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A Child-Centered Approach Makes Social Interaction
Motivating
Facilitators and parents employing
the SRP make social interaction their primary focus
when working one-on-one with a child with Autism,
recognizing that social avoidance is the crux of the
autistic challenge. There are two ways in which a
child-centered approach makes social interaction motivating.
a) Follow the Child: Start with
the Child’s Motivation
The SRP works with objects and activities for which
the child is internally motivated. This play-based
approach starts with the child’s area of motivation
(e.g. jumping on a trampoline). The adult joins in
with this area of play until the child spontaneously
socially orients to the adult (e.g. makes eye contact,
physical contact or a vocalization attempt). This
spontaneous expression of social interest from the
child is then responded to by the adult in a manner
designed to be motivating to the child (based on the
individual child’s interests and previous response
patterns), for example, jumping on the trampoline
while pretending to be a monkey. Any subsequent responses
by the adult to the child’s expressions of interest
are similarly fine-tuned to be motivating to the child.
Thus ensues a cycle of reciprocal social exchange
within the area of the child’s motivation. The
SRP proposes that this approach raises the salience
level of social interaction by tying the child’s
internal motivations to social interaction.
Autistic children can become very
focused on their particular areas of motivation, often
to the point of being termed “obsessional”
or “perseverative”. Many traditional approaches
have tried to steer children away from their areas
of motivation in an attempt to broaden the child’s
range of interest. The SRP instead recognizes these
interests as doorways into that child’s world,
a means of forming a connection to become the foundation
for more spontaneous and flexible social exchange.
Support for this perspective comes from Koegel, Dyer
and Bell (1987) who found a negative correlation between
social avoidance and child-preferred activities in
autistic children. That is, when prompted to engage
in activities the children had already demonstrated
an interest in, children were much less socially avoidant
than when prompted to engage in activities chosen
by the adult.
Baker, Koegel and Koegel (1998)
further underlined the effectiveness of the child-centered
approach with autistic children in a group setting.
They took the obsessional interests of a group of
children with Autism (e.g. US geography) and made
them into common games that could be played by the
autistic child and his/ her peer group (e.g. tag game
on a giant map of the US). From very low levels of
social interaction in the baseline condition, the
percentage of social interactions increased dramatically
during the intervention period and continued to be
high at a 2 month follow-up. These increases in social
play interactions continued even in the absence of
the adult who had done the initial prompting. Furthermore,
the autistic children began to engage more in other
non-obsession themed games after the intervention.
Baker et al (1989) conclude that “the obsessional
themes of children with Autism, which are typically
viewed as problematic, can be transformed successfully
into common games to increase positive social play
interactions” (p.306-307).
The parents of the autistic children
involved in this study reported either no increase,
or a decrease, in the child’s engagement in
the target obsessional theme at home, after the initiation
of the obsessional themed games. This finding is consistent
with Charlop et al (1990) who used obsessional themes
as reinforcers for children to complete other tasks
and found no increase in the children’s use
of these particular obsessional themes. The SRP similarly
maintains that using a child’s obsessional theme
or topics of perseveration as a platform for social
interaction does not encourage further perseveration
but instead helps transform perseverative, rigid play
or conversation into socially appropriate, flexible,
reciprocal interaction, because it makes social interaction
more motivating than previously. Again, direct empirical
observation is required to assess these observations.
b) Give Control: Be Responsive
and Sensitive to the Child
The second crucial factor in facilitating the emergence
of a genuine and spontaneous interest in the social
world is giving control or employing a responsive
style of interaction (Beckwith and Cohen, 1992). The
SRP is child-centered. This means a) the topic of
play is derived from the child’s individual
interests, and b) the child actively chooses when
to begin and end that interaction. This is critical
and the juncture at which traditional approaches to
special education tend to differ. Trivette (2003)
defined this responsive style of interaction as involving
two important components. First, the adult responds
only to the child’s production of a behavior.
This means that the adult responds only after the
child makes a physical gesture (e.g. waves, smiles,
touches), a vocal sound (e.g. a coo, a word) or an
action (e.g. throws a ball, picks up toy). Second,
the adult’s response to this action is sensitive,
that is, appropriate in its level of intensity. A
sensitive response is one in which the intensity level
matches the child’s developmental level and
mood. For example, if the child is crying, the adult
may offer a soothing song; if the child is excited
and laughing, the adult might offer a swing in the
air (Trivette, 2003).
In a meta-analysis of 13 studies
looking at the effects of this style of interaction,
Trivette (2003) concluded “that a responsive
caregiver style of interaction positively influences
the cognitive development of children with, or at
risk for, developmental disabilities” and also
“has a positive influence on the social-emotional
development of these children” (Trivette, 2003,
p.5). All 13 studies meeting inclusion criteria for
this meta-analysis (1,336 children in total) showed
the same result––that adult responsiveness
substantially helped these children’s cognitive
and social-emotional development.
