Many studies suggest that training peers to interact with children with autism can be an effective strategy to teach social skills. Training peers has a lot of potential for many reasons: It can create social motivation as well as many opportunities to practice, it sets up a realistic context to practice, and it can produce natural reinforcers. Sometimes these skills generalize and the children with autism start using their new social skills with other children too.
But sometimes the skills don’t generalize and other interventions are needed. The key risk is that sometimes we can be easily fooled by data that looks like the child is making amazing progress. The data may look great as long as the child is interacting with trained peers. The key point is you don’t really know if you have anything until you bring in different, untrained peers. In other words, sometimes you can’t be sure whose behavior has changed. Was it the typically developing child that was trained to prompt and interact, or did the child with autism develop real skills? Without natural contingencies the behavior is unlikely to maintain.
The same logic can easily be applied to typically developing children who were not specifically trained, but just naturally prompt and reinforce appropriate behaviors. These children can help produce amazing benefits, just be careful not to be fooled those data. It may be that real skills have developed, but you don’t know until you check. As soon as you hear someone say, “S/He is amazing with him” your radar should go up. Interactions like these are often a great start to helping developing social skills- just don’t get fooled that they produced more improvement than they really did.
Being brutally honest with how much progress you have actually made is crucial to the Poogi.