“Joint attention” could be THE buzz phrase of all autism buzz phrases. But it’s a little hard to define and a lot hard to capture on video— mostly because Nick doesn’t really do it. A lot harder to prove a negative, right? So I included a video of him working on joint attention and pointing with one of his wonderful therapists, as well as a rare image of Nick pointing.

I used to joke that 90% of Nick’s zillions of hours of evaluation and therapy were about pointing, and the other 10% were about… everything else. And it wasn’t really a joke. The importance of pointing really cannot be overstated. You hear a lot about the significance of eye contact in autism, but for some reason, you almost never hear about that all-important Point. But both eye contact and pointing are markers for the ability to engage in something called “joint attention.”

Put simply, joint attention is engagement. It’s that feeling you get when the person you’re talking to is really *with you* and not spacing out or texting someone on the phone…or in any other way “somewhere else”. This seems to be the working definition most autism therapists currently use.

But I believe the original definition was a bit narrower and more technical; “joint attention” used to refer to the situation where two people are literally attending to the same thing— either through verbal or nonverbal communication. For instance, if I (verbally) say to you, “Look at that airplane” and in response, you look up, see the airplane and tell me it’s white, we have just shared joint attention: we jointly attended to the airplane. Similarly, if I (nonverbally) point to the airplane— or even just gaze at the airplane— and you see me do this, follow my point or gaze to the sky, and look at the airplane as well, then we have shared joint attention: even though we aren’t talking about it, we are both attending to the airplane. And the fact that you only attended to the airplane because you saw me attending to it means that we are doing it *jointly*. I think this definition is a bit dated, but you’ll still sometimes hear people use “joint attention” in this way. Personally, I prefer this definition. Like most things that are dated, it’s just better.

Nick and kids like him spend *years* working— and I mean working HARD— on joint attention. A very typical schedule involves 30-40 hours a week of (pricey) therapy, most of which is dedicated to improving eye contact, engagement, and, of course, The Point. And despite all of this grueling work, I can count on one hand the number of times Nick has pointed to something in his entire life. One of those times was this beautiful point to a bubble when we went to the magical, Nick-friendly Gazillion Bubble Show in NYC.