Subsequent research has continued
to support this finding (Mahoney and Perales, 2003;
Mahoney and Perales, 2005) and found that responsive
interactive style also has positive outcomes on language
development (MacDonald, 1989; Manolson et al, 1995).
In a long-term study, Siller and Sigman (2002) found
that the more mothers of children with Autism engaged
in responsive interaction with their children, the
higher the levels of communication functioning their
children attained at 1, 10 and 12 years of age. Mahoney,
Boyce, Fewell and Wheeden (1998) reported that in
a large scale, multi-site early intervention research
project (Infant Health and Development Program, 1990),
maternal responsiveness accounted for six times more
of the variance in the developmental functioning of
low birth-weight children than did the children’s
participation in an intensive (25 hour per week) high-quality
school program. Investigating responsive teaching
is especially important in the light of findings that
mothers of developmentally delayed children tend to
be more directive (not responsive) when interacting
with their children (Spiker, et al., 2002).
Lewis and Goldberg (1969) suggest
that this responsive style of interaction has such
a positive effect on children’s development
because it facilitates the child’s feelings
of control and self-efficacy. This contributes to
the child’s sense of competence and so increases
the likelihood of the child engaging in subsequent
interactions and learning situations. Mahoney and
Perales (2003) propose that a responsive style of
interaction enhances social behaviors that may be
the same as the pivotal response behaviors seen to
enhance the efficacy of discrete trial training interventions
(Koegel, Koegel, Shosan and McNerny, 1999). Pivotal
behaviors “are the processes children employ
to learn and practice new behaviors during spontaneous
interactions. Following this line of reasoning, it
seems possible that as parents engage in higher levels
of responsive interaction with their children, they
are actually encouraging children to learn and use
pivotal developmental behaviors, which are the processes
enabling them to acquire untrained socioemotional
competencies” (Mahoney and Percales, 2003, p.
84). This would explain why studies using interventions
focusing on these pivotal developmental behaviors
show children learning skills that they then generalize
to other learning situations (Koegel, Koegel and Carter,
1998; Kaiser, Carter, Koegel, 2003).
The SRP employs, exclusively, a
responsive style of interaction that they call “giving
control”. Under the SRP, each time a child makes
spontaneous social contact, the adult responds in
a “sensitive” manner as described above;
additionally, when a child disengages from social
contact, the adult responds by respectfully withdrawing
and waiting for a social cue from the child before
pursuing any further interactions. Each time this
happens, the child learns that s/he has control over
her/his social environment. Considerable research
shows that children develop to the degree that they
have control over their behavior and their effects
on the environment (MacDonald, 2004). A child inhabiting
the fragmented, unpredictable, chaotic perceptual
world described above, who is also extremely challenged
by communicating his/her wants, and whose autonomic
system appears to be out of control, does not have
a sense of being in control of the world or even of
his/her body in the way a typically developing child
does (Bluestone, 2004). Thus, the importance of providing
a social environment maximizing the child’s
sense of control can be seen.
That children with Autism do not
have a sense of control in the world could explain
why they seek out patterns––meaning, predictability
and order in a chaotic world. Baron-Cohen (2004) found
the content of rituals and topics of perseveration
(of higher-functioning children and adults with Autism
and Aspergers Syndrome) is not random, but tends to
cluster in the domain of systems (including technical,
natural and abstract systems). These systems are underlain
with rules and regularities more easily grasped by
the autistic mind (Baron-Cohen, 2004). The social
world is not an organized system regulated by fixed
rules but rather a fluid, ever-changing bombardment
of sensory input. If the autistic child is to feel
comfortable in the social world, then the social world
must be made as controllable as possible to encourage
the autistic child to participate. This is exactly
what is done by the SRP. So when a child in an SRP
playroom disengages from the social interaction, the
facilitator respects this and allows the child to
disengage, does not keep pursuing the interaction
as recommended in other relationship-based approaches
(Greenspan & Wieder, 1998) and waits for the child
to re-engage before continuing to build social interaction.
When consistently immersed in a social environment
of this nature, SRP proposes the child learns that
he has control over the previously uncontrollable
social world. This puts the child in the driver’s
seat and shows him that he can indeed effectively
elicit a response from another when he chooses; this
sense of control forms a foundation for reciprocal
interaction (Dawson and Galpert, 1990). Koegel, Koegel
and McNerney (2001) review data suggesting that “when
children with Autism are motivated to initiate complex
social interactions, it may reverse a cycle of impairment,
resulting in exceptionally favorable intervention
outcomes” (p.19).
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