5 Reasons to Reduce Prompting with Your Child with Special Needs

Should we really be prompting our children with special needs?

What is a prompt?

A prompt can be verbal, visual, gestural or physical. It is given to encourage a response, etc. Prompts can be beneficial and are often needed to guide and redirect a child to a task. Prompts are meant to be faded over time as a child develops a specific skill. To learn more information about prompts, check out this article written by Brenda Kosky Deskin . However, when the same level of prompting is given for an extended period of time and not reduced, prompt dependency may occur.

What does prompt dependency mean?

From my perspective, that is when a person is dependent on prompts to initiate a behavior or response. When a child and/or adult becomes prompt dependent from a parent, caregiver, therapist, etc, they become unable to discover their own mistakes and rely heavily on others to give them some sort of indication that their answer is correct. This could be a head nod, a “yeah”, physical prompt, etc. to choose the right answer. As a caregiver, therapist, and/or parent, we want our children to succeed and can become accustomed to guiding and helping them along. I explain this issue of prompt dependency often to caregivers and compare it to driving a car. When someone drives you to a location, do you always remember how to get there? It is when you drive the car that you remember the route to your destination. This analogy can be viewed in many different respects concerning a variety of context and situations.

Here are five reasons to reduce prompts with a child with special needs:

1. Decrease prompt dependent behaviors:

Prompt dependent behaviors can be your child gazing at you before choosing the right answer, not answering until you ask them a question or your child constantly asking for help. How do you decrease these behaviors? Give time and allow them to discover themselves how to answer the question, communicate, (depending on the task). Modeling can be an excellent technique as well.

2. Increase independence:

When an individual is prompt dependent, they are less independent. They are relying on that particular person to help them and therefore not being as independent as they can be.

3. Improve initiation of communication:

Many individuals on my caseload have difficulty initiating communication because they rely so heavily on others for specific prompts. This can be the person saying hello first, telling them what to say, etc. This reliance on another person to provide a script is not allowing that person to initiate the interaction themselves.

4. Improve self-confidence:

As the prompts reduce, you may notice more mistakes. However with more mistakes, develops the process of learning new concepts. Just as with any child or adult, we learn through mistakes. When you make those mistakes once or twice, you try not make them again. For example, when working with a child using a communication device, if I tell them where the “food” page is every single time, will they learn where it is? No, they will just be dependent on me to tell them. If I allow them to make a mistake and go into the clothes page, they will see food is not in there. Once they do find that food page, there will a sense of pride, like “I did it!” This will increase self-confidence and make him or her proud!

5. Improve problem-solving skills:

Many times if you give your child enough time to figure out a response or initiate an interaction, there can be an improvement with problem-solving and inferencing skills. Given the time, a child will be given the opportunity to problem solve and determine the response independently. This opportunity can be within a structured task or even within a simple conversation. I hope this article helps! Please use this article to help educate others and build awareness!

Becca Eisenberg