Sharing My Overview On Social Skill For Children With ASD

Social interactions are a problem for all children with ASD, no matter what their cognitive level happen to be. They don't initiate interactions as much as typically developing children do.


Children with ASD have difficulty interpreting tone of voice, gesture, and body posture. They find other children's motive, intentions and emotion difficult to understand. Their communciation may be one sided, repetitive, and lacking in true reciprocity. Some children with ASD may talk too much, while others may be passive and quiet.


At each stage of development, there are new social challenges to meet, just like my little STAR. I have to count on SLT, OT and special educators to direct teach him on some social ideas and rules to him or help him engage in social problem solving. Direct teaching of social rules and strategies, and later on, active problem solving are some effective ways of approach that my little STAR may benefit more consider his attentional learning style and strength in 1-1 learning.


Making use of social stories to explain and illustrate social rules and concepts, so as to help him learn to deal more appropriately with a social situation that is problematic for him. It can be written with supporting pictures as well as words, whatever will make the ideas clear to the child, given his language level.


In classroom where group is concern, it is important to observe and seek opportunity to offer the children interaction challenges such as :-


1) Teach him to stop consistently doing something when asked to do so. Able to wait for peer in a group activities.


2) Encourage the child to pay attention to other peers by saying "look", asking "what" question to arouse his interest in social interaction and share soe of his time together.


3) Create awareness and understanding that he can ask for help when havjng trouble socially.

4) Teach him how to expand his language and use of sentence construction to benefit from a group situation with other children.


I am hopeful that once he understands that to change a social situation, he will need to be willing to make some changes in his own behavior and to continue elevate his social skills and reinforcing his group learning road map. He may take more time than other children to acquire the social skill set but does the educational system able to accomodate him with more time he needs.


Whatever form of intervention takes, they are guided by the child's cognitive strengths and weaknessess, as well as his social skill's deficit. Acknowledging the child's learning style, using his strengths to compensate for or remediate his weaknessness is what make the social skill intervention effective.


Once the child acquires the social skill, we may encourage him to use it often until it become fluent or natural, only way out is through repeated and frequent practise. Once he crosses that milestones, I believe that he will be able to pay attention to other children and their reaction and have confidence to apply them on new situation.


Winners Statement;-


" Down the road of life, you can either see obstacles coming and run the other way, or you can take these obstacles as they come, fight your way through them, and be stronger because of them."