Do You Like The Beach?

Today's blog was written by Dr. Barbara Kaminski, Ph.D, BCBA, who is the Clinical Director for Green Box ABA, PLLC

I was just standing in the surf, letting my feet get buried deeper and deeper into the sand with each wave. He appeared seemingly out of nowhere and was suddenly standing between me and the next wave. “Do you like the beach?” was his first question. I paused. The manner of his approach and the rhythm of his speech were definitely cues that this man was on the autism spectrum. I responded with a statement and then a reciprocal question. He “sort of” answered the question and then asked me another question. Peer response. Peer response. He finished by extending two fists with “thumbs up.” I looked at his extended fists, wondering what the response should be; what had been used as the “social reinforcer.” I gave him a double fist-bump. He looked disappointed and left his fists in place. Wiggled his thumbs. Ah, okay. Another “fist-bump” but this time we touched thumbs. He happily ran off into the waves. I didn’t actually take the time to count, but in retrospect, I think we had about a 10-exchange “conversation.”

Out of everyone on the beach, he chose to approach me. It was a good choice and I am thankful. Given my profession, I had some idea of how to respond to him in a meaningful way. On the whole, both the initiation and the conversation had the formal appearance of being appropriate. But even to me it felt unnatural and, well, kind of odd. And who knows how many other people he had “initiated a conversation” with on the beach and how they responded. I am sure some were polite and tried to have a conversation. I can imagine others who were not so polite, if you get my drift.

I have no doubt that he has worked very hard on these social skills. I have no idea whether he worked on them formally with an ABA provider. At the very least, he probably had social skills goals on his IEP. But there was definitely something missing.  To me, things just felt out of place. To someone without my experience, I am sure it would have felt uncomfortable. As a professional who frequently works on helping kids on the spectrum learn social skills, I felt convicted. Do we often stop short of teaching truly functional, meaningful social skills?

It is daunting, to be fair. In our social interactions, we make highly conditional discriminations, in a fluid, ongoing way. If we take the time to “process” what to do next, our social interaction becomes stilted. At the very least, our discriminations are on based on the conversational partner (is this a friend, an acquaintance, a clerk at the store, a supervisor/teacher, etc.) and the context/setting. There are scenarios where we might have a successful initiation with an unfamiliar person at the beach. For example, if I have a boogie board, I might talk to someone else with a boogie board about the height of the waves. Or if I notice that someone has built a super amazing sand castle, I might ask her a question about that (“That’s an amazing sand castle. How long did it take you to build it?”). However, no matter how much I want to know more about the sand castle, I may not initiate a conversation with her if she gives cues that she needs to chase after a toddler on the sand. I will admit that the sheer number and variety of contextual and social stimuli that function as discriminative stimuli for emitting (or not emitting) a social behavior can make this next level training seem nothing short of impossible. But as behavior analysts, we have the training and the skill to break it down into manageable, albeit complex, targets.

I would never suggest that we shouldn’t work on the basic building blocks of the social skills repertoire – initiating conversations, asking questions, etc. I spend a lot of time teaching the topography of the behavior – “how” to initiate a conversation, for example. But personally, I often don’t get as far as helping clients learn “when” to initiate a conversation. Or how to end a conversation naturally. And if I really want my clients to not just interact with others but to actually develop relationships, then I need to help them work on those sorts of things too. Unless what I want is a client who in the future has awkward conversations with random women on the beach, that is.