Years ago, I was working with a first-grader in an inclusion classroom. The student made fantastic progress with a 1-1 aide in the classroom. He had great reductions in problem behaviors, increases in appropriate behaviors, and was doing well on a variety of programming. For context, he had mostly completed Level 2 of the VB-MAPP.
But one area where the team still had significant concerns was his ability to socially interact with peers. There was a variety of programming in place for these skills, but he didn’t quite have the ability to keep up when his peers were talking at snack or recess.
A common tactic employed in this situation is to first determine what the other kids are talking about, and then teach our students to talk about the same things. Well, one of the little FIRST GRADE BOYS was saying things like, “Who is the hot girl with Johnny?” when talking about the paraprofessional working with Johnny. That was a long way from the types of conversational exchanges that we were working on like, “I have chips for snack.” “What TV shows do you like?” The gap was obviously large, but a bit hard to quantify.
Although data looked good on increasing peer interactions, those interactions were (obviously) still awkward, and did not lead to meaningful friendships with peers. This is another situation, where it might look good in the short-term, but the results are not very meaningful towards improving anyone’s life in the long-term.
In my view, the solution to this problem is to focus on developing a deep interest. Friendships are usually based on having at least one similar interest that both people like to talk about. When you have at least a few appropriate things that you know a lot about, it becomes possible to find “your people.” This goes a long way towards helping children with autism develop meaningful friendships.
Don’t worry so much if they aren’t interacting with peers a lot. The goal isn’t to make the child popular. The goal isn’t to make the data look good to meet arbitrary criteria in the goals. There is a big difference between one meaningful friendship and zero meaningful friendships. The way to go from zero friends to one friend is to develop at least one skill, interest, or activity that is deep enough that it becomes possible to find others that like to talk about and participate in that activity.