The Autism News | English


My aunt often comments that she has the funnest job in the world (although she uses better grammar than that). She’s a speech pathologist and works in a preschool classroom for kids with autism; her role is to help the language and communication skills move forward. My oldest daughter helped out in her classroom for a couple days last year and confirmed my aunt’s “funnest job” assessment, although the miniature horse that was visiting at the time may have contributed to that conclusion. While I don’t want to downplay how challenging her job is, it does seem like my aunt has a lot of fun with the kids.

She also happens to be one of my most loyal readers. The other day while I was visiting with her, she mentioned that one of her incoming 3-year olds loves the J-Lo/Pitbull song “On the Floor”, and my aunt commented that she had purchased the song, pondering whether it was appropriate to play in a preschool classroom.

This stream of information caused my poor brain to sputter almost to a halt as it tried to process the questions that were raised. Why do the autistic kids get to listen to dance club music when my non-autistic kids had to endure Barney during their own preschool days? How did this toddler manage to dictate what music was played during her school day? And how was it even possible for the youngster to develop such strong feelings for such a mediocre song?

Rather than articulate any of these questions, my actual response was simply to blink a few times and assure my aunt that the song in question doesn’t contain any significant profanity- it’s just a fun song about J-Lo going clubbing, possibly with her own 3-year olds.

But for some reason, the comment about using the song in her classroom got me thinking. I generally think of music as being strictly for entertainment purposes, so I was intrigued by the idea that it could actually be used for educational or therapeutic reasons. While this probably isn’t newsworthy to the parent of an autistic child, I found it fascinating.

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