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I have a 14 year old autistic child. He has never spoken and when he was very little he could not focus long enough to even make eye contact with a photograph. As he got older and we introduced more photo's to him he began communicating with them. Starting out mostly with favorite food items he worked his way up to requesting not only his favorite foods but his favorite toys then his favorite places. It took many years and lots of hard work but now my son uses photo's pretty much to communicate to us. He will bring us a photo of school on weekday mornings, he will bring us a photo of his favorite park. He even has requested the bathroom using a photo. In many cases autistic children can graduate from using real photographs to ones called Meyer Johnsen pi cs which are stick figures engaged in whatever for example "help". My son is a very visual learner and these type of photos' don't work well for him. My son loves to look at photographs also for a hobby so over his last few vacations i have been taking photo's of almost everything he does and we make a book out of it at the end of vacation. We put very small captions under the picture for example. This is me feeding a goat. He loves the books and it is a great way to show school or therapist or even family that your autistic child does enjoy doing things. Currently we have a dry erase board in the kitchen. It is covered with Velcro and familiar pictures that my son can just go up to and grab himself. This has helped so much with his anxiety level when we are about to go somewhere. We show him the picture and that way he has the visual in his brain and he understands.

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