pressure to be social

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My daughter is 20 with social anxiety and aspergers. She has attended a ‘social skills’ course this past 12 months to help her be independant socially. It did very little to help her. My daughter goes to a social connections night one Saturday each month for games and pizza with other adult aspies.

She smiles, plays Yahtzee and Uno and eats pizza and is pleasant but not socially verbal. She talks at home. The night is run by the person that tried to teach my daughter social skills and commented how lovely daughters hair was in a bun and of course daughter keeps eye contact with her and says nothing but has a pleasant look on her face.

I said to her might you say thank you for the compliment. The woman giving the compliment looks quite irritated and has a look of not amused. I’m only saying this as I really am at a loss as my daughter is the only one in the group that hasn’t learnt some way of being social verbally. Feeling prejudiced and misunderstood or am I to force her to reciprocate socially. I have tried talking with her about this at home, but I cant force her.

We are in a therapy, and with a support worker and an OT and going into equine mindfulness. Its annoying and upsetting that my daughter is judged by a woman whose son is aspie himself, but totally social. She has insinuated before that she be made to be social with the tools that has been taught to her.

When I have praised other apsies on their social skills and also me trying to find what they have found to help them, they say that their parents have done a really good job with them, if kind of leaves me feeling like I am missing something. I have been pro active without rest for my daughter in the last 5 years and still going. Any thoughts please. Thankyou

How is someone supposed to force a 20 year old to be social if she does not want to be social? I mean you can't really make a younger child do it either, but what the heck is this woman thinking?

Some aspies are more social by nature, just like some are more verbal, some are less sensitive to sensory issues, have less issues with food, etc. Some are better at math, better at art, better at whatever. This is true for NTs as well. People are not the same.

You can help her put tools in her toolbox and you can explain what they are useful for, but that is about it. If she does not want to be social then I would focus on letting her know that pretending to be social can help with job interviews and staying employed because there is a lot more to working and getting jobs than the actual job, like it or not. Maybe that will help motivated her to practice, if she looks at it as the vocational skill that it truly is.

As far as the children who are grateful for the help, they may be naturally inclined to want to be social, but bad at it, so the help was welcome. If you have someone uninterested in improving, that is a different matter, and the situations are not analogous.

My son is extremely disinterested, but younger than your daughter. I have no idea if he is going to choose to learn the skills or not, so I am also concerned with the practical consequences of that choice. So, I understand your situation.

She is not going to do it for fun, because to her it is not fun, and if she doesn't see the sense in practicing it, it may be somewhat tortuous for her.

Please check
http://www.eikonabridge.com/fun_and_facts.pdf
http://www.eikonabridge.com/anxiety.pdf
This is my son from a recent trip:

I do everything differently from other parents. I place no emphasis on my children's verbal or social skills. I care only about their happiness and creativity. While other parents chase after skills, I chase after creativity. Creativity cannot be taught: it can only be destroyed. All children are born with creativity. Creativity and rules don't mix. Guess what? My children turned out more verbal and social than most children on the spectrum. Isn't that strange?

Trust me, there is a different way of raising autistic children. These children have zero problems. The problem is on the side of adults. Ask yourself: why do you even worry about social skills of your daughter? Are you doing it for your daughter, or for your own benefit (so that your daughter can look more "normal")? You don't treat your daughter as an equal-rights human being: you are dehumanizing her. You think she is defective. You think you are the one to teach, not the one to learn. I am perfectly ready for the day when my children are more knowledgeable than I am. My children are my teachers.

It doesn't sound to me like your daughter has social anxiety. She sounds quite happy as she is. The only anxiety I can detect is parental anxiety.
Forcing her to socialize may lead to anxiety, so it's probably something you will just have to accept because making it a big issue will probably be the wrong thing to do.

She'll talk when she has something to say.

Pressuring an autistic person to do something that does not come natural to them is not only non-productive, I personally consider it psychological abuse. Disapproval only makes one feel one is defective, which only causes us to withdraw from interaction and drives us deeper into ourselves.

