My son does not speak. This means that everything he needs the world to know, he has to say some other way - with his body, his movement, his volume, his refusal, his delight, his flight.
Living alongside him has rearranged how I read every other human being.
Because here is what the systems around him keep doing: they take the only language he has and they file it under behaviour. And in institutional English, behaviour is not a message. It is a problem. It gets managed, reduced, charted, extinguished. The reports speak of behaviours of concern, as though the concerning thing were the signal and not whatever the signal was about.
Imagine sending a letter and having the recipient respond by trying to make you stop producing letters.
The reframe
The alternative is almost embarrassingly simple: behaviour is information. What a person does is data about what their environment demands, permits, and punishes. A child who runs from a classroom is telling you something precise about that classroom. An adult who stops attending appointments is giving you a usability report on your service. Distress is not noise interfering with the data. Distress is the data.
Once you make this shift, you cannot unmake it. The question stops being how do we stop this behaviour? and becomes what is this behaviour answering? The first question ends in compliance. The second ends in design.
Who gets read generously
There is a class dimension here, and a neurological one. The further a person's signalling sits from institutional norms - the wrong accent, the wrong volume, the wrong eye contact, no speech at all - the more likely their communication is to be classified as a deficit. Fluent people get interpreted. Everyone else gets assessed.
This is not a failure of individual kindness. The teachers, support workers and assessors I meet are mostly people of goodwill operating inside reporting frameworks that have one column for behaviour and no column for message. The form itself is the philosophy. Language is architecture, and these are buildings with no door.
What changes
I no longer ask whether someone is being difficult. I ask what difficulty they are responding to. It is a small grammatical shift with large consequences, because it moves the site of repair from the person to the conditions - where, for patterned things, it always belonged.
My son is not a behaviour plan. He is the most honest correspondent I have. The work is building a world that learns to read.
Filed under Autism & Neurodiversity · Back to Field Notes