses on simple partner communication can be beneficial. Potentially, increasing disability and AAC awareness in schools may help to improve children’s attitudes toward their peers who use AAC.
It is evident from the literature that inclusion in settings with peers without disabilities is not enough to promote friendship. Small interactive group activities with less adult support over time may encourage independence of the child using AAC and boost peer interaction. External factors related to the SGD also warrant consideration. This includes the time-consuming construction of messages, and issues with volume and voice of speech output that can cause frustration and hinder communicative exchanges. Future AAC technologies that facilitate more naturalistic conversation are needed. Also, development of social competence could be promoted by providing children who use AAC access to vocabulary that is present within their naturalistic play and learning environments which might support the children’s interaction with their peers.
It is our suggestion that by using a three-pronged approach to intervention, successful development of friendships among children who use AAC and their peers will be more likely. Overall, friendship must be considered as a life-span goal that is important to the child’s long-term well-being.

Marika King, Nicole Lim, Nonye A.O. Nwosu

Intervention Strategies,Friendships

This post is part of the collection

1 Replies

• Newest
• Oldest
• Most liked

• 0 likes
• 0 replies

It seems so important to me when you said "Small interactive group activities with less adult support over time may
encourage independence of the child using AAC and boost peer interaction." There is such a fine balance between being an adult who helps our children to interact and use the AAC device and being an adult who just gets in the way of being friends. When we create environments with the expectation that we need to set up activities and then get as far out of the way as possible, I think we help kids make their own friends.

I often watch videos of children using AAC devices with an eye to the number of adults vs the number of children are shown. It's quite amazing how often the videos show off the use of the device rather than the communication that could be happening. I know I'm an AT specialist, but I really think a focus on friendship would lead us to think of a multitude of methods of communication strategies. It's part of the reason I love working with the matrix so much. We can focus on all the ways a child expresses things and some of them will include a device but many will include body movements,gestures facial expressions ....

gaylbowser@gmail.com - 12/14/2016