The same is true when you do begin to open up and say what you really think and feel. After a few rounds of

"Oh, you mustn't say that!" and "That's just outrageous, what in the world is wrong with you!?"

one learns never to communicate one's true feelings to anyone, ever.

I have found throughout my life, unchangingly, that I can be very social and able and willing to talk and have conversations one on one, quite happily and even chattily if I'm comfortable with that person.

But put me in more of a group setting, and I clam up exponentially. Even now at the age of 55 when I would no longer deem myself to have the social anxiety I had when I was young. I still clam up in a group. Even though I'm perfectly capable of relaxed one-on-one conversation or maybe two other people plus me.

There is something about more than two or three people that I retreat from mentally. Once a group dynamic is present, first of all my mind and senses get overwhelmed with all this multiple input. Even if I don't actually go into shutdown or meltdown, even if I'm still feeling okay, the more people to deal with, the more I'm hearing all these different strings of conversations and cross-talk and I'm just trying to process it, let alone contribute.

It's all I can do just to listen and take things in. So I'm more quiet then than I'm otherwise capable of "at home" or with just one or two people.

Then about contributing by speaking up and "being social" -- no sooner have I ordered my thoughts and felt I had a response to something, than everyone has moved on in the conversation, to another topic!!

So I miss the boat and stay quiet.

Also, I start to feel like I have nothing unique to contribute socially, if all these other different people are saying every thing that I might have said anyway, or thoughts and ideas better in fact than my own.

I used to be in a community group that organized a local arts event every year. There would be meeting where we were all supposed to brainstorm new ideas for the presentation of the event. I kept finding that everyone else had such good ideas that I had nothing else to add or say, so I was completely non-verbal throughout all those meetings.

Maybe your daughter is like me in this respect. You say she "talks at home" but not at this social group. Perhaps it's for the same reasons I have. I just clam up in groups but I'm perfectly functional "socially" when there are fewer people to be talking to in the first place.

I think you may need to allow your daughter to be this way. Not everyone is the same, even in the neurotypical worlds, let alone the neurodiverse.

The thing about all that socialization training is, I don't see the purpose.

I used to go into hiding when my parents had guests in the house, even when the guests came with their children around my age. It was very simple: I had little in common with them, I had different interests from them. If you asked me, I would tell you that I would still do the same, today.

People may say that social skills are important for getting a job or finding a soulmate. But then, I did get jobs, and I did get married and formed a happy family. In my circle (science/technology), I get to see people with much less social skills than myself, yet some of them turned out to be much more successful than myself. So I scratch my head: what's the value, what's the need for children to become social? Are we really doing all this socialization stuff for the benefit of autistic children? Or are we doing it simply because we the adults dislike people that look and behave differently from us?

The thing is, every non-social, nerdy person that I have met, would come to life when he/she starts to talk about his/her subject of passion. Even myself, I have made tons of friends, I've organized outing events, geek parties, even a Thanksgiving dinner. I mean, in my smaller circle, I am quite a social person.

My point is, there are jobs out there that are friendly to autistic people. There are also nice, neurotypical people out there that can appreciate you for who you are and ready to become your soulmate one day. So I don't think the focus on raising autistic children should be on verbalization and socialization. All on the contrary, we should follow our children's interests, and use modulation to introduce them to new skills. There is a reason that I still take my son to elevator ride every week. To you, riding elevators may seem like a useless activity. But to me, my son has learned all the skills he'll ever need to learn in life and then some (e.g. interest in writing Chinese characters), from riding elevators.

When I hang around with other autistic children, if they jump, I jump, if they spin, I spin. You probably don't see any other 50+ year old doing that in public space. But, hey, it's my freedom of expression, and chances are I am more successful and more highly educated than those people that stare at me. So I never feel a iota of shame. (Sure, it's awkward for my wife watch me do all that, but she has gotten used to it. Ha ha.)

I just don't see the purpose of socialization training. It only reminds me of the conversion therapy that our society once practiced to attempt to make gay people straight. At some point we've gotta ask: who are the really mentally ill here? Why do we keep doing these awful things to our children?

