A Guide to Writing Social Stories™

Step-by-Step Guidelines for Parents and Professionals

Chris Williams, Barry Wright

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781784503888
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Autism Spectrum Disorders
• Index: Psychology

Social Stories™ are a widely used and highly effective intervention for supporting children on the autism spectrum, but it can feel overwhelming to follow all the rules put in place to create personalised stories. Developed with the input of parents and professionals, and informed by new Social Stories research, this is a comprehensive, clear, easy step-by-step guide to writing effective personalised Social Stories™ that give children social information, creating many benefits for them.

The book includes many examples of real Social Stories created for children by parents and teachers working together, and handy downloadable checklists that highlight the essential components of a Social Story, helping to ensure that each story you write achieves the best possible results.

Part 1

SOCIAL STORIES
and Autism

1

UNDERSTANDING AUTISM

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a developmental disorder that normally becomes evident in the first 3 years of a child’s life. It includes autism, Asperger syndrome and atypical autism. ASD affects communication, social interaction, imagination and behaviour. It is not something a child can catch.

Parents do not cause it.

All children with ASD will continue to make developmental progress and there is a great deal that can be done to help. The following sections describe some important theories that help explain it in more detail.

Mindblindness

Children with ASD are delayed in developing Theory of Mind and struggle to learn it intuitively in everyday interactions in the same way other children do. Some books call this mindblindness. Mindblindness refers to being partially blind to understanding the minds of other people. Consequently, people with ASD have great difficulty in understanding the point of view, thoughts or feelings of someone else. Mindblindness leads to great difficulties in making accurate guesses about what people might be thinking or feeling or in predicting what they are going to do. This is a crucial skill for successful social interactions.

Imagine being unable to understand how someone else is thinking or feeling; imagine not being able to consider their point of view. How confusing and frightening the world must seem and how difficult social interactions must be. It is not surprising, therefore, that young people on the autism spectrum are sometimes anxious, see things more from their own point of view and behave differently from other children. This is not the same as selfishness. It is a problem in their understanding of other people.

Mindblindness is not an ‘all or nothing’ concept. The ability to intuit another person’s emotional state varies in people with or without autism. However, in children with autism, this ability is likely to be within a lower range or band and develop at a slower pace.

How does mindblindness affect children’s behaviour?

•Making poor eye contact with people. Typically, people rely heavily on eye contact and facial expression for non-verbal social communication. A teacher may look at a child with a stern facial expression to mean ‘stop doing something’ but the child with ASD may be less able to understand that the eye contact or facial expression conveys meaning, or unable to interpret it because of mindblindness. The child is not (necessarily!) deliberately ignoring his or her teacher.

•Not readily understanding or using gestures. Gestures (such as pointing, beckoning, waving or making a ‘shhh’ gesture with their finger to mean ‘be quiet’) are a common form of non-verbal communication which are both inexact in meaning and requiring of a degree of intuition to interpret. It is less likely that a child with ASD will understand the meaning of an adult’s gestures or use them themselves.

•Friendships. Children on the autism spectrum make friendships in different ways from many children. They are less likely to have large friendship groups and make friends more around specific interests. Mindblindness makes complex social relationships in groups more difficult.

•Not showing the teacher or parents their drawings or work unless asked to. Children without ASD generally show things for praise, encouragement or approval. This behaviour relies on understanding that the other person might be interested or give praise. This understanding is not necessarily present in children with ASD.

•A lack of awareness of social conventions or what they are for. For example, leaving the classroom to go to see the clock in the hall without realising the teacher might be worried about a missing child or that the other children are all in ‘reading time’.

•Finding it much harder to share than other children. Sharing skills develop as a child tunes into the needs of other people. Mindblindness may mean that children with ASD struggle to understand the needs of others intuitively or that they need to share information about their own needs.

•Lack of awareness of others’ feelings (e.g. pain or distress). Having less understanding of how their behaviour might upset others.

•Struggling to have a two-way conversation. They may want to talk more about their interests and be less interested in other people’s hobbies or ideas.

Social Stories can be used to give children information about social situations or how others may behave.

Getting the gist

Our brains are constantly being bombarded with information. We see, hear, smell, taste and touch things. We can take in all this sensory information and make sense of it. We manage to ignore irrelevant information (like a tractor in a field, a ticking clock or the humming of the power station next door) and build all the sensory information into a clear understanding of what is going on. We have an ability to draw together lots of sensory information from a situation in order to make sense of it. For example, in a picture there are lots of colours, shapes, sizes and objects. We can see the picture as a whole and observe a group of people dressed up in fine clothes and hats throwing confetti at a couple outside a church and we might guess that this is a wedding. Our brains do this very quickly and automatically. Children with ASD appear to experience great difficulty in drawing together information in this way to understand the gist of what is going on or what is expected from them. In this example, children with ASD might focus on individual details like the church bells, or the pieces of paper floating around but fail to recognise the event as a wedding. They may focus in on small details of the way something sounds, looks, feels or smells. It seems as if they ‘can’t see the woods for the trees’.

Similarly, young people on the autism spectrum can appear to be very literal in the understanding of verbal requests. Often this is related to their failure to ‘get the gist’. For example if a teacher gave a homework exercise to the class entitled ‘Was the Victorian era a golden age?’ most young people would understand that they would need to write about the reasons why they agree or disagree with the question. Those with Asperger syndrome might hand in their homework with simply the answer ‘Yes’, and then be confused...