Perspective-Taking Skills

 The ability to understand and predict how other people are thinking or feeling is a very complex and abstract skill. Teaching perspective-taking skills to children with autism is a necessary piece of developing appropriate social skills.

Quick Strategy: To assist in teaching perspective-taking skills use visuals of drawings or pictures of people in social scenarios, draw or insert “thought bubbles” above each person indicating what each of the people might be thinking.

Teach your child to reflect accurately on other people’s perspectives using context, clues and background knowledge to draw conclusions on other people’s thoughts and feelings.

Work with your child on developing his ability to “fill-in-the-blank” of people’s thought bubbles both in pictures and during or after social interactions in his or her natural environment.

Try using sequencing picture cards initially to assist in developing your child’s understanding of cause and effect relationships.

Purchase or develop sets of 3-5 pictures representing a sequence of events (EX: child running to school because he is missed his bus, etc.) Pair “why” questions with the sequenced events. EX: “Why is the child running to school?”, etc. Use pictures from the sequence to prompt appropriate responses. Use many examples of picture sequences to develop your child’s understanding of cause effect relationships.

Sometimes after language imitation emerges parents report their child uses the language from an inaccurate perspective. For example, if their child wants ice cream, he/she will bring ice cream to the parent and say “Do you want ice cream?”, not because the child is asking the parent if they want ice cream, but because this is what the child has heard from the parent previously before getting the ice cream.

A quick and helpful strategy to use in the home to for parents teach appropriate responding in these situations is to model the language from the child’s perspective. For example, when the child brings ice cream to the parent instead of the parent asking the child “Do you want ice cream?”, the parent can model the appropriate language for the child to imitate (i.e. “I want ice cream.”, “Can I have ice cream?”, etc).

Once your child begins imitating the appropriate response try fading back your prompt (”I want ice cream.”) and adding more natural parent responses (i.e. “What do you want?”, child responds “I want ice cream”) to work toward independent responding with this skill.

Initially, this can be taught by using a visual to assist in teaching the structure for using this language. For example, create a visual with the words or pictures representing the words “I (picture of the child) see (picture of eyes).”

Take the child’s finger and point to the words/pictures on the visual while teaching the child to point and say the represented words.

Find objects (i.e. ball, shoe, book, etc.) in the home the child is familiar with and place next to the visual. Ask the child what he/she sees and assist him/her in pointing to the visual and object and describing what they say using a carrier phrase. Example: Child points to visual and book and says “I see book”. Increase the number of objects the child shares with you as he/she becomes more independent in using the full-sentence phrase. Once the child begins to be successful in using the visual to share the object with a carrier phrase, work on fading the visual out of the instructional process by asking the child what he/she says and assisting him/her to use the phrase independently.

Teaching children with autism to answer wh ?’s questions is an imperative skill for improving comprehension and social language skills. Answering wh?’s can be broken down and taught using rules and concrete concepts. When teaching who, what, and where questions begin first by teaching rules.   

  Rules

• Who =person
• Where= place
• When = time

Person, Place, Time

Once your child can list or describe the “rule” for the targeted wh ? begin developing the concepts of person, place, and time. Make sure you target the questions individually, for example first teach who, then where, etc. To begin developing your child’s concepts of person, place and time ask your child to list, or categorize “banks” of examples of each. For example, child “lists” 5-10 persons (siblings, parents, relatives, friends, teachers, etc). Be sure your child can list unfamiliar and generic (i.e. Mr. Smith, Johnny, etc.) community helpers (i.e. doctor, policeman, etc.). 

Teach in a Sentence

Once your child is able to list or categorize familiar/unfamiliar persons,places, and times, begin using in a sentence and asking questions. You may need to have a visual of the rule present to pre-teach or error correct with your child.

Example:

Give your child a sentence, (example)”Mom when to the store.” , ask your child “who?”

Child responds “Mom”

Be sure to ask the wh ? in isolation initially to assist your child in discriminating the wh? word and not just filling in the blank for the only word you did not give him/her (i.e. Do not use the other words in the sentence  ”who went to the store?”, etc.). Also, be sure to move the “person”, etc. around in the sentence (i.e. “The person who went to the store was mom.”, The person named mom, went to the store.”) in order to assist the child in following the “person” around in different orders in the sentence.  Follow this structure when teaching where, and when concepts as well.

Check back later in the week for more information on teaching your child to answer and ask wh questions.