first post - practicing social situations with a young child

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Hi, everyone. This is my first post here on the forum. I have a 4-almost 5 year old daughter who was diagnosed with PDD-NOS (the psychologist said that if she was older, she would have been diagnosed with Aspergers). She's smart and a good learner, but has difficulty and anxiety with social interaction, mostly because she misses social cues. Some of the things she does is to walk away from a conversation before it's over, has to be reminded to say hi, doesn't ask questions, doesn't stay on topic, that sort of thing. She has trouble making and keeping friends because of this and it's starting to bother her. I think she understands that she's not socializing correctly, but doesn't understand what she's doing wrong. We are on a wait list to get into speech therapy, and I've been talking to her OT about what to do as well. So far, because she's so young, I'm having a hard time finding resources to help her with this problem.

One of the activities we are going to do is act out social situations with puppets so that she has practice before she enters into a real-life situation. I'm a NT mom, so I am having a hard time anticipating what situations would be helpful to rehearse and what she needs me to explain to her. I don't know how to explain social cues to her very well.

What social stories or situations do you think would be most helpful to her? Are there resources geared for older kids that I could easily modify for a younger children that doesn't read yet?

She sounds like me when I was a kid. What I ended up doing was retreating into my own head. I acted happy (and was happy because I felt safe and secure) at home but in school I barely spoke to anyone. I see now that I was manipulated sometimes and I wonder how many other times I just never realized it.

Speech therapy sounds like it might help if she's a mumbler or not using the right intonation. I was pretty monotonous and even though my parents never realized the extent of my problem, they recognized the intonation problem so they practiced with me reading out books with dialogue out loud.

The things that helped me were to go through and learn what was rude and what was polite. I even had a couple of books on being polite. For example, I realize now that it was not polite that I used to correct people in class a lot when they struggled with reading aloud (I had a very very high reading comprehension for my age). From my viewpoint I was helping them, but I learned later that they thought I was stuck up. Some of these social norms and rules are so subtle, but screwing them up can really give people a bad impression of you.

A lot of the time I knew that I had done something awkward or hadn't handled a certain social situation correctly, but I didn't know what to do differently until a few minutes or hours later when I came up with something. I ended up with a lot of regret and shame. My self-esteem was in the toilet. I hope you'll be able to help her keep a healthy self esteem. If I had looked at it from a viewpoint that all humans have innate value and that everyone is different and everyone has weaknesses and strengths, I might have had more self-confidence. But don't tell her that everything she does is wonderful like my mom did. I knew I wasn't perfect, and I could tell that she was lying to me sometimes, and it just made me feel worse about myself.

Hi E_V_E, welcome to WP!

My son is 5 and having similar social challenges. His SLP calls it pragmatics. In his IEP goals, the SLP wrote that they will be working on a) what to say, b) how to say it (correct nonverbal gestures, intonations, and/or facial expressions), c) when to say it (not interrupting, and to answer a question when it is asked), and there are two more but I can't recall them at the moment.

One way to modify social stories to someone who can't read yet is to put them into an iPad app that can read text aloud. I use Pictello ($18.99) but there are other ones out there, even free. Pictello is like a talking scrapbook of sorts; there is space for a picture and five lines of text for each page. We use it as a visual schedule and I have made several social stories for him also. Of course you would have to have an iPad though.

Another way would be to read the stories to her and have her look at the pictures, then have her "read" it back to you to make sure she remembers the story. Then she can "read" it to herself whenever she wants. Using pictures is crucial because our kids tend to be visual learners. You can use either real pictures (especially of her) or drawings; they don't have to be perfect just enough to get the message across. There are a lot of books out there with social stories in them. The publisher Future Horizons has a couple of good ones, or you can see if your school district or library has some. They would be in the education section of the library.

What situations to act out is so different for each child - it's hard to say which ones to do. I look for situations where my son makes a mistake in a) b) or c) above, and go from there.

I hope this is helpful.

