No feeling could be more devastating than the feeling of never being able to communicate love. All humans desire and genuinely want to be loved as well as to hear that they mean something to somebody close to them. Unfortunately, not everybody is blessed enough to receive this positive feedback from their loved ones. Several people with infantile autism lack the ability to talk or communicate. The parents of those who have infantile autism will never hear their kid tell them how much they mean to them.
Through the development of a technique called facilitated communication, parents and their mute children were finally able to talk to each other. An adult facilitator would guide the child's hands across a keyboard of some sort, and help them write what they wanted to say. The success of this technique was overwhelming and parents around the world could not have been happier. Finally, their dreams have become reality and all was right in the world.
Perhaps these conversations were "working" simply due to the fact that the parents wanted them too. It may have been an extraordinary claim, to be able to talk to someone who is mute, but it was important enough to them that they were able to block out all evidence disproving the validity with ease. Unfortunately, as studies soon began to show, the children weren't really using this technique to talk at all. It was essentially a "scientific" version of an Ouija board. The adult would unknowingly guide the child's hand and therefore the sentences were really being produced by the facilitator, and not the child.
It is understandable these parents would want to hold on to the belief that their children were talking to them. Unfortunately extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Researchers began to test this technique using a more rigorous research design. They found many imperfections with facilitated communication. In fact, when tested, nearly 100 percent of the trials showed that the words on the paper were coming from the adult facilitator entirely and not the child.
Leave a comment