More growling... Shawn will be 14 this year and still growls when aggitated. Come to thinkof it so does my husband.  I think for Shawn it is one of those processing things. It allows him time to organize his thoughts instead of blurting out bad things. Or express his feelings without words since sometimes they don't come to him. His biggest growl is when someone intterupts him. He forgets what he was saying so he just growls. Reminds me of the scottish hhmmphh sound! I posted recently about my ds growling and stimming more. Well, the growling is increasing by the day and I don't really know what to do. His ABA teacher will do a functional assessment on Monday to find out what triggers it, I also started taking data myself. In the meantime we decided not to call any attention to it. I would like to get your opinion/thoughts if you had any experience with this. We have not had growling, rather screeching. We extinguised it by not giving it any attention and reinforcing stronger when he wasn't making the noises. It went away, came back for a while, then went a way and has not ever come back. I hope it goes a way soon. Our other issue was that his little brother used to laugh or cry when he did it and that was reinforcing the behavior. Thank you so much for sharing your experience on this. From my observation I noticed that ds is growling because of stress, anger, and in fact he has been more tantrum-prone these days. You helped me greatly to understand the reason of this behavior. Like I said in my first post I am not going to give attention to it for now. Hopefully, after his functional assessment I will be able to develop a plan on how to deal with it. I will keep you posted. We just had growling as an expression of anger.  It was eventually replaced with words, but can still happen in or near meltdown state. Is your child having more meltdowns lately, that he may be hovering near meltdown state for much of his day?   My son did the low growling thing for around two years ,2-4 in fact low growling was on his checklist of behaviours in day care ,and was checked most days,in my son low grumbling /growling was an indicator of stress ,he often growled as other children came close to his center ,to keep them away,as he preferred to play alone. Linda We have growling and sometimes even snorting. It usually happens when DS meets a new person he doesn't care to be around. It has nothing to do with that person, but more to do with his perception of the situation at the time. Does that make sense? I haven't really figured out to "fix it" yet. I have found that the slightest details are not so slight to DS, or any child on the spectrum. It doesn't take much to set him off. I don't really call attention to it, but I try to calm him as much as possible. Going thru a grunting phase over here, behavioral therapist says it a way of him expressing himself or telling us something. So I feel your pain. Alex's daddy, I think we are on the same boat regarding the terrible 2's (or in our case terrible #'s). I agree that grunting and growling is a way of expressing themselves, since they don't have the words yet for doing so. If your therapist comes up with a replacement behavior plan please let me know. I will do the same once we figure out something. For now, I am just ignoring it and praise when he says no instead of growling. On Monday and Tuesday, his therapist will do the functional analysis and hopefully we can start with some replacement behavior. I will definitely update and share our plan.
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