Brie Nichols, a stay-at-home mom of two, shared a heartwarming moment of her autistic son speaking for the first time. Her non-verbal 6-year-old was diagnosed with autism as a baby. She has been an autism awareness advocate since then and has shared moments from her life on her social media account.
She was able to record her son’s first response to a question she had been asking for three years. Nichols asked her son, “How was school?” he responded, “Okay.” Nichols asked him twice in disbelief, “The school was okay?” He again responded, “Okay.”
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This left her speechless and happy at the same time. Even a one-word answer from her son made her day. Nichols told People, “I’ve spent years talking to my son and asking him questions, hoping that one day he might answer. I didn’t start recording because I expected a response. I’d been asking him how school was for about three years, ever since he started, and he had never answered before.”
She revealed a part of her that always hoped for an answer: “I waited almost six years to hear him call me ‘Mama.’ [I would] have waited forever if I had to, but I also never would have stopped asking him.”
Having never received a response to this question in the past, she was completely blown away by the breakthrough. The mother of two noted that school environments can be incredibly stressful for kids like him, making this sudden reply an emotional milestone. For the very first time, the guesswork of how his day went was eliminated.
The video quickly went viral and has almost 2K comments. Many mothers chimed in with their own experiences in the comment section of the Instagram post. One wrote, “Literally me when I asked mine what he ate for lunch and he said chicken wings n fries I almost crashed the car.”
The second one commented, “My nephew was nonverbal until 4. Graduated from a difficult major in a Big10 school.” Another one praised Nichols, “Good job on the consistency of the mom. I am sure his teachers and aides at school have been working with him too.”
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A fellow autistic joked, “You don’t know how funny this is to me as an autistic person. Because I remember when I was little, my mom would ask me this question every day. I never knew how to answer it, and it annoyed me so much.”
In another post, the mom shared how her nonspeaking son was singing along to a Frozen song. As a parent, these are important milestones for her and are also encouraging for others who are going through the same thing.
