Social skills for teens and adults: what changes after childhood (audio overview)

A free audio overview for families, derived from Special Learning's course "Transition Survival 103: Advanced Social Skills for Adolescents and Adults" (presented by Christine Austin). It is a synthetic voice, not a person, summarizing one session of the course; it is not the session itself.

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Episode notes

• Free tools and guides, no account needed: special-learning.com/free-resources
• The ABCs of Autism guide, free and written for families: store.special-learning.com/free-abcs-of-autism.html
• The full session, and the rest of the series, is in Special Learning's Video CE Library, written for professionals: special-learning.com/for-behavior-analysts

Transcript

This is a free audio overview from Special Learning. It's a synthetic voice, not a person, and it's summarizing one session of a training course. It isn't the session itself.

The session is called "Transition Survival: Advanced Social Skills for Adolescents and Adults." It's taught by Christine Austin, a behavior analyst who directed clinical operations at a center-based autism program, and it's the second of two parts. The first part covered conversation skills. This one covers two things that decide how adulthood goes for a lot of people: managing your own reactions, and building relationships. It was recorded for professionals. This overview is for the parent of a teenager or young adult who is watching the school years run out and wondering what comes next.

The presenter says something early that a parent may want to hold onto. Everyone, she says, needs work in these areas. The difference for a person with autism is the size of the gap, and the gap can be taught across. She lists the current theories about why social interaction is hard in autism and then sets them aside, because, she says, there's a lot of evidence that these skills can be taught, and the session is about how.

The how comes first. The presenter walks through the teaching methods with their strengths and limits. Drilling a skill in a quiet room works for the basics, like eye contact or tone of voice, but it doesn't produce spontaneous social behavior, and what's learned there doesn't travel on its own. So the skill has to be practiced where life happens: at home, at school, at work, at a friend's house. Sometimes that means setting up a situation on purpose. Sometimes it means catching a moment as it arrives and talking about it afterward. Picture stories that show a situation unfolding like a comic strip, with what a person says in one bubble and what they think in another. Short written stories, in the first person, that spell out the social rules of a situation and how the other person feels. And the method the presenter says works best in her program: explain it, show it, role-play it, give feedback, then practice it somewhere new, and then somewhere new again.

Two details from that section matter for families. First, she says to work on only three skills at a time, so the person isn't overloaded and each one is reachable. Second, supports can be hidden. A high school student carried his rules for the day on the first page of his binder, where only he could see them, so he couldn't be bullied for needing them. A card in a pocket. A small vibration on a schedule as a private reminder. And the people who teach don't have to be professionals. She says to find friends, family members, a neighbor, anyone willing, and let them help.

There's a story from her own work. A seventeen-year-old, six and a half feet tall and the friendliest person in the building, kept standing too close to people. He wasn't aggressive or rude. He simply didn't know that his size changed what a comfortable distance was. Once he was taught, she says, his social opportunities opened up so much that it was rewarding for everyone around him. The point of the story is that the missing piece was small, teachable, and invisible until someone named it.

Then the session goes through the skills themselves, and it's a long list. The presenter groups them, and the grouping is useful in its own right. Before anything else come the basics: being ready to interact with a friendly face and a calm voice, waiting without leaving or protesting, and adjusting to change, because, as she puts it, that's just not the way the world works, things change, and a person has to be able to stop, breathe, and make a new plan.

Then the skills of managing yourself. Noticing what your own body does when you're embarrassed or nervous or angry, and putting a name to it. She describes a feelings thermometer, a simple scale from one to five, so a person can see where they are and act before they reach the top. Reading other people's faces and posture. Dealing with anger by knowing your own triggers and having a plan before the moment comes. Solving a problem by staying calm, working out what the problem actually is, and thinking about consequences before acting. Asking for help or a break when something is hard, without learning to be helpless. Making a mistake and recovering from it. Deciding what to do when you're bored. Setting a goal and rewarding yourself when you reach it, because, she notes, the people who reward you now won't always be there.

One rule from this section deserves its own line, and the presenter borrows it from another author: don't be the rule police. A coworker in flip-flops against the dress code is not an emergency. A classmate whispering while you take notes might need a word. Learning which is which is a skill, and it's on the list.

The second half is relationships, and the presenter opens it with a sentence families may want their teams to hear. There's a stigma, she says, that people with autism don't care about other people or don't want relationships, and it's just not true. Everyone wants a relationship. She also says the skills have to last across adult life, because services usually stop when school does.

The relationship skills start with appropriate touch, and the presenter is direct about why. If someone doesn't know the social rules, the consequences can be serious for the rest of their life. The rule she teaches is simple: appropriate touch is touch the other person wants, and if you're not sure, ask. Then giving encouragement, asking permission, accepting no, making and answering a phone call, playing a game, and losing and winning without ruining it for everyone.

The advanced skills are the ones the presenter says are hard for anyone. Standing up for a friend, and knowing when it's safe to. Dealing with teasing, and telling the difference between teasing and cruelty. Feeling left out, and not letting other people's choices decide how you feel about yourself. Sharing a friend. Asking someone on a date, which she says is built on all the conversation skills from part one and all the self-regulation skills from this one. Being assertive with "I feel" statements. Telling good peer pressure, like friends talking you into a dance, from bad. Rumors. Someone who wants to see you in private but ignores you in public, and what that really means. And getting ready for a difficult conversation, whether that's ending a relationship kindly or telling your mother about the baseball that went through the van window.

For each skill the session gives the social rules to teach and everyday situations to practice them in, and it says to practice across settings and to teach the difference between how you talk to a friend and how you talk to your boss. The presenter also says to start early, in the early teens if possible, because some of these skills take a lot of repetition.

A note on time and language. The session was recorded some years ago and uses diagnostic terms that have since changed. This overview leaves them out; nothing in the skills depends on them. And while schools, services, and workplaces differ from country to country, the skills on this list don't. A person who can wait, name a feeling, accept no, and ask before touching is more independent everywhere.

Two things in the session this overview leaves out: the assessment tools the program sells, and the details of specific teaching materials. Both are for the professionals, and neither changes the ideas here.

This is general information for families, not clinical advice, and not a treatment recommendation for any individual.

If you want something to use today rather than something to buy, Special Learning's free tools and guides are at special-learning.com/free-resources, no account needed.

The full session, and the rest of the series, is in Special Learning's Video CE Library; the link is in the episode notes.

This has been a free audio overview from Special Learning.