8 Social Skill Activities for Autism

Is your child experiencing challenges with inactivity, reluctance to make friends, or engaging in social gatherings?

Autism presents unique hurdles, making children emotionally distant and hypo-sensitive to social stimuli. This condition often inhibits communication and social participation, but there are effective interventions available.

Engaging in structured social skill activities can significantly enhance your child’s abilities to interact and participate in social settings.

By practicing these activities, your child can gradually improve their social functioning and develop vital communication skills necessary for forming friendships and navigating social situations effectively.

Discover the eight carefully curated social skill activities for autism outlined in this blog, aimed at empowering your child to thrive in social environments.

Key Takeaways

1. Eye Contact and Imitation Games: Encouraging eye contact and playful imitation helps children with autism recognize emotions and improve engagement.
2. Name and Emotion Games: Activities like name games and emotion cards familiarize children with social interactions and emotional understanding.
3. Role Play and Social Stories: Enacting real-life scenarios and sharing social stories prepare children for everyday interactions and tasks.
4. Turn-Taking and Video-Based Learning: Turn-taking games and videos teach patience, collaboration, and appropriate responses to situations.
5. Therapeutic Support: While activities build social skills gradually, therapies like stem cell treatment offer additional support to reduce symptoms and enhance participation.

8 Social Skill Activities for Children with Autism

Here are some practical strategies to enhance your child’s social abilities. Check our curated list of activities tailored specifically for children with autism, aimed at fostering social interaction and growth.

1. Improving your child’s eye contact:

Children with autism do not have proper eye contact capabilities. Help your child to stare at you for 5-7 seconds and always praise him for his action. 

If your child is unable to make any eye contact then you can put stickers on your eyes or forehead and make him look at you. 

Never force your child to make eye contact if he is completely unwilling to do.

2. Play games with your child:

You can play games with your child and allow him to imitate you. You can roll your eyes, stick out your tongue, and make funny faces. This can help your child to understand emotions better.

3. Play a name game with your child:

You can request all the members of your family to stand in a circle and tell them to say their names. In this way, your child can remember the names of your family members and start making new friends.

4. Play with emotion cards: 

You can print cards that depict emotions like happiness, sadness, excitement, anger, fear, surprise, embarrassment, shyness, curiosity, and worry. You can tell your child to look at the emotion cards and name each of the emotions. 

In this way, your child will get familiar with different types of emotions and understand how to react in different circumstances.

5. Enact a role play with your child:

Do role plays of events that have already happened with you and your child and tell them how he will react if the event happens in the future. 

In this way, you can improve your child’s social skills and help him build relationships with other people in society. 

Suppose you and your child met a person whom both of you didn’t know before but later you became his friend. You can do a role play to make your child understand how to talk with unknown people and make him learn how to make friends with people.

6. Show your child different videos:

You can use videos to make your child teach different situations, emotions, and lifestyles. For example, if your child is unwilling to have his haircut, you can show him a haircut video and make him understand how it brings about changes in appearance.    

In this way, you can help your child to develop a dressing sense and also make him participate in various functions in society.

7. Tell your child social stories:

Social stories are about a particular situation that your child is going to face in everyday life. 

For example, if your child doesn’t know how to behave in the supermarket you can create a social story to make him understand how to choose and buy products from different corners of the market. 

Also, you can narrate social stories to your child to make him understand how to play football in the playground along with other friends.

8. Engage in turn-taking games with your child:

Kick a football and shout “Your turn” in front of him. Your child will kick the ball and shout it is his turn. In this way, your child can know how to participate in activities involving multiple members.

Conclusion – developing social skills activities for autism

Social skill activities can make a child aware of his surroundings, understand emotions, help in making friends, and make the child participate in various functions in society. 

But, it is always difficult to make your child do the things and listen to you. The child remains in his own world and suffers from hyposensitivities or hypersensitivities related to stimuli. 

There are treatment options for your child. However, most of the options are time-consuming and are not definite pathways for cure. 

Stem cell therapy is an innovative therapy that helps in reducing autistic symptoms and also decreases your child’s restlessness, and hyperactivity. It improves your child’s power to listen to you and your interactive sessions in a much better way. In this way, you can make your child social and an interactive person. 

MedicoExperts is a 24/7 global hospital that has a panel of stem cell therapists and neurologists. You can consult the best doctor for your child and plan effective treatment options for autism treatment in India. MedicoExperts will help you reduce your child’s autistic symptoms to a great extent. 

FAQ :

References

https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/autism/facts.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7670840/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9788721/