play and social skills

Play is an integral part of learning and developing. Children that have difficulty engaging in age-typical play with friends often struggle with other social skills and this can affect their ability to build meaningful and lasting relationships with others.

Using ABA principles, we teach play and social skills to children who struggle to connect to others, interact and communicate with peers or engage in age-typical play skills, including turn taking, pretend play and sharing.

Through a detailed assessment, we identify the deficits and also the barriers that keep the child from learning play and social behaviors. Barriers may include problem behaviors, skill deficits, and lack of generalization, among others. We then develop a plan that is individualized to those barriers and needs, adapting the teaching structure to the action plan. Some children may need to begin with learning play and social behaviors in a 1:1 setting first, and then progress to a small group or a play date at their home.

When the barriers in terms of skill deficits or problem behaviors are significant, the treatment plan will include a plan for reduction of the problem behaviors and a plan to teach the specific skill deficits, which sometimes need to be addressed prior to addressing the play and social skills needs.