Which is more important:

1. teaching a child with autism to ask others to do things for him or
2. teaching a child to do things for himself?

For example, would it be better to teach a 7-year-old child to ask for a bowl, spoon, milk, and cereal for breakfast or would it be better to teach him to get breakfast for himself?

I think requesting trumps learning to complete an activity independently. Recent research in applied behavior analysis also seems to follow this track. For example, in the 2005 replication research of Dr. Lovaas' 1987 study, Dr. Glen Sallows includes the following statement in his description of treatment procedures, "Requesting was taught as early as possible, initially using nonverbal strategies if necessary (e.g., gesturing, signing, or the Picture Exchange Communication System PECS (Bondy & Frost, 1994), in order to reduce frustration (Carr & Durand, 1985) and increase the child's frequency of communicative initiations (Hart & Risley, 1975)."

Sallows, Glen O. & Graupner, Tamlynn D. (2005). American Journal on Mental Retardation, 110 (6), 417-438.

While learning to complete a task (like making breakfast) can improve independence in one area, it may not generalize to other situations. On the other hand, the ability to request has the potential to generalize to a wide variety of situations. Thus, for some children, it can be helpful to practice requesting, even in contrived situations that will later turn into independent skills, in order to focus on this fundamental skill.

Here are a few ways to evoke initiations:

1. limit access to desired items (e.g., rather than having a child drink juice throughout the day, give it to him for breakfast and then put it away until lunch)
2. provide incomplete sets of materials for an activity (e.g., give a child applesauce without a spoon)
3. engage child in repetitive play activity and stop intermittently (e.g., build a tower and knock it down, build it again and knock it down, build it halfway and pause for the child to request putting on another block)
4. present or look at desired item and wait expectantly (e.g., when a child goes to the door to go outside, hold his shoes in your hand and wait expectantly for him to request them)

Here are a few guidelines when teaching requesting:

1. focus on specific requests before teaching general requests (i.e., I want juice/cookie/bubbles should be taught before I want help/more)
2. it is better to increase the number of simple requests rather than attempting to increase the amount of language in the request (e.g., teach a child to request 10 more objects or actions using a single word response rather than focusing on his using the full sentence "I want..." with the 10 objects he already requests)
3. be careful how quickly you introduce requests that serve the same function (e.g., "I want cookie" and "Can I have cookie" both result in a cookie; a child may simply replace one phrase with the other)
4. focus on requests that are likely to be maintained in the natural environment (e.g., telling a child to draw a picture so that he then requests, "I need pencil" will not be maintained in the natural environment if the child does not demonstrate interest in drawing)
5. recognize the difference between contrived requests that teach the general skill of requesting and appropriate requests that a child will likely use in the future (e.g., it is often helpful to teach a child to ask for a spoon, bowl, milk, and cereal at breakfast, even though he will eventually get all of this material independently, but this is a different kind of request than a child's asking for help, or asking where a preferred object is located)

I'm interested if others have ideas of ways to evoke initiations or helpful guidelines when teaching requesting.