Autistic boy and speech pathologist share flight, her discovery changed his life forever

Rachel Romeo was preparing to board the second leg of her flight home from a conference in Helsinki, Finland, when a flight attendant gave her a heads-up: she’d be seated next to a 10-year-old boy with behavioral challenges. With the flight fully booked, switching seats wasn’t an option. What no one could have predicted was how Romeo—a speech-language pathologist (SLP)—would make a lasting difference for both the boy and his father during the eight-hour journey. Their touching interaction quickly went viral after Romeo shared the experience in a heartfelt Twitter thread.

As Romeo took her seat, the boy’s father immediately turned to her, apologizing in broken English. He explained that his son had severe nonverbal autism and warned her that the flight might be difficult. In her tweet, Romeo recalled the moment: “I just had such an affirming experience. On my 8-hour international flight back from a conference, I sat next to a father/son. In broken English, the father began to apologize/warn me that his ~10-year-old son had severe nonverbal autism and that this would [likely] be a difficult journey."

Romeo told the man not to worry as she was used to supporting children with various needs due to her line of work and took out a speech that she had planned to write on the flight. "Challenging behaviors began even before take-off: screaming, hitting me, and grabbing for my things. The father repeatedly apologized, but did little else," she tweeted. "I asked him how his son preferred to communicate. He didn’t seem to understand. Perhaps this was a language barrier, but I think instead the child had very little experience with communication therapy. I put away the talk I was working on & asked if I could try. He nodded."

"It suddenly occurred to me that wherever this family was coming from, I don't think this child had a lot of services as we do in the U.S.," Romeo, a postdoctoral fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Boston Children's Hospital, told The Washington Post. She first tried "pulling up some standard images for basic nouns on [her] computer" but soon realized that screens seemed to bother the child. "So I summoned my god-awful drawing skills and tried to create a (very!) low-tech board," Romeo tweeted. "And by god, it clicked. I made symbols for the things he was grabbing, for his favorite stuffed penguin, and for his dad. He took to it very quickly. I introduced way more symbols than I normally would, but hey, how often do we get an 8-hour session?!"

"By the end of the flight, he had made several requests, initiated several times, & his behaviors had reduced quite a bit," Romeo revealed. "The father was astounded—clearly no one had ever tried an AAC (augmentative and alternative communication) approach with him. I gave him the paper & showed him how to use it, and he nearly cried." The boy's father seemed excited to learn about this new form of helping his son to communicate, she said, adding that she hopes the pair will continue to create symbols together as she considers the ability to communicate to be a fundamental human right.

"This was the human desire for communication, pure and simple. To connect with another person and share a thought. Communication is a basic human right, and I was overjoyed to help someone find it. What a privilege and a gift," Romeo tweeted. "It can be easy to write off these individuals as different and not interested, but that’s certainly not the case," she said later. "Everyone has something to tell you. Everyone has a story."

This article originally appeared 3 years ago.