Look At Me

    

  My daughter, Brooke has beautiful eye contact and I don't take one second of it for granted. I took this picture of her at the Texas State Fair last year.  I love her big blue piercing eyes and for a mother, there is nothing more fulfilling than looking into the eyes of one of her children and sharing the closeness that comes from that.  But in the autism community, eye contact, or lack thereof, can be a big issue. 
     A lack of appropriate eye contact was the first red flag I saw in Brooke's development.  When she was just six months old,  I became very alarmed about her lack of eye contact.  I would hold her and talk sweetly to her and  try desperately to make eye contact with her.  She liked it when I spoke to or sang to her. She would smile and her entire face would light up,  but she would look sharply to the left or right avoiding a direct gaze with my eyes, as if it was painful. It hurt my feelings so bad. Sarah, my first born child, had allowed me to cuddle her and feed her as we stared into each others eyes, and that feeling had been magical.  It was like we were the only two people on Earth, and in those moments, to me, we were.  I wanted that desperately with Brooke.  I would try to reposition her body to gain the eye contact I craved, but it was quite a challenge as she would squirm to look elsewhere. When I did get any eye contact, it would be fleeting. 

I remember back then, going to the Internet and typing "poor eye contact" into a Google search.  EVERYTHING that came up was about autism.  I went numb with the thought that my beautiful baby could be autistic.  I remember one night in particular, after spending too much time reading on the Internet, going upstairs to her little pink nursery and getting down on my knees beside her crib.  She was ten months old at the time and by now, even without a formal diagnosis, the signs were all there and my suspicions could not be calmed.  I was shaken to my core with fear. As I kneeled there, engulfed in the beauty of her sleeping perfection, I was hoping against hope that it was not to be. I grabbed onto the white wooden spindles of her crib, so tightly that my hands began to perspire, and with one spindle in each hand I began to pray, no beg God, by the moonlight, that she would be okay, that she would be "normal," that He would not let it be my baby who had autism.  "No God, no, please," I begged.  "I can't do this. Give this to someone else, some other baby, somewhere else, someone who doesn't care about their baby,  but not mine, not our family...please God, please, no........." 

But God sees the beginning, the middle, and end and now,  nine years later, knowing what I know,  having experienced what I have experienced, and learning what I have learned, I am a better person for having Brooke and she had made me the person I was meant to be.  I don't know how or why God chose me to have Brooke, but I once read a poem by Erma Bomback that has brought great peace to me.  Here it is:



 

God Chooses Mom for Disabled Child 

 

Did you ever wonder how mothers of handicapped children are chosen? Somehow I visualize God hovering over Earth selecting his instruments for propagation with great care and deliberation. As he observes, he instructs his angels to make notes in a giant ledger.


"Armstrong, Beth; son; patron saint, Matthew.

 

"Forrest, Marjorie; daughter; patron saint, Cecelia.

 

"Rudledge, Carrie; twins; patron saint.... give her Gerard. He's used to profanity.

 

" Finally, he passes a name to an angel and smiles, "Give her a handicapped child." 

 

The angel is curious. "Why this one, God? She's so happy."

 

"Exactly," smiles God. "Could I give a handicapped child a mother who does not know laughter? That would be cruel." 

 

"But has she patience?" asks the angel. 

 

"I don't want her to have too much patience or she will drown in a sea of self-pity and despair. Once the shock and resentment wears off, she'll handle it." 

 

"I watched her today. She has that feeling of self and independence. She'll have to teach the child to live in her world and that's not going to be easy." 

 

"But, Lord, I don't think she even believes in you." 

 

God smiles. "No matter. I can fix that. This one is perfect. She has just enough selfishness." The angel gasps, "Selfishness? Is that a virtue?" 

