What if the reason your child isn’t talking yet isn’t because they can’t learn words, but because they’re missing a skill that almost always comes before speech? That skill is imitation.
Imitation is the gateway to learning. It’s how children learn sounds, gestures, play skills, social interaction, and eventually language. When imitation is weak or inconsistent—which is very common in children with autism and toddlers showing signs of autism—everything else becomes harder. In this episode, I’m going to show you why teaching imitation is often one of the smartest first steps you can take. We’ll talk about what imitation really looks like, how to assess if your child has an imitation delay, why it matters so much for play and communication, and I’ll give you tips on how to start teaching it in a highly practical, child-friendly way.
Welcome back to this episode. I’m excited to be doing a solo show for a change. I’ve gotten myself into doing mostly interviews, and this topic of imitation came up in a recent Q&A call for members of my paid online courses. We do a monthly call, and one of the questions was how to teach imitation skills. I realized at that point that I had done a whole video blog—about five or ten minutes long—that’s going to be linked in the show notes, and in it we talk generally about imitation. But when that member asked the question, I realized I had very little information out there with demonstrations on how to teach imitation or a whole podcast on the importance of imitation. That prompted me to create the video blog and also to create this podcast, because imitation is arguably even more important than talking skills. It’s really critical when babies are developing. Their first imitation is babbling back and forth, smiling back and forth, clapping, doing little gestures. If that doesn’t develop, then you get toddlers who aren’t naturally picking up imitation to build one-word utterances and get verbal imitation, or echoics. We’re going to talk all about how to assess and how to teach in just a few minutes.
The four steps of the Turn Autism Around® approach are assessment, planning, teaching, and easy data collection so that you can evaluate whether what you’re doing is working. As I said, imitation is a critical skill for babies who need to be taught directly, as well as for toddlers and children with autism, because all babies, toddlers, and children learn most language and social skills through imitation. It’s also really important for developing receptive language skills and then verbal imitation skills.
So if you’re frustrated because, for example, your child or clients might not be able to touch their head or clap their hands on command—we call those receptive commands or receptive identification (“Touch the banana,” “Give me your shoes,” “Go get your shoes”)—it is probably related to the fact that they’re missing those imitation skills, which can often be the bridge needed for receptive language. It’s easier, for instance, to say “Do this” and clap your hands than it is to sit on your own hands and say “Clap your hands.”
This makes sense if you think about learning a foreign language. If I were in another country and I didn’t have any of the language, and someone sat on their hands and said “ooby owi ooi,” I’d have no idea what they were talking about. But if they clapped their hands while saying “ooie owie ooey,” I would at least try to clap my hands, even if I didn’t understand the words. That’s what we’re talking about here. There is nothing magical about teaching language; it is all step by step, and it’s a behavior that can be shaped. Imitation is a behavior that can be shaped and taught. Language is a behavior that can be shaped and taught.
Yes, there are some kids with other issues like apraxia, but that doesn’t mean, “Oh, my child has apraxia, so they’re not going to be able to talk,” or, “They have motor-planning problems, so they’re not going to be able to imitate.” Those are barriers and additional concerns, of course, but they are not a rule-out that determines your child’s future.
Imitation of simple actions usually begins at about eight months of age in a typically developing baby or toddler. By eight months, simple actions like clapping hands, tapping the table, or making a toy car go back and forth should be starting to emerge. By age two, most typically developing kids are imitating everything. This development is often very delayed in children with autism. Some children with ADHD are delayed; some children with Down syndrome or other developmental issues are also delayed with imitation.
The fact that your one- or two-year-old is not imitating doesn’t necessarily mean it’s definitely autism, but it is a red flag, and any delay can and should be treated. Part of my mission is to empower parents to assess the situation and to teach their children to imitate, to talk, to play, to improve eating, sleeping, potty training, and to reduce tantrums. Imitation is a very big, pivotal skill, and this is the way kids learn language, social skills, play skills—even the way adults learn skills.
So the first step of the Turn Autism Around approach is assessment. When we’re talking about assessing imitation, we also have to assess a bunch of other things like language, other skills, and how severe any problem behaviors are. But when we’re talking specifically about assessing imitation, we want to ask and answer questions like: Can a child take an object like a car, and if you say “Do this” and make the car go back and forth, can they do that? If you say “Do this” and clap your hands, can they clap their hands?
