The Search for Answers
My journey into working with autistic children began when I was 19.
I was a bit lost, having walked away from my childhood dream of becoming a professional dancer (a story for another time), when a job advert for support workers at a local residential special school for children with autism caught my eye.
My parents and friends thought it unusual at the time. I had shown little interest in working with children, beyond being an assistant dance teacher in my teens, and certainly not with a group of them with such significant support needs. I couldn’t explain why I was interested, but I went for the job and got it.
I remember being taken on a tour of the residential unit and being utterly struck by the children I met. I had never before seen children and teenagers behaving as they did, and I felt my heart just open to them. I was filled with curiosity about what their experiences might be like, and questions about how they could be helped.
That curiosity drove me forward as I moved from support work into the classroom, then into speech and language therapy and autism specialism. Along the way, I carried out diagnostic assessments, trained others in how to communicate more effectively with autistic children, and put what I was learning into practice in my direct work with children. I later pursued a Master’s in Education, specialising in autism, hoping that more knowledge might help me make a more meaningful difference to their lives.
I imagined the answers might be buried in books I hadn’t yet encountered, people I needed to hear speak, or techniques I hadn’t yet learned. Instead, I emerged from several years of studying alongside working with a great deal of knowledge, but also a growing sense of disillusionment. I had encountered so many different theories and approaches that I was left wondering what we should actually be doing on the ground.
As part of my dissertation, I developed a multisensory, yoga-based intervention for young children and saw the positive impact it could have. I also continued to pursue other interventions that supported autistic children’s communication, integrating them into my work and training other professionals to use them. I could see that these approaches made a difference, and yet something still felt missing.
I would visit children in schools and nurseries and often come away feeling despondent. The intervention might be in place and showing some positive impact, but many children were still unsettled, struggling, and finding life difficult.
These children’s challenges were often significant, yet I was beginning to see what was sometimes missing, and to wonder how much of a difference its presence might make.
The People Who Just Had It
It is one thing to deliver a specified programme of activities for a child, using techniques we have been trained in. It is another to really tune in to the child in front of us and meaningfully connect with them on their level. This kind of connection is harder to teach through a manual or training course.
In my time working in schools and nurseries, I would occasionally encounter a wonderful member of staff who just had it, or perhaps got it. I couldn’t articulate what it was at the time. All I knew was that these were people who simply and naturally oriented themselves towards the child, largely dropping their own agenda and instead tuning in completely to the unique world of the child in front of them.
It wasn’t that they applied a technique or delivered an intervention better than others. Instead it was as if they could empty themselves of their own stuff enough to really see what the child might need, and respond in a way that felt right for them in that moment. These were sometimes the older ladies with warm hugs and smiling eyes, but they could equally be a young person with a particular presence and openness about them. It wasn’t something I could predict from a person’s experience or qualifications, yet when I saw it, it was unmistakable.
Many of the children I worked with communicated in ways that were not always easy to recognise as communication. They might make a sound, repeat an action or move in a particular way, without any obvious indication that they were seeking a response from someone else. I often found that things began to shift when we stopped trying to initiate an interaction and instead began to notice what the child was already doing — perhaps responding with a similar sound or movement, or finding some small way to join them in their activity. There were frameworks that laid out this process, but it could be all too easy to follow the steps formulaically, without always meaningfully responding to the child in front of us.
But the people who seemed able to do this naturally were often the ones I felt were making the greatest difference to a child. It was the quality of their attention that seemed to set them apart.
I didn’t have a word for this at the time. Attunement wasn’t a concept I had encountered in my professional training, although it was something I had begun to explore through my own experiences and reflections outside of work. It gave me a way to describe something I had been noticing for years.
When Attention Shifts
What I often saw elsewhere was a very different quality of attention.
In every setting, I met people who were well-intentioned and dedicated to supporting the children in their care. Yet many didn’t appear to fully recognise the subtle but significant impact their own attunement, or lack of it, could have.
I remember how often the everyday demands of working in schools and nurseries intruded on the interactions that mattered. Imagine a child who communicates without words, who is still discovering that his actions can have an effect on the people around him. A member of staff sits next to him, tuned in and waiting, ready to respond to his subtle nonverbal cues and build on them. Then another member of staff calls across to her about a scheduling issue, or someone comes through the door with a message from the school office. The adult’s attention shifts, and the moment is lost.
These interruptions might seem minor, but for a child whose communication depends on those small exchanges being noticed and responded to, they really matter. They are opportunities to build connection and help the child discover that they can make themselves understood.
Attention can be pulled away from a child in other ways, too. Sometimes, it is our own impulse to make something happen. When a child doesn’t respond in a way we recognise or expect, it can be tempting to say more, ask another question or introduce something new. We might be trying to help, but in doing so, we can miss what is already happening.
When a child makes a sound and someone responds, or reaches towards something and another person notices, something begins to happen between them. The child starts to discover that their actions can affect those around them, and that others can share in their interests. Repeated over time, these exchanges become part of how a child experiences and understands the world. They need to happen again and again, woven into the fabric of everyday life.
For many children, these exchanges develop naturally through everyday interactions, without anyone needing to think too much about how they happen. But for many of the children I worked with, this process didn't unfold so readily, which meant we needed to become more intentional about noticing their attempts to communicate and finding ways to respond.
I found myself wondering what might be possible if this kind of attention happened not just in an occasional therapy session, or with one particular member of staff, but throughout a child's day. What difference might it make if the people around them were more consistently able to recognise their attempts to connect, respond to their interests, and meet them where they were?
