She Memorised a Rhyme Overnight But Won't Say "Give Me Milk" — Here's Why That's Actually Good News
Written by Dr. Priyanka Jain Bhabu | Founder and CEO, CRIA Foundation | Reading time: 5 minutes
Published: Aug 2026 | Category: Therapy and Intervention
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A real conversation from our clinic. The mother’s name has been changed to protect her family’s privacy.
In 3 minutes: Why your child’s way of learning is actually showing you exactly what works, and four things we talked about with a mother that changed how she saw her daughter.
Anju’s daughter could hear a nursery rhyme once, from a YouTube video at bedtime, and recite it perfectly the next morning. She’d hear a teacher mention a friend named Minoo, and start saying “Minoo, let’s go” on her own, unprompted.
But ask her to say “give me milk” or “give me mango”? Nothing.
Her school was worried. Anju was confused. If her daughter could learn language, why wasn’t she learning the language everyone was trying to teach her?
When she brought this question to Dr. Priyanka Jain Bhabu at CRIA, the answer reframed everything.
Her daughter wasn’t failing to learn. She was showing everyone exactly how she learns, and nobody was paying attention to the pattern.
1. The World Around Your Child Is Already the Teacher
Every time your child does something and the world responds, with warmth, with a consequence, with silence, their brain files it away.
Child reaches for something and gets it: reaching works. Child tries to communicate and nobody responds: not worth trying.
This is ABA (Applied Behavior Analysis) at its core. Not drills. Not compliance. Just this: your child is always learning from what surrounds them. Our job is to arrange that environment so what they’re learning moves them forward.
2. What Drives Your Child Is Personal, Not Universal
“I’ve tried everything to motivate him, but nothing works.”
We hear this often. And we always ask: what were you offering, and does it actually matter to your child?
Dr. Priyanka put it simply: if someone is hungry and you’re eating chips nearby, you have their complete attention. That same person, well-fed, won’t even notice the chips.
What drives a child to engage only works if it matters to that child, in that moment. What lit them up last month might mean nothing today. This is why we watch, track, and adjust, not guess.
The goal is never to find a trick. It’s to understand what genuinely matters to your child.
3. Your Child Won’t Use a Pencil? Use a Marker.
Anju mentioned that her daughter didn’t engage with writing when given a pencil, but was happy to pick up a marker.
Dr. Priyanka’s response: then use the marker.
If the goal is writing, the tool matters far less than the fact that the child is engaging. Pencil, marker, stylus, typing, these are all pathways. If one is blocked, we find another.
The same goes for tracing. Anju had pushed back on her daughter’s school about it: if the child can write directly, why force tracing? The goal is writing, not tracing.
Changing strategies based on what your child actually responds to isn’t giving up. It’s the science.
4. Connection Before Curriculum
Here’s the breakthrough moment in Anju’s story.
Her daughter didn’t learn “give me milk” because it meant nothing to her. But “Minoo, let’s go”, that was a friend. That was real. She learned “I see the moon and the moon sees me” because she saw a photo of the moon in a book her teacher showed her. The words became alive because they connected to something she cared about.
In ABA, we call this verbal behavior, the idea that communication isn’t just about words. It’s about why a child communicates. To request? To share? To connect?
When we teach language the way a child’s brain is already trying to learn it, it sticks.
What This Means for You
Every thing you notice about your child, the song that makes her light up, the tool he’ll actually pick up, the topic she won’t stop talking about, that is data.
It is the starting point of everything we build at CRIA.
You are not failing. You are the closest observer your child has. And the patterns you’re seeing? They’re telling you something real.
Your child is already learning. Our job, yours and ours, is to learn how they do it.
Want to explore what a personalised assessment could look like for your child? Reach out to us at CRIA, we’d love to listen.