If you’re singing a song like “If You’re Happy and You Know It, Clap Your Hands,” can they follow the motions to the song? Yes, that’s a little bit of what we call “multiple control” because you’re saying “clap your hands” and also doing it. But when you think about little babies and emerging imitation skills, it’s going to be things like peekaboo—moving your hands away from your eyes, for example. So it doesn’t have to look like you sitting down with your child and formally saying “Do this.”
When we’re assessing, we’re looking at: Are they able to do it on command? Are they able to do it naturally? For example, if their 15-month-old cousin goes to the window and pulls the curtain back and forth and plays a little game, will your child do the same thing? If their brother or sister runs into a playhouse, will they run in with them? At story time in the library, are they participating with the musical instruments being passed around? These are all imitation skills and they are all really important to pay attention to, whether it’s your child or your clients.
Then you can sit down with actual objects like a little toy car. I talk in my book and in my online course about the STAT, the Screening Tool for Autism in Toddlers. In the STAT, they have a couple of imitation tasks as part of the imitation subtest, because, like I said, lack of imitation skills—especially by age two—is a red flag for autism.
In the STAT imitation subtest, for instance, you’ll have identical matching little cars. You take your car, run it back and forth, and say, “Do this,” rolling it back and forth two times. In order for the child to “pass” that test, they need to take their car and roll it back and forth a couple of times. If they make the car go up a wall or just push it off the table, that’s not a pass. Fortunately, with the STAT, you can give them a few tries. It doesn’t have to be, “Well, they pushed it off, so they fail.” You can work with them, teach the skill right there, and if they get it by the end, that’s still considered a pass.
Two example tasks in the STAT are: rolling a car back and forth and having the child do the same thing, and taking a toy figurine like an elephant or plastic cow and making it “hop hop hop.” The STAT tells you exactly what to say, but I believe it is something like “hop, hop, hop.” The child doesn’t have to say the words “hop, hop, hop”; they just need to make the toy hop a few times to pass.
If you don’t have the STAT, or you have an older child, you can do something similar. As I show in the video in the show notes, you can get two identical yellow blocks and two identical plastic cups. You say “Do this” and use your block to put it in your cup, and the child needs to do the same thing with their block and cup. When we’re testing, we want identical objects—not two different cars, not a red block and a yellow block. Clear cups are actually a good idea because when the block is inside the cup, it’s easy to see what’s happening, and the child can follow along visually as well. One of the easiest imitation skills to start with is object imitation. So if you want to test your child or your clients, gather some objects and begin to say, “Do this,” then move the item.
Another important point is that you don’t always want every yellow block and clear cup to mean “put the block in the cup,” because that may become just a memorized response instead of flexible imitation. You can also, with the same cups and blocks, say “Do this” and flip the cup upside down. The child then needs to flip their cup. That gives you two different responses with the same objects. You might then have them put the yellow block on top of the cup by saying “Do this” and placing your block on top.
Hopefully those of you who are listening understand what I’m describing. I think it’s often easier to see it than just to hear it, but object imitation is the starting point, and that’s how we assess. Then we’re going to get into teaching, which is similar in sequence.
Before teaching, though, let’s talk about step number two. Step number one is assessment. You’re not just looking at object imitation; you’re also looking at whether your child can do gross-motor movements. Can they clap if you say “Do this” and clap your hands? Can they clap without you physically prompting their hands? They should be able to do several successful responses, not just one clap counted as “good.”
Can they touch body parts when you say “Do this” and touch your head? You can probably also use the command “Touch your head,” but here’s an important point: back when my son Lucas was three and being evaluated, I was asked to fill out a form listing his skills. When it came to receptive language—touching body parts—I wrote down that he could touch his head, toes, nose, and belly, and then I put “no” for the rest of the body parts.
When the team assessed Lucas, they couldn’t get him to touch his body parts. They were testing receptive language, not imitation. They were sitting on their hands and saying, “Touch toes. Touch nose. Touch belly. Touch head.” He wasn’t doing it. He didn’t understand “ooby owi ooie” – in other words, the language alone.
Then they came out and said, “We’re not able to get Lucas to touch his body parts. You say he can touch head, toes, nose, and belly. Can you show us how you’re doing that?” This was before I was a behavior analyst. I said, “Oh, yeah, sure. Here’s the thing—you have to do it in the same order, and then we sing the Barney song and I show him.”
So I said, “This is the way he does it. Lucas, first you touch your head, then your toes, then your belly, then your nose,” and I demonstrated while singing. You could see he was actually imitating those actions in the same order to the song. But when the instructions were given out of order, with no imitation and no song, he couldn’t do it.
