SOCIAL SKILLS
I got a nonprofit status so that I could give student volunteers “ community service hours .” In DC , kids need 100 hours of volunteer service to graduate , so this seemed like a natural fit . And this is important : I give both the “ typical ” and the autistic teens community hours — because they are building awareness of neurodiversity together . It motivates all of them to think of this as a service to the community .
So I decided to start my own program based on volunteers and with no bureaucracy . And I wanted it to be free . Right now , too often the only kids who get access to social skills support are those whose parents have resources unless they ’ re lucky enough to be in a really good school district !
I got a nonprofit status so that I could give student volunteers “ community service hours .” In DC , kids need 100 hours of volunteer service to graduate , so this seemed like a natural fit . And this is important : I give both the “ typical ” and the autistic teens community hours — because they are building awareness of neurodiversity together . It motivates all of them to think of this as a service to the community .
DM : Sounds like a great plan . How did you structure it ?
CR : Right — I needed to figure out how it would actually work ! One of the things I wanted to avoid was having the volunteers just “ be nice ” to the spectrum kids . My daughter ( and cofounder ) Sophie calls this the “ Best Buddies ” problem . I wanted to see real learning and genuine understanding develop .
At the time , Walter was doing a program developed at UCLA called PEERS ( Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills ). I liked the way it broke down basic social situations into sets of rules and steps . But I thought if Walter could practice these situations in a safe environment with more skilled peers , he would benefit even more . If , for example , he was learning to join group conversations , he could try it a few times , make mistakes , and get supportive feedback and suggestions from these peers .
Watching Walter try PEERS , I realized that curriculum could be the structure for my mentors . So in the fall of 2016 , I traveled to LA and became a Certified Provider .
DM : Kudos to UCLA for allowing you to adapt their program and make it your own . So once you returned to DC , what was next ?
CR : Then I started recruiting teens with autism for my pilot program . I held a meeting for interested parents , and all but one , whose child was too young , signed their kids up !
Then my daughter pulled together a focus group so we could see what would convince a neurotypical high school student to volunteer . We wanted feedback on the idea , but instead of giving me feedback , they all just signed up !
Without even trying , we ended up with twice as many kids as I had envisioned , 50 percent on the spectrum and 50 percent neurotypical .
DM : How excited you must have been ! But you were also wading into uncharted territory ; that must have been a bit daunting .
CR : As I told all the parents and the kids from the beginning , what we were doing would be an experiment . That approach seemed appealing ; we were all working together to build something .
We scheduled our first meetings to run for five months and called it a “ club .” We sometimes used the PEERS lessons and sometimes expanded on them .
For example , once we took a long time talking about a difficult situation that had come up for one of the members . We brainstormed how to handle it , which the participant found to be a big relief .
52 | Autism Parenting Magazine | Issue 72