Preschool Kids Do Better When They Talk To Themselves, Research Shows

Preschool Kids Do Better When They Talk To Themselves, Research Shows

This article states: "Parents should not worry when their pre-schoolers talk to themselves; in fact, they should encourage it, says Adam Winsler, an associate professor of psychology at George Mason University. His recent study published in Early Childhood Research Quarterly showed that 5-year-olds do better on motor tasks when they talk to themselves out loud (either spontaneously or when told to do so by an adult) than when they are silent."

Self-talk is a critical part of normal development, and in many situations we use self-talk (as in cognitive therapy) to help us navigate a difficult social world and take actions that often we might react to in an automatic manner and often inappropriate manner. Self-talk is at the heart of cognitive-behaviour therapy, and helps us react to an external prompt. Kids with ASD often do not use self-talk to self regulate their affect (emotions) or to switch mental sets and change from one activity to another. Most adults use self-talk and sometimes you can hear them using it. For instance, after a near accident someone might say, "Well, that was a close call..." in order to calm themselves down (change mental sets). With adults our self-talk has gone from external and audible to "that little voice in my head." It helps us use language to solve problems, rather, and many of our kids do, use language to get stuck in a problem and reinforce negative and ineffective thoughts. working with kids its often helpful to model and use audible self=talk when teaching social reciprocity or other skills. This helps parents and teachers model and then monitor what a child is thinking.

Finally, another key component to self-talk's usefulness is that it is an external prompt, something you can refer to outside of yourself. Matching appropriate self-talk to external visual prompts allows us to eventually teach the child to use self-talk more quietly, and finally talk to themselves in their heads. But to do this successfully we need to match the self-talk to external prompts and cues, teach it in several different settings to generalize the skill (something that is often left out of educational programs) and teach it with a method reflective of errorless learning.

When someone finds themselves in trouble often you will hear, "Well, he can't talk himself out of this." The truth is, appropriate self talk might have avoided the problem in the first place.

For more information on autism spectrum disorder you can check out the resourse page on my web site www.drjimroche.com