Finding Your Child’s Voice — Creating Safe Communication

In our last post, we talked about how the belief system you carry into parenting shapes everything — how fear-based theology tends to produce fear-based discipline, and how shifting your attention toward what your child does rightchanges the entire energy of your home. If you haven’t read that one yet, start there. It lays the foundation for everything we’re about to talk about.

Because this post goes one step further. This one is for the parents who are asking a harder question:

What does communication-first parenting look like when my child doesn’t have words yet?

Every Behavior Is a Message

Here is something that changes everything once you really understand it: your child is already communicating. Even if they have no spoken words. Even if they scream, bite, throw things, or shut down completely. That behavior is not random, and it is not defiance. It is a message — the only one they currently have the tools to send.

Research in applied behavior analysis has consistently shown that problem behavior in children with autism almost always serves a purpose. It is typically an attempt to communicate a want, a need, a boundary, or an emotion (Hanley, Jin, Vanselow, & Hanratty, 2014). When we respond to that behavior with punishment, we are essentially telling a child who cannot speak:

“Your message was received, and you will be punished for sending it.”

Communication-first means we do the opposite. We find a way to give them a better tool to send that same message — and then we listen.

Finding the Right Tool

When we work with a nonspeaking child who has an autism diagnosis, our first job is not to eliminate the problem behavior. Our first job is to find the communication method that takes the least amount of effort for that specific child.

We try many things. AAC devices — apps on an iPad that speak for the child when they press a symbol. Sign language. Picture cards. Icons. Research supports all of these approaches, and augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) has been established as an evidence-based practice for nonspeaking autistic children (Steinbrunner et al., 2020, as cited in Ganz et al., 2022).

But here is what we have found in practice: the fastest tool to start with is often the simplest one. A single target. It might be a colored dot. It might be a small picture of a child’s favorite character. Something that takes one touch, one gesture, one small movement.

We call this an omnibus mand — a single communication response that can mean many things. Yes. No. Stop. I need you. I need a break. More. Done. All from one simple touch.

This comes directly from Dr. Greg Hanley’s skill-based treatment model, which prioritizes teaching a functional communication response — one reliable signal — before anything else (Ghaemmaghami, Hanley, & Jessel, 2021). The goal is for that signal to become so trusted, so consistently honored, that the child discovers something profound:

I have a voice. And it works.

What This Looks Like in Real Life

Picture a child sitting on the floor with a bin of small plastic animals. They are sorting them, organizing them in their own system. It matters to them.

A therapist slowly reaches a hand toward the animals.

The child screams. Grabs the therapist’s hand. Pushes it away.

From a fear-based lens, that moment looks like defiance. Like a behavior problem that needs to be corrected.

From a communication-first lens, that moment looks like a child who just sent a very clear message:Stop. Those are mine. I was not finished.

So instead of correcting the push or the scream, the therapist takes the child’s hand — gently, hand over hand — and presses it to the target. Something happens. The screaming stops. The pushing stops. The child touches the target on their own. And then faster. And then without hesitation.

Their body settles. What was escalating fear and frustration becomes something almost calm — like a business transaction.

You reached for my toys. I told you to stop. You stopped.

That is not a small moment. For a child who has perhaps never been able to make their wants understood before, that moment is enormous.

Building the Relationship Inside the Communication

Once the child is reliably using the target, we begin what Dr. Hanley’s research calls the skill-based treatment process. We start to build in gentle, brief moments of no — delivered calmly, without confrontation, and followed immediately by honoring what the child asked for.

No. Three, two, one — okay, your way.

What we are watching in that moment is not defiance. It is a child learning that communication goes both ways. That the person across from them can be trusted even when the answer is no — because the no is brief, it is safe, and it always comes with a countdown and a resolution.

This is boundaries built on trust, not fear. This is what it looks like when the relationship comes first.

It Is Never Too Late to Start

We have worked with children from 18 months to 18 years old, and we always start in the same place. Simplified, effortless, safe communication — built around what that specific person can do right now. We find their voice first. Everything else follows.

The Amplified Bible says in Proverbs 22:6, “Train up a child in the way he should go [and in keeping with his individual gift or bent], and when he is old he will not depart from it.”

Communication-first is not a clinical technique. It is a way of seeing your child as a person with something to say — and deciding that your job is to help them say it.