Social Skills Success for Students with Autism / Asperger's

Helping Adolescents on the Spectrum to Fit In

Fred Frankel, Jeffrey J. Wood

• Publisher: Jossey-Bass
• Year: 2011
• Print ISBN: 9780470952382
• eBook ISBN: 9781118108611
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Inclusive Education

The only evidence-based program available for teaching social skills to adolescents with autism spectrum disorders

Two nationally known experts in friendship formation and anxiety management address the social challenges faced by adolescents with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). The book helps educators instruct youth on conversing with others, displaying appropriate body language, managing anxiety, initiating and participating in get-togethers, and more. The book is filled with helpful information on ASD to aid teachers who have received little training on the topic. Extremely practical, the book includes lesson plans, checklists, and sidebars with helpful advice.

• Based on UCLA's acclaimed PEERS program, the only evidence-based approach to teaching social skills to adolescents with ASD
• Contains best practices for working with parents, which is the key to helping kids learn social skills
• The authors discuss the pros and cons of teaching students with ASD in educational settings like full inclusion (good for academics but bad for social skills) and pull-out special day classes (where the reverse is true)

Provides a much-needed book for teachers at all levels for helping students develop the skills they need to be successful.

Part One
Basic Information about Teens with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Chapter 1
What Is Autism Spectrum Disorder?

Leon was the youngest of three boys born to a mother who was a surgeon and a father who was an engineer. His older two brothers excelled in basketball and soccer, but he was awkward and uncoordinated and consequently hated all sports. Starting in elementary school, Leon's primary interest was street maps. He spent recess and lunch alone reading maps. At home he had no play dates and often spent his playtime looking over local street maps with his parents. He had memorized all of the local streets. On beginning a car ride, he would inquire as to the destination and then proceed to give accurate directions.

By middle school, he was still an elementary school child in many ways. He didn't care about the clothes and fads that captivated his peers. He wouldn't comb his hair or brush his teeth in the morning, and he wore the same clothes as he had in elementary school. Some were torn and worn out, but he liked wearing them because they were comfortable. His favorite game was playing with small plastic blocks. He had a Facebook page that featured his two hamsters.

The teenage years offer many new challenges for parents. Exasperated parents often say that their experiences with their teens make it easier for them to allow their children to eventually leave home to become more independent. Some of the difficulties adults face with adolescents on the spectrum stem from the fact that they are teens. Thus, in order to better understand adolescents on the spectrum, we also need to understand the context and issues facing all tweens and teens.

Challenges Facing Neurotypical Teens

In order to be better adjusted, not only as teens but later as adults, these students must master five challenges. Many middle and high school teachers are aware of these, but we summarize them in order to expand on how they affect the adolescent on the spectrum.

Becoming Independent from Parents

Teens become increasingly more involved with and dependent on their peers. One study of teen time use found that teens spend more time with their peers (mean was 449 minutes per day) than with their parents (mean was 248 minutes per day, mostly watching TV together) or alone (241 minutes per day). Looking across all of the teens in the study, the investigators found that the teenage boys who spent more time with their parents did so at the expense of their alone time. The teenage girls who spent more time with their parents did so at the expense of their peers. Thus, time with parents seems to detract more from the social lives of girls than from those of boys.

At the same time they become more dependent on peers, teens are pulling away from their parents. Family relationships of teens are stormier than those of younger children. Predictably, most of the conflict centers on the teens' striving for greater autonomy. The typical teen averages about two conflicts (with everyone) every three days. Perhaps because they are usually more involved in child rearing, mothers are involved in more of these arguments than fathers. As a consequence of more conflict, teens' affection and helpfulness toward parents decline.

Although some adolescents on the spectrum are more docile and childlike than their neurotypical peers, many become surlier and act out more, especially toward parents. Many become less willing to accept help and advice from their parents. The adolescents on the spectrum who are more effective in their struggle for autonomy may seem more problematic for parents. The problem with these teens' striving for autonomy is that their parents usually perceive that they aren't adequately equipped to handle much of what greater autonomy brings. They perceive their teens on the spectrum as needing more specific help with life challenges than do neurotypical teens.

As the saying goes, “No man is an island.” We should all know our limitations and learn when to ask for help, from whom, and how. Teens' deteriorating relationships with their parents often mean that they rarely ask them for help and guidance. More than ever before, it's helpful for these young people to have someone such as a trusted teacher, older peer mentor, or guidance counselor to fill this void. They are more likely to welcome guidance and information if it comes from a trusted adult other than a parent. In Chapter Twelve, we propose that a slightly older peer mentor can also help in this regard.

