Young children learn as much and as fast as they do because their experiences in the world are “scaffolded” by the important people in their lives.  Their attention is followed, joined, and shared by the people who interact with them, and in these ongoing social interactions children learn from others during play and natural interactive experiences that occur throughout every day. They learn how to communicate, what words mean, what objects do, what people do, what’s funny and sad and scary and fun. Children learn from adults how to fit their language, their actions and their attention with another person in shared activities across the day. This process occurs by children watching, listening, doing, and copying another person. Other people also “explain” the world to infants and toddlers through their words and actions in all the ordinary interactive experiences that typically occur for young children. 

 Autism impedes this process of child learning and adult scaffolding, in several ways.  Children with autism are less attentive to other people and so miss many learning opportunities by watching. Young children with autism have impaired communication skills, so they have difficulty learning from the communications that adults provide. Young children with autism also have difficulty imitating others, and so miss opportunities to learn by copying what others do. Young children with autism may not be quite as flexible in their play skills as others, and may enjoy repeating favorite actions with objects, rather than generating new play ideas and learning through discovery, and this limits their learning. And finally, young children with autism may not find social experiences as inherently rewarding as other children, which can result in reduced time in interactions of all sorts. Since interactions are a primary learning opportunity for toddlers, fewer interactions mean fewer learning opportunities.

These effects of autism constrain the learning of young children with autism, who typically have a number of developmental delays in many areas by the time they reach the toddler period, and these are the targets of treatment in the Early Start Denver Model. 

Continue to: Main Goals of ESDM