There are many things for parents of a child with Autism to think about when it comes to social skills. Bullying is one particular topic that many parents of children with Autism unfortunately face. But, there are ways a parent can help their child to overcome and avoid bullying.One way to model, prompt, and reinforce pro-social behaviors is to schedule play dates with familiar peers. The first step is to identify what social skill deficits the child has, and how the parent can model and prompt those skills. Does the child initiate and reciprocate greetings? Does the child maintain reciprocal conversation? Does the child initiate a play statement like, “Do you want to play trains?”
The play date should start in a comfortable environment, such as the child with Autism’s home, and then can generalize to a park or other location once social skills are well established.
This would be teaching social skills in the natural environment, and then the parent or therapist would work to generalize those social skills to the school setting.
Parents can always capitalize on incident teaching in the natural environment by finding teachable moments at the store, the park, or in everyday life with siblings. Practice makes perfect – or as perfect as possible. The more opportunities the child with Autism has to practice appropriate social skills, across a variety of kids and a variety of locations, the more familiar he/she will be with those skills and the better able he/she will be able to use appropriate social skills to avoid being bullied!