The Autism Society Event and Education Recordings Archive

We will begin by discussing why social-emotional learning goals are developmental in nature and why social-emotional learning needs to be on-going. For example, many parents and youth are under the misperception that they have already “done” social skills. However, what is expected of an 8 year old is not appropriate or sufficient for an 18 year old. Assuming a social skills intervention provided them near age appropriate behavior at the time of intervention they would not have then continued to develop social skills normally from then on. They would continue to benefit from ongoing learning.

We need not look far in the media and in our own communities to see more youth on the Autism Spectrum who have presumably crossed sexual boundaries because they were not afforded the opportunity to think ahead (Rain, 2010). They are then faced with consequences they are unaware of and we as a society are ill-equipped to manage the repercussions. With better thinking comes better behavior. Many youth and young adults with ASD can find themselves in situations that they are not prepared for. Many times we did not practice and rehearse skills related to sexual behavior much like we did for more common situations like riding a bus or standing in line.

We then look to the literature, (Blasingame, 2011) for best practices to identify and develop strategies for teaching social problem solving skills (e.g. How to read facial cues and understand what others are thinking or feeling.), social communication skills (e.g. Accepting that other people have different opinions and not imposing one's position on others.), sexual boundaries (e.g. What to do when a person tells you to leave them alone.) and personal rules for sexual behavior (e.g. What should your rules be about looking at naked pictures?) necessary to avoid problem sexual behavior and promote healthy behaviors for youth and young adults of a variety of abilities on the Autism Spectrum.

All the while, we will be noting the developmental nature of these skills. For example, reading facial cues and understanding what others are thinking and feeling for an eight year old is very different than for an eighteen year old. However, we sometimes look at this without a dynamic view and check it off the skills streaming as complete.

Finally, we will look at four different methods of treatment and training: Pivotal Response Training (Robert Koegel & Lynn Koegel), Social Communication Emotional Regulation and Transactional Supports (Prizant, Wetherby, Rubin, & Laurent), Social Thinking (Garcia-Winner), and the Circles Curriculum (Champagne & Walker-Hirsch), to determine the model that is best for them as facilitator of psychosexual education and social-emotional education depending on several variables including skill level of their target population.