So it’s really important that if you’re going to mix commands like “Touch your head, touch your nose,” it may be cleaner at first to just use “Do this” with a model: first with objects, then with body parts, and with commands like “Do this” while clapping your hands.
The first things to assess are objects, then gross motor (clapping, tapping the table with both hands). I find it easiest to start with big motions that also involve sound, to get and hold their attention. Fine-motor imitation usually comes next—that could be a thumbs-up, putting two index fingers together, or wiggling fingers. You’d say, “Do this,” and wiggle your fingers, or “Do this,” and put your two index fingers together.
If you’re documenting this, and you go through a list where they can put their index fingers together, do a thumbs-up, and wiggle their fingers on imitation with the command “Do this,” the next imitation skills to look at are head movements and oral-motor movements. If they can’t do any play skills or gross-motor imitation for even a couple of responses, you can stop there with your assessment—that’s where you’re going to start teaching. Only if kids can really do object and gross-motor imitation would you then move on to fine motor, then head movements, then oral-motor skills.
Head-movement imitation might include shaking their head “no,” nodding “yes,” or rolling their head around. Oral-motor imitation might include opening their mouth, bringing their teeth together in a “hard smile,” or sticking out their tongue. Throughout all of this, if we need to give physical prompts, they must always be gentle and as non-invasive as possible. If a child reacts by trying to push your hands away, that’s a sign that you’re over-prompting or that those skills aren’t the right skills to work on yet.
With head and oral-motor movements especially, you need to wait until a child is imitating fluently with a bunch of other skills before you even attempt them. I would never recommend making a child shake their head no or yes by physically forcing their head, and I would never recommend putting your hands on a child’s face or mouth to get them to open their mouth or say “cheese,” unless you are working with a trained SLP or someone trained in a specific prompt method like TalkTools.
We have a whole show with Mags Kirk, who is dually certified as an SLP and BCBA and is a TalkTools-certified professional. With TalkTools, there may be some limited, very specialized procedures where a trained professional helps a child blow on a whistle, suck from a straw, or bite down on a soft block. Those procedures might involve brief, trained hand-to-face contact. But otherwise, I do not recommend parents or behavior analysts touching kids’ faces at all. That’s why you have to work on the easiest skills first and assess carefully. If you get to the point where any of this is too hard and the child can’t do it, you stop the assessment and move to the next step.
At the very end of that structure—objects, then gross motor, then fine motor, then head movements, then oral motor—some programs will “back-door” into speech. Once you teach a child to open their mouth on imitation, you might add sound: open mouth with an “ah,” closed-mouth hard smile with an “ee.” If you think about it, a child who isn’t making those sounds probably has oral-motor issues going on as well. Feeding issues are very common in this population.
We use TalkTools, with the help of professionals like Mags Kirk, to improve feeding, talking, and drooling in kids. There is a lot to be said for addressing those oral-motor aspects in a systematic way.
So that’s what we want to assess. The next step of the Turn Autism Around approach is step two: planning. Once we have our one-page assessment done—and in the book resources we provide a blank plan and a sample plan—we can start to plan. If a child is not imitating with objects, that’s where we want to start.
For planning and teaching, we put object imitation on the plan using a variety of objects—not just two yellow blocks and two cups. We pick a variety, as outlined in the video blog. If the child can do object imitation fairly fluently but is not imitating actions, you’ll still want to keep some object imitation on the plan to keep things fun and light.
Even with the cup and block example, you can work your way into some gross-motor imitation: have the child put a block in each cup (you put a block in your cup; they put a block in theirs), and then say “Do this” and cover your block with your hand. That’s a back-door way to start getting some gross-motor imitation. That might go on the plan as well.
Teaching is step three, but before we go fully into teaching, there’s one more thing I forgot to say about assessment and planning. When you’re assessing imitation and making a plan, you’re not just assessing object imitation, gross motor, fine motor, and echoics.
Most kids who are being diagnosed with autism, or who are worrying us because of delays, can’t do object imitation and have very delayed play skills. They are also usually not able to echo words when you say them. If you say “Say ball,” they won’t say “ball.” But some kids do have what we call delayed echolalia and/or scripting. We’ve done a video blog and a podcast on that, which we’ll put in the show notes.
When you’re assessing imitation, you should also assess verbal imitation: if I say “ball,” can he say “ball”? When Lucas was little, he could not. We couldn’t get him to echo words. I didn’t know what echolalia or scripting were. I didn’t know that a lack of imitation and echoing was a red flag for autism.