I noticed similar patterns when I spent time in mainstream settings, working with children who already had more established communication skills. Their need for individual attention was perhaps less obvious than that of the children I worked with in specialist settings, but I often felt that a little more time spent really noticing and responding to them could make a meaningful difference.
The barriers here were different. One or two teachers were trying to move a class of 30 children through a set of learning objectives, with limited opportunity to tune in to each child as an individual. I knew this wasn’t because staff didn’t want to do so. Even so, I struggled with how often outcomes took precedence over relationships and connection. And when a child needed more individualised support, accessing it could involve a lengthy process of assessment and paperwork.
I often found it difficult to meaningfully change this on the ground. I tried to find ways of helping adults become more aware of the impact of the environments they created for children and the quality of their interactions, even developing a classroom environment audit that was adopted by a couple of schools. But every place I went to, staff were already overwhelmed, and another piece of paperwork could feel like one more demand or a criticism of them and the already difficult job they were doing. I could see what was missing, but struggled to find a way of changing it.
But I also saw that the problem wasn’t always a lack of time or opportunity for individual attention. Even in specialist settings, where children might have dedicated adults working alongside them, that didn’t necessarily translate into the kind of attunement I had come to recognise in certain people.
And yet I kept coming back to those rare individuals who just had it. They didn't need reminding to tune in to the child, to wait until they were away from the child to speak to a colleague, or to be fully present in the moment with them. They just did it, seemingly effortlessly.
This was both the blessing and the challenge. It showed me what was possible, but also made me question where this quality of attention came from, whether it could be developed in others, and if so, how?
The Quality of Our Attention
The ability to fully attune to the child didn’t seem to be a product of experience: I had seen it in the most inexperienced people and its absence in the most experienced. It also didn’t seem to come down simply to care. Almost without exception, the people I met who worked with children did so because they wanted to help them. And the quality of attention seemed largely independent of the particular intervention or technique being used.
Perhaps, though, the quality of attention was a key thing that helped those interventions to work.
I began to wonder whether some of the answers might lie in our culture at large. We live with so many competing demands on our attention, so much to think about and so much vying for our focus. I wonder how much this affects our ability to slow down, notice what is happening around us, and really tune in to another person.
In my own life, developing a mindfulness practice, and later exploring yoga and meditation, significantly changed the quality of my day-to-day attention. Before that, I often moved through my days caught up in cycles of thinking and overthinking, without really noticing how much was going on inside me or around me. Learning to notice my thoughts, and eventually finding moments of stillness in which I wasn’t so caught up in them, began to change how I experienced my relationships.
I wonder whether this also affected how I worked with children. I had spent years learning about them, their development and the approaches that might help them. But perhaps another part of the work was learning to observe my own internal state, and how it affected my capacity to be available to someone else. As I became more aware of my own patterns and less caught up in them, I found I could meet children with a different quality of presence.
Now, in parenting, I find myself reflecting on this topic again because of the powerful impact I see that it has on my own children. It isn’t realistic to offer this kind of attention all the time, but when I manage to be fully present with them, putting aside everything else for a few minutes and really tuning in to them, the effect is palpable. I often notice a shift in their behaviour when they have my undivided attention, as though something they needed has been met.
Children need to feel seen, heard, understood and connected to us. Not all of the time, but regularly enough that they know they matter, that we are available to them, and that they can trust us to respond in ways that recognise and respect their individual needs.
Connection as the Intervention
I suppose what I had always been searching for was a way to connect with the children I had devoted so many years to understanding and supporting. I was there to help them learn to communicate, and often there was an expectation that, with my knowledge and techniques, I could enable them to talk. Sometimes, I could. But time and again, I found that meaningful communication depended on something more than the techniques I had learned. It depended on whether I, and the other adults around them, could really meet them where they were.
I saw how an interaction could begin with something very small: a sound that I responded to, a movement I mirrored, or an action that became something we could share. Over time, a child could begin to repeat something deliberately, look towards me to see my response, or find new ways to bring me into what they were doing. These moments showed me that communication wasn’t always something I needed to elicit. Sometimes, it began with noticing and responding to what was already there.
Can we wait long enough to notice what a child is communicating, even when it doesn’t look like communication as we expect it? Can we respond to their smallest actions or sounds to show them they are having a meaningful effect on us? Can we recognise when a child is trying to share something with us, or is simply inviting us into their world? Can we take the time to notice what matters to them, delight in their achievements, however small, and share in their enjoyment?
Can we recognise connection as something worth prioritising, and create the time, space and conditions that allow us to put it into practice?
Can we have connection as the target, and relationship as the intervention?
After all those years of searching for ways to help children, I find myself returning to the need for us to really see the child in front of us. Not just to understand them through the knowledge we have acquired or the techniques we have learned, but to be sufficiently present to notice who they are, what they are communicating and what they need from us in that moment. Because the way we respond to children becomes a central part of their experience of the world, just as their responses shape our experience of them.
I still don’t know how we best develop this quality of attention, or how we create the conditions that allow it to become a consistent part of the environments in which children grow and learn. But I suspect that until we take the quality of our attention as seriously as we take the methods we use, we will continue to overlook something fundamental.
If this piece stirred something, I’d love to hear.
Have you ever noticed a difference in a child when you changed the way you responded to them?
And what do you think helps us become more attuned to the children in our care?
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This is so interesting, thank you for sharing your experiences here. I agree that connection is absolutely vital, and I’ve seen the difference in my own children when they have me fully present, especially on a 1:1.
I’ve been thinking about how I can bring my expertise to my local schools, including mindfulness, visualisation and hypnosis for self-esteem/confidence, anxiety etc. (I’m certified to work with children also). I feel a space for them to be heard, and have that connection and felt experience is so needed.