“It’s Prohibited … He’s in Critical Condition”. Can Reading Fiction Help Genuine Autism Disorders? Perhaps so.
Today’s post is about reading books, which is not one of my favourite pastimes, but it does indeed seem to have significant benefits, particularly if you have autism. Monty is now aged 16, but I still recall the amazement his teachers at school expressed when his 1:1 Assistant taught him to read (using ABA and endless enthusiasm). Teaching someone who could hardly speak, to read, is no small achievement. We have also done endless exercises at home to learn to read, to write, to do maths and of course to speak. The issue later at junior school was to what extent Monty understood what he read. There can be a lot of wishful thinking on the part of the parent. Fast forward to 2020 and Monty spends about an hour a day reading a “grown-up” novel. This was a plan I instigated and again the question arose, how much does Monty understand and frankly, is there any point in the exercise. I have no doubt that a decade ago when Monty was reading aloud, it was like a mechanical p...