Beyond the ‘Script’
If you’ve ever sat in the back of a social skills group and thought to yourself, this feels a little bit like a corporate board meeting, you aren't alone.
I was listening to a webinar recently by Landria Seals Green that really hit the nail on the head about how we approach social interaction for our children, and it got me thinking about the "Pinterest-perfect" version of therapy versus the messy, loud, and beautiful reality of being a child.
Think about the last time you saw a group of seven-year-olds playing. They aren't sitting around a table taking polite turns and saying, "It is your turn now, John." In reality, they are probably shouting, "Hurry up!" or "No fair!" or "Watch this!" They are interrupting each other, getting mud on their shins, and using words like dude or s’up that we can barely keep up with.
Landria made such a powerful point: if we only teach our children the "polite" version of socialising, we might actually be making it harder for them to make real friends. When we insist on perfect eye contact or robotic greetings, we’re teaching them to be "mini-adults" instead of helping them fit into the world of their peers. A ten-year-old who walks up to a group and says, "Hello, my name is Lauren," might actually stand out more than a kid who just walks up, nods, and says, "what’s up?."
One of the stories that really stuck with me was about a simple game of UNO. We often see these therapy sessions where a child has a dozen visual prompts and coloured cards just to play a game they already know how to play. Landria challenged us to think about how that looks to another child on the playground. If a child can match colours and numbers, they already have the skills to play UNO. By over-complicating it with "therapy tools," we sometimes accidentally send a message to the other children that our child isn't a "viable" play partner. We want to build community around what our children can do, not highlight what they need help with.
It also made me rethink the idea of "being good." We spend so much time teaching our children to be compliant and to share every single toy. But think about your own life—do you share your favorite coffee mug or your phone with every stranger who asks? Probably not! We need to give our children the "justice" of being allowed to say no. We need to teach them how to have an attitude when someone pushes them on the playground, or how to advocate for themselves when they just want to be left alone. An autistic three-year-old deserves the same right to have a messy, frustrated tantrum as any other three-year-old without it being labeled as a "maladaptive behavior."
The big takeaway for me was that social skills are "complicated fun." They shouldn't be about clinical goals that look good on a data sheet; they should be about giving our children the tools to survive and thrive in the school yard, at the park, or on an online game like Roblox. It’s about narrowing the gap between the "therapy room" and the "real world." Sometimes that means letting them get dirty, letting them use the "wrong" slang, and letting them be exactly who they are, rather than a rehearsed version of who we think they should be.
At the end of the day, we want our children to have authentic relationships. And authentic relationships are rarely quiet, rarely perfect, and almost always a little bit muddy.
