There is a lot of research on teaching children with autism conversation skills. Many times, I’ve seen children who have had a tremendous amount of this training, yet still there is something missing. It just doesn’t seem quite right.
What I believe the children are missing in some cases is enough background knowledge and interest in different topics to meaningfully engage. Some children spend so much of their time on iPads, video games, or extremely obscure interests that they don’t have a lot to talk about.
Although admittedly hard to prove in a scientific study, in my view helping children develop a variety of interests not only opens potential vocational and leisure opportunities, it can help with conversation skills, too. When you have a deep interest and knowledge about a topic, there is a lot more to say.
This goes a little bit against some of the conventional wisdom. Often behavior analysts want to know what is happening in the child’s current environment. What are the 3rd graders talking about? Let’s teach him to talk about that. Certainly, in some situations that tactic can work great. But often it doesn’t.
Let’s say the kids are interested in the new Star Wars movie that just came out. The amount of background knowledge and language to meaningful participate beyond one or two exchanges is enormous. Often, you won’t be able to get meaningful conversation going using this strategy.
I strongly suspect it is better to take the long view of developing conversation skills. Helping the child develop an appropriate and deep interest in a few different areas will be much more successful in helping develop meaningful conversational skills and relationships than trying to teach the child to talk about whatever the current popular topics happen to be.