After a child receives an autism diagnosis, the family is often encouraged to seek out therapy for the child. But many have been questioning why autistic kids need therapy.
As someone on the spectrum myself, I can tell you that autistic people learn things differently.
Sometimes we struggle because we are missing information and skills that other people seem to learn naturally. Experiencing that feeling growing up was extremely frustrating!
Many people are aware that picking up on subtle cues is not often a strength in autistic people, sometimes we need to be explicitly taught certain skills in order to be successful.
As kids get older, social skills get more complex. When I was a teenager, I had trouble knowing how to start conversations with my peers. No matter how many times I saw them start conversations with each other, I had a really hard time figuring out how to do it myself.
I had to be coached specifically on HOW to use various conversation starters.
People around me seemed to naturally understand the give and take and the surface-level humor involved in
the small talk that starts conversations.
Without someone sitting down with me and teaching me what I needed to do to accomplish my goal of starting a conversation with a peer, I would’ve experienced significantly more frustration as a result of being unable to connect with those in my environment.
This is one example of how therapy can be useful to autistic kids because it can explicitly and systematically teach the skills they want to learn.
When kids are taught these skills in a way that makes sense to them, they will be able to take full advantage of each opportunity they come across. In my case, I had plenty of opportunities to start conversations with my peers, but sometimes, the opportunity itself is not enough.