My son is also 20 and one of the social Aspies. But here is the thing: he was ALWAYS social. The difference for him was to learn to do it appropriately so that he would get the results he wanted, something that eluded him for many years. He engaged in his social skills classes because he wanted the result: more effective social interaction.

What you see with your daughter may be more of a personality difference than an ASD issue. As I know from raising my son, there is not and never will be any getting him to do things he does not want to do. The only way is to sell him on the benefits. If he sees none, and doesn't feel inclined, he probably will never take the action. If I can find the right sales pitch, he will be all in. Getting to the right sales pitch requires knowing what he wants and what his goals are. Sometimes there is no sales pitch to be had, and I have to agree with him that whatever it is just is not that important (raising an ASD child will certainly challenge your assumptions on priorities and social constructs!).

I am wondering if it might be helpful for you to write up some questions for your daughter related to the process and your concerns, and then allow her to answer them in writing. I know that many members on this site are much more comfortable expressing themselves in writing than in conversation. I would suggest questions to find out how she feels about the class and its goals, what her level of interest in social exchange is, and what her hopes for her own future are (to the extent you do not already know these things, anyway). It is difficult to help someone if they aren't allowing you inside their thought process enough for you to know how they feel and what they want, so you need a way to access more of that information. Once you have it, you should have a better feel for what to do about this class.

Good luck.


PS - It is also possible that she wants to learn the skills, but something about this particular class is uncomfortable for her. That is another question you could ask. My son dropped out of one social skills group he was put in for a long list of seemingly minor reasons, but they were important to him. You have to take any such concerns seriously.

Last edited by DW_a_mom on 10 Jul 2017, 5:30 pm, edited 3 times in total.

I very much appreciate your perspective of not finding any value in it. I will, however, say that my son was the opposite: he LONGED for positive social interaction. He needs it. As a result, once appropriate socialization classes were found (appropriate for HIM being an important concept here), he engaged fully. He LOVED the lunch bunch he had in elementary school, for example.

Key to making a decision is knowing the individual. Just as NT parents should not assume every child needs to become socialized, parents should also not assume that no ASD child has an interested in being socialized. Some ASD individuals very much want a strong social life, but may start to tune out and pretend they don't because of frustration. I saw my son start to do that, the process of turning off and giving up, and he was miserable. Now that he has learned to manage social interactions more appropriately, he is truly happy and thriving. We just have to be careful to never assume either way, and help each individual be who THEY want to be.

Okay ---- eikonabridge? You have taken my opening statement completely out of context.

I opened by saying I can be chatty with a smaller group of people or one-on -one -- but what I was getting to NEXT was this, my next statement:

"But put me in more of a group setting, and I clam up exponentially. Even now at the age of 55 when I would no longer deem myself to have the social anxiety I had when I was young. I still clam up in a group. Even though I'm perfectly capable of relaxed one-on-one conversation or maybe two other people plus me."

And it's nothing to do with social anxiety anymore, although it used to be.

And also, just like you, I too was a child who ran and hid when anyone came to the house.

I hid under freaking tables. It was a massive thing about me. I hated guests coming to the house. I would hide. I would go to my room when I was older but when I was younger I was like a feral child who immediately scooted under pianos and tables in the furthest room from the front door.

I also went through long years of selective mutism at school. But I could TALK AT HOME. Like the OP's daughter can "talk at home" as she said.

You are also assuming I had "training" to become more social.
I did not. Nobody made me do anything.

It was I MYSELF who forced myself to be more social later on during my late 20s, not necessarily because there was "value" to being so, but in my case I had a motivation as there was a special interest, talent and would-be career I was pursuing which all but required me to "network" socially or never get anywhere with my goals.

But even despite this decision of my own to come out of my shell more, I am still to this day NOT comfortable with larger groups of people, and am only able to talk comfortably to one, two or three people at most. But even that comfort level comes more naturally, over the years -- I'm 55 freakin' years old now.

So I don't know why you are assuming I've had training or that I am not similar to the OP's daughter -- I'm making the point that I certainly was indeed like her at her age.

The OP says her daughter is quiet at this social group she goes to, but is talkative in a normal way "at home." That is MY case also.

