Brandon is a 5 year boy with Autism who is non-verbal. His behaviors were SIB (self injurious behaviors) head butting into the walls hard, slapping face, screaming, etc.
We worked on getting him to functionally communicate his wants and needs.
Manding is requesting wants and needs when there is an MO (motivational operation) something Brandon wants badly. Brandon is limited in his wants and desires. He doesn’t like candy (can you imagine?). No candy, no ice cream. He loves Gerber puffs, water and bubbles (he is extremely sensory). Even though “water” is a hard word for a non verbal child to say, we decided to give it try!
So every day when we finished the potty or whenever we made it to the sink, we did manding. I shut the faucet and waited for any response from Brandon before turning it on again on. At the beginning I prompted his mouth, using an echoic prompt and many times a full echoic prompt and then faded the prompt away from full echoic to independent! You’ll see this in the video below.
He is now saying “water” completely independently and using it to ask for a bath saying water and a drink.
After a month of Brandon asking for water we took a walk in his neighborhood and guess what, when we saw a stream of water, I asked him, “what is that?” and he answered “water!” Hooray! Success!!!
If video does not play, use this link: Brandon Manding for Water