Kaden's Life in Pictures

One of my closest friends growing up loved to take pictures, and is now a very successful photographer. She was constantly posing us all through high school, documenting every memory we made. This grew on me, and naturally I learned to love pictures as well. But it wasn’t until very recently that I realized the true power of a picture.

When we first started to recognize some of the challenges Kaden is facing, everyone told me that it would be so important to figure out what his strengths are and build on those. After so many evaluations, assessments, and people placing Kaden’s every little behavior under a microscope, it has been so wonderful to see his little world open up and help him find his strengths. He has so many!

Through this whole process everyone who has worked with him has told us he is very visual. He may not talk, he may have a hard time organizing & processing everything as it comes into his brain, but he is somewhat of a visual genius (those are MY words!) When he started learning PECS (using pictures to communicate his needs), his speech therapist could not believe how fast he learned them. The more he started using PECS to communicate, the more he began to sign and make noises. Today the school psychologist came out to our house and said she has never seen a kiddo as young as Kaden using PECS so efficiently. He is speaking in sentences, with pictures!

Our house is now completely visual. He has his PECS book which we take everywhere with us. That means that we have to know where we are going in advance and I have to have pictures of everything he will have access to. He has a “please” and “I want” picture as well, and he has to use those when communicating what it is that he wants.

He has a magnetic PECS board in each room of our house. So, in the kitchen his board is hanging on the wall and includes everything he could want in the kitchen. We did this because it would have been too many pictures in his book, so we decided his book could be more mobile.

In addition to his PECS book and boards, we have set up a daily schedule board for him. It is a huge dry-erase board that hangs in our living room. We have pictures with magnets on the back in the time slots of everything we are going to do in that day. As we go through our day, he takes down the pictures and places them in the “all done” envelope at the bottom of the board. This board really helps him transition through his day with less anxiety…knowing what to expect is so important for Kaden.

We have started to introduce “social stories.” These are little books of all of his different routines. For example, his social story for bedtime will have pictures of everything he does during his routine. “Kaden brushes his teeth” and next to it will be a picture of Kaden brushing his teeth.

It sounds like a lot, and at times it is. It is a lot of planning and discipline for all of us. With that being said, it is so worth it to see him as he learns to communicate and function in his day to day life without all of the frustration one must feel from not being able to talk. He wants to communicate so badly, and now that we are giving him the tools to do so his whole world has changed.

I think it is ironic that 2 years ago it was Kaden who was one of my biggest inspirations to study graphic design. I have been told that I have a “keen eye” when it comes to graphic design. Well now I get to take all I know from my inner creative toolbox, and create visuals to help Kaden in his development. I have worked on a lot of wonderful design projects in the last couple of years, but not one of them has been as important as this one.

Without the pictures in Kaden’s life we would still be trying to anticipate his needs and he would still be extremely frustrated. Next time you snap a picture, remember that in someone’s life a simple picture could be making a world of difference!