Autism Social Skills

This paper aims to discuss multiple social-communicative challenges related to social skills in teenagers with autism. These behaviors include turn-taking and inappropriate responses and are defined as being unable to contribute appropriately in a conversation and speaking out of turn. The lack of these specific social skills mostly affect higher functioning children on the spectrum and children with Asperger’s Syndrome. Positive social and conversational skills are important in making and maintaining friendships when teenagers with autism transition to high school and beyond. Supports recommended to address these challenges are a peer-mediated social skills training program and a therapist centered group social skills training program. These

Even though these students are in a least restrictive special education settings compared to their lower-functioning peers, challenging behaviors occur that can affect them educationally and socially. Lack of social skills behavior such as inappropriate responses and turn-taking can also affect the confidence in the child with autism and their willingness to make and keep friends. These weakened social skills traits for children on the spectrum can lead to isolation and loneliness from their same aged peers and can also inhibit the development of intelligence, language, and other related skills (Guralnick, 1981). Parental and familial involvement is also affected from raising a child on the spectrum and research shows that raising a child with ASD negatively impacts the well-being of parents and families regardless of symptom severity, suggesting that even families of children with ‘‘higher-functioning’’ ASD are negatively affected (Karst, et al., 2014). The families can be affected emotionally, socially and economically as

In a Social Skills Training Model (SSTP), a therapist meets regularly with a small group of non-verbal or minimally verbal children with ASD to teach and discuss social skills, such as those involved in having conversations or demonstrating empathy (McMahon et al., 2012). This model also uses parent-questionnaires, checklists and intervention staff observations and assessments. Although this model is significant in working on building conversational social skills and vocalizations, research does not show any significant change in relationships, generalization or any peer related skills (McMahon et al., 2012; Solomon, M et al., 2004). This strategy could work in the initial stages to begin building conversational skills and vocalizations but not for children that previously developed those skills. Although this strategy has been proven to be beneficial, I do not think it will work well for a higher-functioning individual that is extremely verbal and conversational