(Not Fighting Autism, working with it)
'A Hierarchy of ASD Needs' - "The goal of every ASD person and caregiver should be to reduce the symptoms ..."
Today's ASD caregivers largely approach us from Social Skills down. They see ASD as a behavioral issue instead of what it is. A neurology. The goal of every ASD person and caregiver should be to reduce the symptoms that cause us to fail.
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The building blocks begin with Health (sleep, diet, exercise) and move on to self esteem (which really can only happen after acceptance) and moves onwards to self awareness and empowerment through advocacy. Once the symptoms are reduced THEN we can begin to think about "behavioral" things like social skills.
Too many kids in social skills classes who need support NOT being told how wrong they are and further crushing their self esteem. There is NOTHING today in the current social skills curriculum that allows that we are NOT broken but that we suffer from sensory processing, real time processing and context issues. There are NO NT written social skills books that teach advocacy. All the material I have seen to date teach NT social skills as the RIGHT way and ASD as the WRONG/Disabled way.
Some ASD kids have enough abstraction skills to work with this. They are considered nuanced challenged in the "social sills teacher" circles. Others get highly offended/ODD by this approach. Others still get completely crushed and spirit broken.
More on this in subsequent slides but net is this....
If your kid has self esteem issues, has not yet accepted his label, is ODD or melting down regularly, is not on a regular diploma path (despite being capable IQ wise), I would not consider this a very good risk to take.
Oh and I want to add here.... So far 100% of the parents who have worked with me on "fixing" these other root cause issues, have reported that their kids social skills are actually just fine. Somehow (like magic) the kids are better. Must be something to the fact that it really is not about social skills abilities... ;) Karla's ASD Page
via
Stop discrimination against special needs