What he did have were a few little scripts. I know I’ve talked about this before, but it’s important. We used to take him to a museum that had a sign that said, “Please do not feed the ducks,” and my husband would read it and then add “Quack-quack.” Lucas liked to run to each sign with his dad and hear that little routine. Then, in the middle of the night, he might wake up and say, “Please do not feed the ducks. Quack-quack.” I didn’t know at the time that this was another red flag for autism, and that it was called delayed echolalia or scripting.
That scripting is something we now include on our assessment form: can the child do immediate echolalia, and do they have delayed echolalia or scripting? It’s actually a good sign, in a way, because it tells you they can say words. At the time, two decades ago, I didn’t know how to take “Please do not feed the ducks” and turn that into more functional language, like labeling a duck or asking to go to the museum. Now I know exactly how to do that, and it’s all outlined in my book, my online courses, and my video blogs.
So, when you’re making a plan, your plan is basically built from strengths and needs. If a child can’t echo and can’t imitate at all, that’s definitely a big need. They might be able to imitate with blocks and cars; that would be a strength. They might also script or have delayed echolalia. You can list that under strengths or needs, depending on how and how often it shows up.
A key need is getting them to echo you, because once echoing starts—think back to that foreign language example—then you can say, “This is called an ubby,” while holding up a water bottle. If the child says “ubby,” you can then use transfer trials: later you just hold up the bottle and expect “ubby,” and the label transfers to that object. If you were in a foreign country and learned that water was called “ubby,” you’d need to remember that to get water.
As I said, delayed echolalia is actually a positive sign in that sense—any imitation is a good thing, even if it’s delayed. Imitation in general is such a critical skill. So, making a plan means identifying which imitation skills are strengths, which are needs, using strengths to help build weaker areas, and then writing it all down.
The good thing about imitation is that it doesn’t require speech and language at first, and parents can often get a quick win. For instance, if you can teach a child to wave when somebody arrives or leaves, that’s powerful. If you can teach them to wave and gently prompt that, and then they start waving or clapping along with their daycare or preschool class, or touching their body parts during songs with imitation, that’s often a quick and encouraging win to show parents how much their child can learn. Planning how to teach imitation is critical.
When you get to teaching, step three, we’re following that same sequence. Assessment is step one, planning is step two, teaching imitation skills is step three. I’ve already told you quite a bit about how to assess. Teaching imitation goes in the same order: first objects, then gross motor, then fine motor, then head movements, then oral motor, and finally vocal language. That’s typically the progression.
However, using a verbal-behavior approach and the Turn Autism Around approach, we are not waiting for verbal imitation to be perfect before we work on language. At the same time we’re building imitation skills, we are also holding up water and saying “water” three times. We’re taking an inset puzzle and saying “pig” three times while the child puts the pig piece in the puzzle.
We’re working hard to get language as quickly as possible. All the early learner programs in my book and online courses are designed to get quick wins, get language going, and pair the name of the pig with the picture of the pig and the child’s desire to put that pig in the puzzle. It’s part mand (request), part tact (label), and part echoic when the child imitates the word.
That’s why inset puzzles are one of the programs in my early-learner curriculum. That’s also why Mr. Potato Head is in there. We can hold up the nose piece and say “nose” three times. Once the child really loves building Potato Head, and it’s fun and reinforcing, we can start touching our own nose while holding up the nose piece and saying “nose.” We can gently help the child touch their nose as well.
If Potato Head gets “unpaired”—meaning it stops being fun—we need to re-pair it and make it fun again. It’s like a job: we have to keep it reinforcing. Potato Head is a very important program for building imitation skills.
Song time is another big piece. We have songs, song fill-ins, and motor actions during songs. Songs like “Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes” are critical for learning. While it was a mistake in my earlier story to assume Lucas understood body-part words based only on the Barney song, it wasn’t a mistake to use the song to teach imitation. For example: first we touch our head, then our toes, then our belly, then our nose in the Barney routine. We also should have done “Head, shoulders, knees, and toes” and had him imitate those actions with the song, and then we should have used Potato Head to teach body parts out of order, without a song, to show true understanding.
All of these types of activities are embedded within my early learner programs. If you’re listening and you’re doing a different approach without these strategies, I’d say this is essentially a new, integrated approach based on decades of research, decades of my experience, and decades of it working with real families. I really encourage you to get a hold of my book—listen to it, read it—and download the book resources, which will really help.
