I don't get it...

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I saw the video a few days ago, and it talked about how there are certain "social rules" that parents teach their kids/teens but that it doesn't work. So I don't understand, do the parents not know about the social rules or is it the kid's fault for misinterpreting what the parents teach?
http://www.wrongplanet.net/article410.html

Well, NT adults may not remember what it was like to be a child, or things may have changed and they haven't noticed. I don't know if you've ever seen a depiction of an adult who wants teens to think that they're 'cool' - they generally do what used to be cool when they were teens, and it comes across as really goofy.

Or else they'll say what they wish kids would do, not realizing how other kids actually react to that.

I've run into this with my daughter (me NT, her autistic, not Aspergers, if that makes a difference). Like Ettina says, there is a significant generation gap and I have forgotten the particulars of my own childhood interactions. I can't teach what I don't remember and I wind up teaching what works between adults, which is different from what works between children.

Also, as Ettina says, some rules have changed and I am unaware of the changes. You could ask "which rules have changed?" and that's the catch. I have no way of knowing.

The final problem is that much of what I'm attempting to teach was never taught to me as a child by my own parents. Much of what NT parents teach AS kids was never taught to them as children. That's because NT children often learn social rules from each other, not from their parents. The parents step in now and then to teach manners and enforce sharing but most social rules are absorbed without being explicitly taught through the process of play. So I am attempting to put into words the rules that I never consciously thought about before, never was actually taught by adults, and am probably misremembering anyway because it's been so long since I was a kid.

All in all, not hugely succesful. So I am thankful for any professionals who are more in touch with how children actually interact and don't have to rely in hazy memories of never-articulated rules.

Ah ok. I notice that profs in university try to crack up jokes but no one laughs. I bet he/she will not be making any friends with university students (not that he/she needs to anyway). Just being a prof in itself is enough to attract students to have a chat with you.

I liked watching that video. The thing that made the most sense to me was the 'ecologically valid response' that she talked about. She is right, when I was growing up my parents would just tell me to just 'say hi' to join in a conversation. Some of that thinking is probably comes from the fact that maybe NT parents just think their child is shy and just needs a little encouragement to join in a social setting, and once they have said 'hello' they will just kind of naturally figure out how to fit into a conversation.

Looking back on that sort of advice my parents would give me I think there was just a lot of places where I was just supposed to 'fill in the gaps' with the appropriate things. I tend to think of social situations in 'steps' similar to how Liz Laugeson describes them in that video and can't really imagine not doing so. In the same respect, I am starting assume that my parents never thought about socializing in discrete steps and can't really imagine doing so.

That's a very reasonable assumption. As an NT parent myself, I can assure you that I never did this ever once in my entire life until I had an autistic child old enough to learn (verbally) the steps of socializing. It turns out to be very difficult because:

1)I don't remember all that clearly how I socialized as a child

2)I was never taught by my parents (parents typically don't teach this) so I didn't have the "voice in my head" that parents often rely on when talking to their kids which is actually a memory of their own parents' voices

3)scoializing is non-linear so breaking it down into discrete steps ultimately fails, although the woman in the video certainly does do a better job than me of attempting to force some linearity onto it