Girls Growing Up on the Autism Spectrum by Shana Nichols

Author:Shana Nichols [Shana Nichols With Gina Marie Moravcik and Samara Pulver Tetenbaum]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781846428852
Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
Published: 2013-07-02T04:00:00+00:00

Encouraging friendships

In our clinical experience, pre-teen and adolescent girls with ASDs have expressed several different points of view about friendships in general and their desire, or lack thereof, to have one. Some girls prefer to keep to themselves and not have any friends because “it clogs up my head and distracts me from concentrating on more important things like schoolwork.” Others simply enjoy spending time by themselves and don’t feel the need to have these “friendships” that their parents and teachers talk about and encourage. As a parent who has tried to facilitate a friendship, you might have experienced some resistance or even protest on your daughter’s part. Don’t despair. Her attitude toward friendships can change with positive experiences. If you are able to find a peer with similar interests whom she enjoys spending time with, then with the proper support and encouragement you can succeed in introducing a friendship that may last for some time.

Although it is important to encourage friendships, parents should be cautious and refrain from imposing their personal definitions of friendship on their children, allowing them instead to define their own relationships (with appropriate guidance and support, of course). Based on student accounts, girls with ASDs tend to befriend other students who are also perceived as different or opinionated, and who for those reasons are more appreciative of individuality. Girls with ASDs also tend to seek out fewer friends than neurotypical girls. Rather than having several good friends and a network of peers to hang out with, many of the girls in our group sessions have expressed the desire to have a single good friend who understands them and their need to be alone sometimes. Interacting with more than one friend can be challenging owing to impairments in social information processing: a conversation with multiple girls means having to understand and process several people’s perspectives at once, and respond in turn. In addition, conversations tend to move much faster when more than two people are involved. Given the language and social processing delays that girls with ASDs tend to have, these types of interactions and conversations are especially challenging. In her book, Pretending to be Normal, Liane Holliday Willey states:

I never understood group dynamics that work on giving and taking, role-playing and modeling, rule-following, and turn-taking. Somewhere along the way, I had learned to cope with the intricacies of young friendships well enough to manage one friend. Any more spelled disaster sometimes in very real forms. (p.20)

She further defines friends as “people I enjoyed passing a few minutes or a few hours with” (p.53). Similarly, the girls in our teen groups have stated that they do not necessarily want to spend a lot of time with a friend or engage in lengthy conversations about serious topics or feelings; they would prefer to spend shorter periods of time conversing about common interests (e.g. art, television shows, movies, music, books, favorite actors or actresses).

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