The Rescue - Nicholas Sparks [79]
“How did you finally get him to do it?”
“I just kept working with him until he did.”
“But how did you know what would work?”
“I didn’t, really. Not in the beginning. I’d studied a lot of different things about how to work with kids like Kyle; I’d read up on different programs that universities were trying, I learned about speech therapy and the things they do. But none of them really seemed to be describing Kyle—I mean, they’d get parts of it right, but mostly they were describing other kids. But there were two books, Late-Talking Children by Thomas Sowell and Let Me Hear Your Voice by Catherine Maurice, that seemed to come the closest. Sowell’s book was the first one that let me know that I wasn’t alone in all this; that a lot of children have trouble speaking, even though nothing else seems to be wrong with them. Maurice’s book gave me an idea of how to actually teach Kyle, even though her book primarily dealt with autism.”
“So what do you do?”
“I use a type of behavioral modification program, one that was originally designed out at UCLA. They’ve had a lot of success with autistic children over the years by rewarding good behavior and punishing negative behavior. I modified the program for speech, since that was really Kyle’s only problem. Basically, when Kyle says what he’s supposed to, he gets a tiny piece of candy. When he doesn’t say it, no candy. If he doesn’t even try or he’s being stubborn, I scold him. When I taught him how to say ‘apple,’ I pointed to a picture of an apple and kept repeating the word. I’d give him candy whenever he made a sound; after that, I gave him candy only when he made the right sound—even if it was just part of the word. Eventually, he was rewarded only when he said the whole word.”
“And that took four hours?”
Denise nodded. “Four incredibly long hours. He cried and fussed, he kept trying to get out of the chair, he screamed like I was stabbing him with pins. If someone had heard us that day, he probably would have thought I was torturing him. I must have said the word, I don’t know, five or six hundred times. I kept repeating it over and over, until we were both absolutely sick of it. It was terrible, truly awful for both of us, and I never thought it would end, but you know . . .”
She leaned a little closer.
“When he finally said it, all the terrible parts suddenly went away—all the frustration and anger and fear that both of us were experiencing. I remember how excited I was—you can’t even begin to imagine it. I started crying, and I had him repeat the word at least a dozen times before I really believed he’d done it. That was the first time that I ever knew for certain that Kyle had the ability to learn. I’d done it, on my own, and I can’t even describe how much that meant, after all the things the doctors had said about him.”
She shook her head wistfully, remembering that day.
“Well, after that, we just kept trying new words, one at a time, until he got those, too. He got to the point where he could name every tree and flower there was, every type of car, every kind of airplane . . . his vocabulary was huge, but he still didn’t have the ability to understand that language was actually used for something. So then we started with two-word combinations, like ‘blue truck’ or ‘big tree,’ and I think that helped him grasp what I was trying to teach him—that words are the way people communicate. After a few months, he could mimic almost everything I said, so I started trying to teach him what questions were.”
“Was that hard?”
“It’s still hard. Harder than teaching him words, because now he has to try to interpret inflections in tone, then understand what the question is, then answer it appropriately. All three parts of that are difficult for him, and that’s what we’ve been working on for the last few months. At first, questions presented a whole new set of challenges, because Kyle wanted to simply mimic what I was saying. I’d point to a picture of an apple and say, ‘What is this?