I recommend that imitation skills—and many other skills—not be worked on only in the natural environment, but also in a structured way. A big part of the Turn Autism Around approach is to pair up materials like Potato Head, inset puzzles, object-imitation items like cups and blocks, and keep them together in a bag or bin. That way, you’re not hunting around your house for these identical objects every time.
We want to work on these skills at a table where the child’s feet can touch the floor and they can sit comfortably. We should never force a child to sit at the table; we need to slowly pair the table with fun so that “table time” feels like learning time, not work. Many Early Intervention professionals don’t recommend table time and prefer everything on the floor, but I have found over the years that short bursts of fun, highly reinforcing table time are very effective.
We want to make table time appealing and put everything together so it’s easy for the child and the parent—even if it’s just 15 minutes a day. This is all outlined in my work.
When we are teaching, we want to use what behavior analysts call the SD, or discriminative stimulus—the command “Do this.” Then we move the spoon into the cup or stir the spoon, for example. We say “Do this” clearly, a little louder, maybe more exaggerated and fun: “Do this!” and then we perform the action. We want to teach the child to respond to that “Do this” cue. In my program, we also do a lot of “touch head” with a model, combining different operants (imitation, receptive, and sometimes vocal) to get more “bang for our buck.”
We also want to use imitation skills for play skills: having identical dolls and identical little bottles to feed the dolls, for example. Eventually, if the child gets good object imitation with blocks, spoons, cups, and so on, we can transition to only needing one set of materials.
For example, you might say, “Look at Mommy feeding the baby. Okay, your turn,” and hand the child the doll and bottle so they can imitate. You eventually want to get to the point where you don’t need two identical sets.
Or if you’re playing with a dollhouse and have different dolls, you might say, “Look, the mommy doll is going up, up, up the steps. Make your baby doll go up the steps,” or “Make the mommy go up the steps.” The same idea applies to a toy farm. If you can get it to where you’re working with one set and the child still imitates, that will help generalize skills to more natural environments.
If you do need to use any prompting, it must be very gentle. The child needs to accept the prompt willingly, which is why we need to start with things that are fun and highly reinforcing. It’s a slow, fun process, not a forced one.
Once your child masters some object imitations, you move on to gross-motor imitation, like clapping and tapping the table. Again, I usually start with gross-motor imitation that involves sound to get the child’s attention.
Finally, step four of the Turn Autism Around approach is using easy data to make sure you’re making progress. For parents, I never want to bog them down with complex data sheets. I also don’t want them working on a million skills at the same time.
So, as you develop table time, read the book, and download the free resources and assessments, ask yourself or the parents: “What would be a great imitation skill to start with?” Waving is often a great skill. Clapping is usually a great skill. Try to work on a couple of imitation skills at the same time, not twenty.
I once worked with one of my first clients who spent a year in traditional ABA. He learned “clap hands,” but when you said “touch head,” he clapped his hands. When you said “stomp your feet,” he clapped his hands. It wasn’t generalized at all. That’s why it’s really important to pick three to five different targets per program.
So if you’re doing body parts, I work on three to five of them at the same time. If you’re working on imitation skills, I might choose waving, clapping, and banging on the table with both hands. You can’t push fine-motor imitation very hard with very young children because their hands are small and they simply can’t perform some of those movements yet.
That’s the overview of teaching. Again, the early learner programs have imitation built in, have tacts built in, and have echoics built in. It’s just a matter of figuring out what prerequisite skills are needed, then assessing, planning, teaching, and keeping the minimal data you need to make sure it’s working.
Another thing about imitation is that it can help build what we call behavioral momentum. If a child can imitate a little bit, you can sometimes build momentum by doing a quick chain: “Do this—let’s do it fast: clap, tap, reach up!” It’s fun and fast. Combining songs and fluent movements can get kids more excited and engaged. Again, never force or over-prompt. Make it fun and always be gentle.
That’s pretty much what I have for imitation. Don’t over-do it by working on too many skills at once, but don’t ignore it either. Always think about the four steps: assessing, planning, teaching, and evaluating using easy data. We do need to work on lots of skills overall, but imitation is such a critical skill that I believe it should often be one of the first things you work on.
I hope you enjoyed this episode on imitation and that you are ready to start taking action to teach important skills—including imitation—by enrolling in my online course and community, where you’ll get step-by-step guidance so you can start turning things around today. You can learn more by clicking the link on or around this video. And I hope to see your introduction in our community today.
“Do this.”
Working on too many skills at once