Preparing for a Vocation or Career

Vocational counselors use two kinds of assessments to help people select potential careers. One is to assess their range of interests and skills and try to fit them to careers where their skills would be most useful. Another type of assessment is based on the people with whom they like to associate. Young adults form many of their relationships with others at their job, and these relationships generally help to improve their job performance and job satisfaction. Relationship impairments of adolescents on the spectrum are thus limiting to their eventual job placement, satisfaction, and performance on the job.

Teens on the spectrum may at least partially grow out of some of their symptoms. They may have had a narrowly restricted range of interests as children but are now ready to expand those. Our experience has been that students on the spectrum are able to widen their range as long as their anxiety doesn't get in the way. Chapter Four addresses how to increase the range of their interests, which will be helpful in terms of eventual job and friend choice.

Adjusting to the Physical and Psychosexual Changes of Puberty

Not only is the social landscape changing for teens, but so are their bodies. Teens on the spectrum are generally unprepared to meet the challenges of sexuality and romance. The more docile and childlike tweens and teens on the spectrum may be oblivious to these issues. Many want a girlfriend or boyfriend, but just as characteristic of their social interactions with peers in general, they are clueless about what having a romantic relationship entails. Boys on the spectrum may be especially at risk for accusations of harassment or, worse, stalking. Girls on the spectrum are especially at risk for being exploited or, worse, becoming victims. Chapter Eleven deals with issues of victimization more fully.

Developing Values and Identity

Teens require a lot of time to process the changes that are taking place in their lives. One study, using electronic pagers to prompt teens to report what they were doing and their emotional states throughout the week, reported that neurotypical teens spend an average of about 25 percent of their waking hours in solitude, mostly of their choice. This solitude is beneficial to them: those who spent between 30 and 40 percent of their waking hours alone had better grade point averages than students spending either more or less time alone. They were also rated as better adjusted by their teachers and peers. Thus, adolescents on the spectrum may require some amount of solitude, mainly at home, in order to process their life challenges and changes much as neurotypical teens do.

Establishing Effective Relationships with Peers

Early conceptions of individuals with autism characterized them as having a powerful desire for aloneness. We have observed that rather than wanting to be alone more than other teens do, high-functioning teens on the spectrum want to be more like the teens they see around them, but they don't know how to engage their peers effectively. Many cannot form even superficial friendships, and most cannot become more intimate with the friends they have.

Students on the spectrum are aware of being socially rejected. Only 27 percent reported having a best friend while this applied to 41 percent of students with other developmental disabilities. Many teens on the spectrum have a limited knowledge of what a friend is. For example, they may say they have one or two friends but can't remember their names. They may name others they occasionally see at school but never get together with them outside school. They report having poorer relationships and less satisfying companionship with the friends they may have, as well as more loneliness at school, compared with neurotypical peers.

These teens' continued isolation makes deficits in the knowledge of peer etiquette more obvious as they get older. As adults, many individuals on the spectrum lack community connections and friendships that neurotypical persons take for granted. For these reasons, the PEERS intervention instructs kids on the qualities of friendships and teaches them the steps to join crowds and make best friends.

Neurotypical teens are able to establish relationships at many levels, which can be categorized as their crowd, their friends, and their very best friends. Kids seek out others like themselves and become more like those they associate with. Friends are similar to each other on demographics, school-related attitudes and attitudes about teen culture (smoking, drinking, drug use, dating, and participation in religious activities), dress, and grooming. All of these factors are concretized in the “crowd.” The crowd is a unique category of looser friendships that emerges in adolescence, and each crowd is described by a name—for example, the Jocks, Brains, Burnouts, Computer Geeks, Rednecks, and Goths.

Within the crowd, teens form cliques with four or so other teens. Unlike the cliques in elementary school, mixed-gender cliques sometimes form at this stage, and these groups tend to be stable. Whereas elementary school friendships weaken when the children are assigned to different classrooms at the beginning of each school year, middle and high school cliques are stable across years and over the summer since teens are able to travel to each other's houses and meet in different locations without much parent involvement.

Despite the crowd's importance in the process of defining teen identity, it has been largely overlooked by clinicians who are training teens in social skills, largely forgotten by parents of kids on the spectrum, and largely ignored by the teens on the spectrum themselves, often at their social peril. For example, a teen on the spectrum with limited musical ability may try to join the band crowd. As our experiences with the PEERS intervention have shown us, it is very useful to teach teens (and remind their parents) about this social feature. The roles that teachers can play in this are discussed more fully...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Table of Contents
• Title
• Copyright
• About the Authors
• Acknowledgments
• Jossey-Bass Teacher
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part One: Basic Information about Teens with Autism Spectrum Disorder
• Part Two: Interventions for Basic Social Skills
• Part Three: More Intensive Interventions to Help Kids Fit In
• Conclusion: Helping Kids on the Spectrum Find Their Own Place in the World
• Resources and References
• Index
• End User License Agreement