Let's Make A Home Video | How Media Brought Us Closer Together

My son started watching videos around one year old. Not cartoons. Not television. Mini educational videos made by his friend —  a man Otto affectionately called “Glasses.” Otto watched him carefully. He mimicked him. Echoed him. Memorized him. Glasses became something between a friend, a teacher, and a celebrity.

I was inspired by their connection…and admired Glasses for dedication to the craft.

Around that same time, our speech therapist suggested something simple: record our play together. The intention was clinical enough — sample language, observe communication, track progress over time. So I started filming and I uploaded clips privately to YouTube because it made sharing easier.

Over time, Otto started to notice the camera. He’d ask what I was doing. “Oh, I’m just making a home video,” I’d say. An excuse at first. But then he wanted to watch them and almost overnight, they became his preferred media. Still—not cartoons, not movies. Just us.

At first, I thought maybe he liked seeing himself. But over time, I realized something more complicated was happening. These videos gave him something many children crave but few adults think about: predictability. Familiar voices. Known outcomes. Repeated emotional experiences.

For many autistic children — and for many children who communicate through a gestalt style of language development — media can become more than entertainment. Scripts, repeated phrases, and familiar scenes may serve as regulation, rehearsal, memory, emotional processing, and communication. Research around echolalia and gestalt language processing increasingly recognizes that repeated language is often meaningful and functional rather than random repetition.  

Looking back, I think Otto wasn’t escaping into the media, he was returning to it, and was studying it. Organizing his world through it…and because the videos were ours — our voices, our laughter, our backyard adventures, our routines — he was studying me too.

Over the next year, our lives became punctuated by a sentence: “Let’s make a home video.” Every walk..beach day…experiement…explosion…every strange little moment. We recorded nearly 200 videos. I was just documenting and observing…then I started noticing patterns. Our home videos became my notebook and evidence to support a deeper connection with him. 

I could see what he replayed. Some videos reached one hundred views. One hundred. A child choosing to revisit the same moment in time, over and over again. I started asking myself—

Why this one?

What language appeared afterward?

What part did he script?

What expression did he replay?

I learned more about my son’s interests and communication through those analytics than I did falling into algorithm-driven parenting content online. The videos became clues. They helped me notice him, while I was busy doing something else. 

Then something shifted again. Around four years old, Otto started re-enacting videos. He wanted to perform them again. Scenes from months ago and sometimes years ago. He’d recreate exact moments. Repeat the dialogue. Position himself exactly the same way.

Those old videos weren’t stuck in the archives anymore. They were time-portals and places we had memories we could return to together. Moments I thought were gone forever, suddenly existed again. It felt like real life time travel, even magic. 

Then came the video editing. Every night after Otto went to sleep - I closed my social media apps and decided to start editing. Make the videos have more punch. I added music, captions, special effects like flames and bubbles. I became completely hyper-fixated. It felt important.

Every morning, Otto would climb into my bed and he’d say: “I made a home video for you.” A script, echoed from the very first time I surprised him with an edited video. And if I didn’t have a new one? He was never disappointed. He would choose an old favorite. Again. And again. And again. What started as observational documentation to support speech became something I never expected. A bond, a love language.

We have four years of archival “home videos.” Small moments protected from disappearing into the endless camera roll of my phone. It’s sad to think that generations exist and don’t really have cardboard boxes filled with VHS tapes anymore.

Home movies used to live in physical places — rewound, replayed, slightly grainy, impossible to edit. Today, most of our memories live scattered across thousands of forgotten files, social media feeds, and cloud storage.

But our videos became something different. They feel alive.

Maybe my favorite realization of all is that the videos never became proof of his progress — they became proof of our connection. Because connection with autistic children is sometimes misunderstood. Parents are often taught to look for eye contact. Conversation. Initiation. The visible markers that reassure us we are being let in.

For us, it looked different. It looked like replaying the same thirty seconds one hundred times, and a child handing me a phone and saying, “Let’s make a home video.”

He doesn’t want to be entertained — he wants to later revisit something we make together. Somewhere along the way, I stopped using the camera to document childhood and started using it to participate in it.

Maybe that was the whole point. Not to create content. Not to preserve proof that we were doing a good job. Just to leave behind evidence that we were here. That we played. That we noticed each other. And one day, when he is older, maybe he’ll scroll back through thousands of tiny ordinary moments and realize what I hope he feels now...

I was trying to get to know you.

And for now, our relationship lives somewhere between memory and media — quietly archived on a private YouTube channel, only a very few get the privilege to watch.