Stop taking my post out of context. And stop assuming I thought there was "value to this training" -- I wasn't "trained" socially and it wasn't about how "valuable" or not that would be. My individual case was that I personally had a motivation to try harder for a specific reason in my life, but I still would rather be at home alone talking to NOBODY.

Clearly you only read my FIRST paragraph and then started posting. It's my second paragraph that applies a quite different context to my first.

I wish people would f*****g READ beyond the first few words.

Don't get yourself all up in a knot. The user you are mad with goes around with no concept of the damage that he is causing, claiming that he is the be-all and end-all of autism. It's really not worth engaging. He just goes off anytime anyone challenges his individual idea about what it means to be autistic. It's not personal to you at all.

Oops. I guess my writing style got you confused. I thought my comment was a total agreement with what you have said. This is an open forum, meaning that I wasn't addressing just your comment. I was agreeing with you and making a point to the OP, and to ALL the readers in general. I guess that part wasn't clear. Please read some of my previous postings in this forum to get an idea. I have been very consistent in my message throughout all these years. Somehow I tend to assume that all the regular attendees of this forum already know my position and my style of writing.

My comments in the forum is always for general public. I guess it can get people confused. In short, I wasn't just replying to you personally.

If you read my message one more time, you'll realize that my message was in total support of your message.

I guess the technical term for my writing style is called the usage of the "generic you." Please check
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generic_you

Jason, there is nothing intrinsically bad about teaching social skills. Yes, some of the classes are about normalization, and I hear you on that--and those are things you don't have to join. Due diligence, always, right? That said, depending on what is being done, some classes can be something beneficial, depending on how they are run, for some kids. Just like you re-purposed ABA to be (from what you describe) that the ABA practitioners you hire doing things other than ABA, social skills training doesn't have to look like what you presume for it to look like.

There are functional skills that have to be taught: How to cross the street, how to use a knife safely, etc. There are certain social rules that need to be taught as well. Kids of all neurologies need that. Sometimes autistic kids need to be taught things like "If you want friends you have to let them talk about their special interests, too." There is nothing nefarious about teaching children these things.

I have no idea what type of social skills training the OP was contracting out, (other than the mother was also not thrilled about how they were being executed) but because her daughter is 20 years old the issues are more complex than just making an autistic elevator-riding club and using that as an organic free-form social skills training mechanism.

Something like that is great for kids your children's ages. For a 20 year old, it is much harder. Depending on what her interests are, it may be hard to find a club for them or make one herself. She may need supervision navigating it, especially if it is populated largely by NTs, and at 20, you just can't bring your Mommy to everything and she may not be able to meet people easily in other ways.

Yes, you are right.

I guess some readers here might not understand what I am proposing instead of the traditional approach on autism, so let me elaborate. (Nothing I say below is new: I've said the same thing over and over again.)

Fun times via social skill training are fine. But those fun times are like desserts. The question is: where is the main course? Or as they say: where is the beef?

The traditional, neurotypical-inspired approach to "treat" autistic children is to start with speech therapy and socialization. The justification is that kids must first learn to speak and socialize, otherwise they'll have difficulty learning later, particularly in school.

If you understand the "dewdrops on a leaf" model that I have explained in the past, you can see how silly the neurotypical-inspired approach is. (http://www.eikonabridge.com/AMoRe.pdf) There are plenty of moisturized spots with gigantic dewdrops from where, using the "pull" method, you can start to weave in an entire network of connections inside the brains of autistic children, particularly in the visual cortex area. Yet these silly neurotypical (or neurotypical-brainwashed) "experts" choose to work on the totally arid spots, using the "push" method instead of the "pull" method. It's a bit like pouring a bucket of water and hoping that the water sticks upwards to the ceiling. They waste away the golden years of these children, getting nowhere. And they haven't learned a thing in 74 years. They commit child abuse and ruin millions of children's lives, and not only get paid for their crime, but never need to go to jail.

Look at today's adults, and by that I mean parents, school teachers, ABA therapists, etc. How many of them can draw pictures and talk to children that way? How many of them have animation video production skills? Is there an elevator riding curriculum for autistic children?