 

God nods. "If she can't separate herself from the child occasionally, she'll never survive. Yes, there is a woman I will bless with a child less then perfect. She doesn't realize it yet, but she is to be envied. She will never take for granted a spoken word. She will never consider a step ordinary. When her child says "Momma" for the first time, she will be present at a miracle and know it! When she describes a tree or a sunset to her blind child, she will see it as few people ever see my creations." "I will permit her to see clearly the things I see---ignorance, cruelty, prejudice--- and allow her to rise above them. She will never be alone. I will be at her side every minute of every day of her life because she is doing my work as surely as she is here by my side." 

 

"And what about her patron saint?" asks the angel, his pen poised in midair.

 

God smiles.  "A mirror will suffice." 

     Now, I am clearly no saint, but I am different from most mothers. I see the world in only the way the mother of a child with a disability does. That is just too hard to explain in a simple blog so I will save it for a more complicated one later.




   How did I get Brooke to go from "fleeting" eye contact to typical eye contact?  Let me tell you, it took a lot of work, patience and creativity but it was a skill she had to learn and she did learn. 
Here are some of the strategies I used:




1.  I would sit with Brooke in a quiet environment.  There were no toys or other things to steal her attention away and I would just sit and look at her.  I would follow her with my eyes around the room and each time she even intermittently looked at my eye, I would praise her very loudly by saying, "Good eyes!" or "Good Looking!"  I would completely over exaggerate my praise and she enjoyed the animation she saw when she looked.  If you have a child who makes little to no eye contact, I would suggesting setting up an environment where you put the child right in front of you and have a highly desirable item the child likes, for example M&M candies.  Each time the child makes eye contact, offer big boisterous praise and give an M&M. It won't take long and the child will learn how to earn the piece of candy. As time progresses, you can withhold the candy, or whatever the reinforcer is, for a period of a few seconds.  As you continue with  this, begin to communicate  and create intimacy with your eyes to the child's eyes, as the child can tolerate it. Look into the child's eyes and smile, or raise your eyebrows up and down and smile while you do it.


2.  Whenever I wanted to speak directly to Brooke, I got down on my knees right in front of her face, closely,  and I tipped her chin up so she would be looking at my face, then I would say whatever it was I wanted to say to her.  Often, she would still be looking sharply to the left and right initially,  but at least she was looking in the vicinity of my eyes. 


This is a picture of my husband trying to chin tip Brooke for a picture when we were working with her on this skill.  You can see how she had difficulty looking at us, even for a picture:

3.  When Brooke asked for juice or something else, (I was thrilled she was requesting!!!) I would hold the object up to my eyes so I would have a better opportunity to catch her glance before giving it to her.  When she looked at my eyes, I would say, "Good looking," or "Good eyes." 


4.  Before I spoke to Brooke, I often prefaced my statements with, "Look at me....." with and without  chin tipping. Here is a video of it in action.  Brooke was 4 years 8 months old.

(Granted we were still working on other things here, like just answering to her name!  Also pronoun reversals were an issue, she was scared to death of the water, she used echolalia, and she had no conversations skills.  I would have never imagined back then,  that 4.5 years after this video was made, all of these issues would be resolved!)

5.  I also used to make a game out of it.  I got a  silly pair of eye glasses and told Brooke that whenever I had the glasses on, I wanted her to focus on looking at my face/eyes when I spoke to her.   I started with only using the glasses for a  short period of time, and as I noticed her eye contact improving, I wore them for extended periods of time.  I had a few different pairs of silly glasses, and on some days, the whole family would wear them at dinner or other periods of the day.  We all knew what they meant.   Here is an example of some silly glasses I got at a local party store. 

6.  As Brooke got a little older,  we reinforced to Brooke, the importance of eye contact and how it lets other people know you are listening to them.  Even if the child just does an eye "check in,"  it shows respect, interest, and appreciation and it can help a child to build a new friendship. 


I knew we had passed the hump, when she began tipping our chins and telling us to "Look at me," whenever she had something to say.

Eventually, we were able to fade out all these strategies as Brooke's eye contact improved and improved and improved and became, well, typical, like this.....