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People have noticed that many of the pictures I post with my non-verbal son have him holding my chin. It’s almost as if he’s presenting my face to the world.

This pose is a longstanding one in our home. There’s no setup or request. I simply stand close to him, hold out my phone, and he settles in. Before I know it, his hand is under my face as if to say, “Hey world. This is my dad’s head.”

It’s adorable, but it’s also part of a bigger picture. Lucas’s infatuation with the heads of others doesn’t end with pictures or even with me. He does it to his sister too, and he does it off-camera.

Since he was little, my son has always had an interest in faces. I know it flies in the face of most autism-related information, but many of Lucas’s actions do. It’s just another catch-all piece of autism advice that showed me catch-all autism advice isn’t real.

Luckily, I learned early that many non-verbal children take an interest in the mouths of family members who speak. My boy is no exception.

I read how the best course of action is to let them touch your lips and feel the movement when you talk. So we do that. Even to this day, during downtimes, I’ll let him place his hand on my mouth and feel the movements.

Lucas, however, doesn’t leave it there. He’ll do more than touch your lips. He’ll work to get his grubby little fingers in your mouth. I’ve never been entirely sure why, but his facial expression looks like he’s doing a scientific experiment. It’s as if he’s thinking, “Let’s see what this guy has going on in there.”

That said, he’ll do the same with your fingers and his own mouth, if you let him. That, I believe, is more about the sensation of his teeth being pressed on. It’s why he chews sleeves and blankets… but who knows? At 14 years old, this kid still has me peeling layers off the onion.

Keep in mind, I do correct him if he’s being too persistent or doing it at an inappropriate time. You want to encourage your kid to learn. You don’t want him performing a mandible claw on you when you’re talking to the school crossing guard. There needs to be an understanding there.

So I will remind him to be careful or tell him to wait, but I don’t stop him or try to correct this behavior because, well, it helps him understand how to speak… I think.

Even if it doesn’t, so what? My son is interacting with me. He wants to know more about the world around him. That’s my goal as a dad. That’s a victory for us.

You’re probably thinking none of this is a big deal. A little gross? Sure. But nothing major. Let your kid poke your mouth. What’s the big deal?

The big deal is… he does it to my eyes too.

Your son pokes you in the eyes?

Yes. My son pokes me in the eyes. (see for yourself)

Hard? Well, not anymore. Today, when he does it, I’ll close my eyelids and let him flutter my, as I’ve been told, longer-than-average eyelashes. I might repeat “careful,” but I don’t need to anymore. He gets it.

There was a time, though, when this kid went full Mo Howard on my pupils. He’d dive right in and start pulling at my face as if I was a piece of silly putty. When he was little, it made no sense. Yet, I let him do it.

I’m so glad I did. Just like his interest in how my mouth makes sounds, there’s something about my eyes that intrigues him. I’m not sure what exactly he’s trying to learn from it, but I do know he’s trying to learn. It’s important to him, even if I don’t understand why.

Had I used traditional parenting on him at a young age, this would have been a big no-no. The instinct, along with countless parenting experts, is to tell him “no.” You take his hand and you repeat, “No. We don’t do that. We keep our hands to ourselves!”

Thankfully, by the time he started doing this, we already knew he had obstacles to overcome. Face pokes and prods were seen as one of his first true attempts to bond with any of us. It was a major (albeit painful and slightly gross) victory.

So I let him. Sure, I insisted on doing it appropriately and carefully, but it wasn’t outright denied. I’m so glad it wasn’t.

Lucas doesn’t understand a lot of my world. I know that and, through love and patience, he’s grown to be a part of it. I know he sees that and returns my compassion with attempts to be a part of the things I want him to.

By the same token, I don’t fully understand Lucas’s world. That’s not something often written about or acknowledged. We’re all so infatuated with making people like my son know “our world” that we rarely admit we need to better know theirs.

For whatever reason, this is something that my son needs to do, wants to do, and has consistently done. I may not know why, but I engage him in it. I want him to see that he can be the person he wants to be with me and there’s no judgment.

I may not understand it, but he doesn’t understand why we have to wait on line at Target before eating the cookies he’s holding in his hand. Yet, he respects me enough to stand there and wait. I respect him enough to let him do what he needs to do too. That’s what being family is all about.