The fact is, adults can't draw. Adults can't learn to make animation video clips. And adults get embarrassed going out to elevator rides with autistic children. Adults are the ones with all the mental scars that impede them from acquiring new skills or re-acquiring old ones. And instead of treating the adults and solving their mental health issues, we choose to blame the children for our own shortcomings and we then come up with speech therapy and social behavior training for our children. Duh?

The same dollars spent on speech therapy and social skill training programs are much better spent on parental and teacher training. We can also save big money by initiating our children's reading skills early on. Reading MUST precede talking.

Here is a side story. For my son's IEP, I prepared an hour long PowerPoint presentation. Explaining things about autism and how to develop autistic children. At the end of the session, some teachers look at each other, and then asked me with a worried face: "But how do we adjust the goals to follow what you have shown to us?" At that point I just laughed. I told them there is no need to modify any of their goals on the IEP (I usually don't even bother looking at IEP goals... I care about the personality of teachers, whether my children will have fun..., that's about it). I told them, I only wanted two things from school: (1) keep my son happy, and (2) give him a hug. Those are my two real goals. I saw a big relief on the faces of the teachers. I think we achieved those goals pretty well at the end of the school year, as my son always had a big smile going to school and leaving school. And my son has been as creative as ever. I cared zero about my children's academic performance. I cared only about their creativity. But as it turned out, both of them performed quite alright, even my hyperactive son.

My point is, even for the IEP meeting, I communicated my message, visually. I made a whole PowerPoint presentation. There are just things that cannot be explained verbally. I feel sorry for parents of autistic children that believe they can raise their children by solely opening their mouths. If adults know that, professionally out there, people do communicate visually on all important messages, how come we don't do the same with our own children? As I always say: use your hands, not your mouth. Keep the image of the "dewdrops on a leaf" in your head, and know how to develop the brains of your children by using your hands and their eyes. Also, your children's interests and stimming behaviors are the anchor points for their development.

Training the adults to overcome their mental health issues is what we need to do. Remember, every single adult today was a child once upon a time, and when they were children they did not have any of these mental health issues. All children in my daughter's class learned to make animation video clips when they were around 7 years old. All kindergarteners can draw pictures. Children don't get embarrassed at riding elevators up and down. So tell me: how do you explain adults can't do these things? Once you realize how sick the adults are, you will also realize that we need education reform. Our schools are churning out broken, sick, uncreative adults. See this article on how a child-mentality prompt increases creativity immediately:

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/finding-butterfly/200910/thinking-yourself-child-can-unlock-your-creative-potential

Once the mental health issues of adults are treated, we won't need to worry about providing extra speech therapy or social skill training to autistic children. If you have read my article about the "dewdrops on a leaf," you'll understand how to develop autistic children properly. Verbal skills, social skills all come naturally to all children, so long as they are properly developed. Once you build up the connections inside the brains of these children (via connected development graph that I have mentioned in the past), once the neural network grows forward towards the frontal cortex areas, it's virtually impossible for the children not to be verbal or social. Verbal skills and social skills will all come for free, as long as these kids are properly developed, intellectually. It is a lie that kids need to first become verbal and social for them to become intellectual: remember the case of Helen Keller? Both of my kids were intellectually developed via the visual-manual channel, way before they were verbal or social.

Human brains are hardwired for children to become verbal and social. My message is: we have our priorities backwards. Verbal, social, behavioral issues simply reflect children being children: there is nothing to do there. We don't develop our children from their moisturized spots: that's not our children's fault. That's our fault. Children with verbal, social and behavioral issues invariably have an even more severe problem: underdevelopment. We don't fix the root problem, we don't address the "beef," and we worry about all the irrelevant issues. When are we going to learn?

