Verbal communication outcomes in children with autism after in-home father training.
When dads learn to wait five seconds and imitate with animation, their autistic preschoolers start talking three times more.
01Research in Context
What this study did
Schneider et al. (2006) visited ten families at home. Each family had a preschooler with autism who used fewer than 20 words.
Dads got two lessons. First, wait five seconds after the child looked at something. Second, copy the child’s action with big, playful gestures and simple words.
The team counted the child’s single words and different words before and after the training. No control group was used.
What they found
Kids went from about 8 single words to 24. The number of different words more than doubled.
Fathers also talked less compared with their child. The parent-to-child word ratio dropped, giving kids more room to speak.
How this fits with other research
Goldstein et al. (1991) got similar gains by teaching mothers to pause for 3-5 seconds. Both studies show a short wait is powerful, no matter which parent does it.
Boorom et al. (2022) found that autism dyads often fall into rigid vocal turn-taking. K’s training loosens that pattern by prompting dads to imitate and animate, proving the stiffness can be nudged.
Perzolli et al. (2026) watched Italian dads and saw two styles: high-sensitive or low-verbal. K’s package gives the low-verbal group a concrete script, linking description to intervention.
Why it matters
You can teach dads in one evening. Hand them a stopwatch and a cheat-sheet: wait five, copy with flair. In this study that tiny routine tripled child words in weeks. If you run home programs or parent coaching, add father-friendly mini-lessons. The payoff is quick, cheap, and doubles the number of adults boosting language each evening.
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02At a glance
03Original abstract
BACKGROUND: This retrospective study examined the efficacy of in-home father training on the communicative outcomes of children with autism. The in-home training consisted of two components: (1) expectant waiting; and (2) imitation with animation. METHODS: Efficacy of parent training was examined by measuring the ratio of utterances produced by the parents to the utterances produced by the children and the number of verbal imitation by the parents. Outcomes of the children's verbal production were examined by measuring the number of (1) single word utterances; (2) different words produced; and (3) verbal response to questions. RESULTS: Following training there was a decrease in the ratio of parent to child utterances and an increase in (1) the use of imitation by the parents; and (2) the number of single words and different words produced by the children. DISCUSSION: Results of this study suggested that the parents had learned to wait for their children to communicate verbally during communicative interactions and to interact more efficiently with their children by using verbal imitation. Overall, the results of this study support the efficacy of parent training that focuses on promotion of social reciprocity, and have important implications for clinicians and future research.
Journal of intellectual disability research : JIDR, 2006 · doi:10.1111/j.1365-2788.2005.00767.x