I would suggest role playing with your child as favorite story/movie characters who are friends in the story. You can be one character and your child be the other. Pick a scene that seems especially social that your child likes, that seems a good fit to you. Start with the scripted version and then deviate as the improv takes you. This might also help you see what social issues your child would like to explore (assuming she is willing to deviate from the script.) Assuming your child will allow deviation, you can also through things in that you feel are important to explore.

If your child won't deviate from script right away, that is OK. return to the script, and try to deviate a different time. It took my son awhile before he allowed me to have input to the script, although he made his own changes almost immediately.

What she needs you to explain to her is probably everything. It may be a bit hard to comprehend but you may need to start with the very basics like greeting people. The puppets sound like a good idea. I would also encourage you to work lessons into every teachable moment you can during the day. You can find opportunities throughout the day to teach her to say hello to people and use the their names. You can practice this every chance you get like when you are out shopping or at the park and you run in to someone you know, prompt her to greet the person. Teach her to ask the person a question, have her listen for the answer and make a response that relates to the answer. Practice doing this with her at home, maybe during meal times if it wouldn't be too distracting. As far as when or how much, I would say do it as often as you remember and she is in a teachable mood. You can also teach her specifically what to look for to understand a conversation is over and/or teach her how to end the conversation herself e.g. to say "It's been nice talking with you, I am going to go play with my dolls now. Good-bye." Or something along those lines. Take every opportunity you can to point out when you observe other people, even on TV or in movies, having polite conversation or how friends take turns talking and listening to each other - the scene in Cars with Mater and Lightning driving back to town after the "tractor tipping" scene comes to mind. Be prepared to break everything down to the most basic components. Use these observations as chances to talk about how the people involved might feel, e.g. that it feels good when our friends listen to us and they feel good when we listen to them. Conversely, you can explain that people may feel confused or upset if she walks away from them in the middle of a conversation.

I would also say that it would be helpful to let her know how important each thing is. For example, it's very important to greet someone or acknowledge them in some way (even if it's just a smile or head nod) when you first meet them. It's less important (but still a good idea) to ask how the other person is doing. Differentiating (maybe it would help to use a scale of importance) will probably make it easier for her to focus on the most important things, and once she has those down fairly well it will be easier to do those out of habit and she can spend more focus on the other details.

Sesame Street actually has hundreds of free videos for social skills for very young children; you can get a good basic idea from them, and then figure out exactly where your child has deficits in interaction and make things more specific. http://www.sesamestreet.org/browsevideosbytheme

One script that made all the difference to my son when he was little: "Hi, my name is (or I'm) ___________, what's your name? I like ____________, what do you like? Do you want to play?" (At this age, play can either be "acting out" whatever their likes are, or it sometimes is just running around the playground together. Depending on where your child is, you may need to script that part, too.)

Once the basic script is in there, you should vary it so she's aware that other people might not follow exactly.

I remember watching a lot of Sesame Street when i was about 3-4

Wow, this has all been very helpful advice! Thank you!

I've typed up posts twice and I have been able to post either one. I'm going to go short and sweet this time.

I didn't understand the idear of communication or socialization until my teachers taught me from a book with pictures of people saying hello to each other. I understood from the pictures in the third person, not from role playing in the first person. I needed to see the picture first before I could do any of it, otherwise I would have no idear what I was doing. I would recommend showing your daughter pictures of social scenarios showing her what people do in different situations before having her do these things herself.

Our last speech therapy appointment was GREAT. They role-played playground interactions. It covered saying hello & good bye, asking for turns, inviting someone to play together, etc. I felt like it was perfect because it is exactly the situation that he has the most difficulty with. He does not approach friendships normally/naturally. Nor does he ask for turns/invite kids to play, etc. It seemed so practical.
I'd start with situations where you feel like she needs the most help such as 'on the playground', or 'at a birthday party', whatever most relates to where she interacts adn has difficulty,

I wish we could star or highlight this post! I think often people think therapy is a lot of useless discussion, or magic - but I've found the speech therapy is a lot of plain old fashioned modeling and practice, practice, practice - extremely helpful for my son, too!

This.

This is what I was trying to say above, except I get too darn technical (sigh). I forget to put things in context.