The purpose of raising children is for them to be independent, to be able to make a living on their own... to have dignity. In this sense, intellectual skills trump verbal, social and behavioral skills. In fact, plenty of people are able to get high-paying jobs (research scientists, software programmers, 3D graphic artists, car mechanics, etc.) with little verbal, social or behavioral skills. This craze from parents, teachers, psychlogists and ABA therapists on verbal, social and behavioral skills is totally unwarranted. Children don't really need any of these skills to become intellectually developed, or to get jobs later in life. The adults shouldn't overrate the importance of verbal, social and behavioral skills, when putting them next to intellectual and visual-manual skills. The adults do so today simply because they themselves want to hide the weakest of their own skills: intellectual skills. We really ought to set our priorities straight, and face our own shortcomings.

Autistic children are not sick. The only problem they have is they are still children: they are children being children. On the other hand, I cannot say the same about the adults in our society: they are indeed mentally ill. And that is the reason why most of our smart and happy autistic children grow up into comatose adults. There is nothing to fix in autistic children: they are perfectly fine the way they are. They just have a different route for development that today's adults refuse to understand and accept. We don't fix the truly mentally ill, and we expect our children to develop properly next to these sick adults?

We should fix the root cause, and not turn the lives of autistic children upside-down! Don't fix the kids. Fix the adults. You'll achieve much more verbal and social autistic children that way. No need for speech therapy nor social skill training. Respect the kids, because one day they will grow up to be your teachers.

As for the professionals already in the field, what should they do? Of course in the long term a more definite solution is needed. Autism is not a healthcare issue, it's an education and social stability issue. So the money shouldn't be coming out of the healthcare field. But whether the money comes from the left hand or the right hand is the least of all concerns. The same holds for the professional titles or the names of the approaches. I'll just drop a hint. At the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Chinese knew they also needed a systemic reform. However, they kept the nominal "communism" system. Today's Chinese economy is fully capitalist, with stock markets and investors. If you can understand how China went from a communist economy to a capitalist economy, you'll know how what to do if you are a professional in the field of autism. You keep the job, you keep the facade, but you undergo a reform and do what's right for the children. And that can be done today. And that is being done today.

Autism will be one day shifted away from healthcare. That will happen. It's unavoidable. Because lies can't propagate forever. Just like the Roman Catholic Church couldn't forever state the earth was at the center of the universe. Lies have a limited lifetime.

What I find ironic is that people advocating politeness "a la neurotypical" are the ones suffering, big time, complaining how hard it is to raise autistic children, and shedding a tear or two now and then. On the other side, I, with all my directness, unpolishedness and even "rudeness" according to some, actually have the easiest time raising my children, and my children are happy and smiling every day... darlings to everyone around them. I have fun every day. Life has been easy for me. Isn't that most strange? Tell me: if I indeed have personality issues, how is it possible at all, that I have two of the happiest kids on the planet? Ha! Moreover, with all my rudeness, please explain how come one of my children's teachers was willing to patiently spend 5 hours, out of her own time and outside school, to sit through two separate presentations from me, for me to explain to her how to educate and interact with autistic children? Does any of your children's school teachers ever do that with you? How come people respect me and are willing to work together with me? Could it be because they have been able to see with their own eyes, up close and personally, how happy and creative my children are? Could it be, after all, that I am not a rude person, at all? Ha!

So, to everyone out there, please take care of your own children first, be happy, like me and my children, and don't cry. That, to me, is much more important, than fixating on my communication style.

I don't need to argue with anyone. As I have said before, it's a competitive world. You snooze, you lose. I am a scientist. I leave things written: about things I believe are right. That's about all I'll do.

Thankyou ASDMommyASDKid I get overwhelmed myself in knowing how to respond and be at point in responding.

I'll give it a go though. I was most feeling this woman had the wrong approach and that she has a limited knowledge of the types of people on the spectrum. Her son is social my daughter is not.

I think she can be damaging, so I think I will keep going to monitor as this is a valued night for my daughter. I am at the stage of not sitting on the same table as her, she enjoys the board games and pizza and I play yatzee with that woman.

I wanted her to have base line social skills to have at least a small chance of 8hours per week of a paid job. She wants that to. She is no longer in a social skills course. She is really liking 'mindfulness' patting a Shetland pony.

Thanks for your support.

Hi bunnyb, I appreciate your point, thankyou. Yes I'm an anxious parent that isnt going to be around forever.