The development of autism in babies may be avoided if parents are taught communication skills through video feedback, according to new research from western Australia.
The study identified a group of one-year-old babies who seemed to be developing autistic-like tendencies, such as difficulty having eye contact and not responding to their names.
For half the babies in the study group, the wait-and-see approach continued. Parents of the second group of babies underwent “pre-emptive” feedback based on videos taken of parent and baby interactions.
“We video parents interacting with their child and go back over the video with the parents frame by frame to help them understand all the beautiful ways their babies communicate,” explains Andrew Whitehouse, chief investigator of the Australian Infant Communication and Engagement Study (AICES).
"We took the approach that babies who are developing a bit differently aren’t getting the social enrichment around them that they require because they process the world in a different way."
Among babies whose families received the pre-emptive intervention, 2 out of 3 did not have an autism diagnosis when they turned age 3.
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This video is excerpted from DurableHuman.com founder Jenifer Joy Madden's interview with lead researcher Andrew Whitehouse.
Here is a transcript of the video:
[Whitehouse:]
We took the approach that babies who are developing a bit differently aren’t getting the social enrichment around them that they require because they process the world in a different way.
So what we sought to do was to help parents understand the differences in their babies and how they can best respond in a way that provides their baby the social enrichment they need for their brain to continue developing.
I mean ultimately, we’re helping babies develop a feeling of being perceived and understood and so that they have a greater feeling of that back and forth interaction, back and forth, back and forth, which are really the foundational building blocks of brain development.
[Whitehouse in AICES video excerpt:]
Therapy uses what we call video feedback, which is where we use the power of video technology to help provide families insights into the unique abilities of their babies.
We then provide families with strategies with how to communicate with their babies to use those unique abilities as strengths and a foundation for future brain development.
[Whitehouse:]
We are helping parents fine-tune their parenting to the unique abilities of their baby. One of the thing about pre emptive intervention is that of course many babies of the babies we are providing support to are just late bloomers.
They were always going to be on a typical path. They’re just a little bit delayed at the moment so we have to have an intervention that is ethical to deliver to people who may not even need it.
There’s no doubt that we are raising kids differently than we did previously. We’ve got a whole lot of whopping distractions that constantly compete for our attention. One of great things of this intervention is that is helps parents to slow down and to understand the wonder that they can experience when they see children through their own eyes.
Human Babies are born very underdeveloped – we know that there are very few animals in the animal kingdom that are born as underdeveloped as us and it’s not just important that our brains receive social enrichment – they require it to develop. And that’s one of the things that we’ve got through developmental science over the last 20 years is that that social enrichment is not just good to have, it’s a must have.
