Nonverbal Communication with Children with Disabilities Imagine not being able to verbalize what you needed or wanted. How would that make you feel? Helpless, frustrated, sad; these are all examples of how children with disabilities feel on a daily basis that make them nonverbal or highly communicative. This is why it is so important that these children use non-verbal communication skills to try to communicate their needs and that the people who work with them are able to understand them. Some of the main ways we see children with disabilities communicate nonverbally are by using gestures, facial expressions, glances, and sometimes even signs. Gestures and signs are normally the easiest to recognize as they imply that they state exactly what they want or use sign language to communicate. Even though they are the easiest to understand, they do not always represent the way these children with disabilities communicate or express themselves. For example, if a child has not learned sign language and does not understand the concept or point to something or make some kind of gesture to get what he wants, he might express what he wants by staring at something or making different facial expressions to let you know that long ago or not, that's what they wanted. Nonverbal Communication: Uses for Children with Autism The use of gestures among children with autism is common but it is also one of the many ways you can identify if they are on the spectrum. According to Watson, Crais, Baranek, Dykstra, and Wilson (2013), different uses of gestures throughout childhood can help start the process of autism screening, evaluation, and intervention early. The sample used for this experiment was a child in ei...... middle of paper ...... so in this experiment they showed how it is possible to use both verbal and non-verbal communication at the same time. This part of the experiment is where the errors started to occur. The children with autism had a lower ability to use gestures related to what they were saying. This makes it very difficult for the recipient to understand since you are receiving different messages at the same time. For this experiment they had a sample group of children with and without autism between the ages of 6 and 12 (So, Lui, Wong, & Sit, 2015). Overall, the use of gestures with children with autism is very common and helps them communicate and be identified. Because these gestures give them a form of communication that is in addition to another form of communication or alone, it gives them the ability to communicate in some way that is useful to them and the recipient in most situations.