The impact of social relationships on the development of individuals with autism

Social relationships and communication with others play a major role in our lives. No one can live alone. Social relationships help us share our feelings and emotions, both joys and sorrows. The idea that there is someone who shares what we feel helps us continue in life and reduces our feelings of sadness and depression. However, there are those who cannot form social relationships, and they are people with autism who are unable to create social relationships or express their feelings in a healthy way. However, people with autism can be developed by supporting and assisting them in simple and possible ways.

What is autism and is there a cure?

Autism spectrum disorder is a developmental disorder that significantly affects a person's interactions with others and social communication. This disorder includes some repetitive, complex, and routine behavior patterns.

Autism spectrum disorder includes conditions such as Asperger syndrome, childhood disintegrative disorder, and a non-specified form of pervasive developmental disorder.

Autism spectrum disorder begins very early in childhood and causes many problems in social communication with others. Autism appears in the first year and then appears to develop normally. Then the child goes through a period of regression between the eighteenth and twenty-fourth months when symptoms of autism spectrum appear.

There is no specific and confirmed cause for autism spectrum disorder yet, but some doctors believe that there are some things that cause it, such as genetic factors and different genes, which play a role in the development of autism, in addition to some environmental factors such as viral infections, air pollutants, or the mother taking some medications during pregnancy or suffering from some complications during pregnancy.

Unfortunately, there is no definitive cure for autism spectrum disorder yet, but early detection and early intensive treatment make a big difference in the lives of these children and help develop autistic individuals in their relationships with others and develop their linguistic and behavioral skills.

Psychological difficulties facing children with autism

Children with autism suffer from several psychological difficulties that make it difficult for them to communicate with others. These difficulties include:

• Difficulty forming social relationships: The inability to form social relationships and negativity in the behavioral aspect are the most important characteristics of autism. Behavioral disorder is not limited to the social behavioral aspect only, but includes many other patterns, including:

1. The child's inability to interact with others, and his constant attempts to withdraw.
2. Ignoring people around him, even during family visits. He does not care about relatives and those around him, and focuses on the material things in the room.
3. An autistic child lacks eye contact, so we find that he does not respond when you call him by name and does not look at the person talking to him.
4. An autistic child treats people as he treats inanimate objects. He does not look at them when talking or even when dealing with them. He may let his mother help him put on his pants, but he does not pay any attention to this help.
5. He checks acceptable social behaviors. It is possible that during a lesson on plants he may eat some of them.
6. He doesn't care about other people's feelings even if he acts badly towards them.

These points include a portion of autistic children, not all of them, as they differ from one another. However, dealing with these points in a calm and sound manner contributes greatly to developing autistic individuals and modifying their behavior.

• Difficulty interacting with others:

Some children with autism are able to interact with others, while others are not. They are unable to take the initiative or attract the attention of others. Even parents try to interact with their children with autism, but the interaction of these children is almost non-existent, stereotypical, or repetitive.

• Difficulties in visual communication:

1. Children with autism find it difficult to make eye contact with others, because they cannot look at anything for long periods of time. They do not know how to use sight to communicate with others. Here, we must develop individuals with autism and help them not to ask them to look into our eyes when speaking, so that we do not make them feel embarrassed.
2. Children with autism are unable to understand symbols, gestures, or cues on other people's faces that could mean a lot.

• Difficulties with emotional feelings and relationships with others:

1. Children with autism can form an emotional bond with their parents, and some begin to smile naturally as early as the age of six. However, this does not mean that they have the ability to form relationships naturally, but helping and responding to parents can greatly develop individuals with autism.
2. Some autistic children in our community miss people who were good to them and then suddenly disappeared, like the classroom teacher they used to have and then suddenly she was absent from work. They often miss the daily routine they used to have with school, not the school itself.
3. Children with autism in our society show some feelings and emotions in a strange and sometimes unexpected way. We find that the majority of children with autism show feelings of anger, sadness, fear, or happiness in situations that do not require this, such as laughing without reason, walking in their underwear in front of guests without shame.

• Difficulty in being able to understand other people's thoughts

Children with autism face many difficulties in understanding the thoughts of others, and realizing what life situations mean in terms of deception or misleading, whether the situations are imaginary or real, and the reason for this is that they are unable to understand what is going on in the minds of others.

Developing social skills and relationships for people with autism

The impact of social relationships on individuals with autism has a great ability to develop their skills, help them integrate into society, and reduce the feelings of depression and anxiety they feel due to the social isolation in which they live.

There are a set of strategies that can be followed with autistic patients to help them develop their skills, including:

• Structured social skills are often implemented with a professional trainer or specialist and in small groups and can be offered in schools or preschool settings. Many activities are used to develop students' skills.
• Social narratives: Social narratives greatly help autism spectrum patients understand the customs and traditions of a society by focusing the narrative and shedding light on some important customs. They are one of the best means to help develop individuals with autism .
• Visual representation of conversations: It is a technique that uses certain symbols to represent social interactions, and uses colors to show emotions such as red denotes love and feelings, black denotes sadness, and so on.
• Visual support: This includes visual support that greatly develops individuals with autism through the use of picture cards, touch, and short videotapes, in addition to colored cards, posters, drawings, or tables, which greatly help them develop and raise their abilities and life skills.
• Modeling: This is a specific display desired by the parents so that the autistic child can imitate it. This imitation leads to the development of new skills and the development of autistic individuals in our society.
• Video modeling : Instead of parents modeling some behavior for the autistic child to imitate, videos containing a certain behavior can be filmed and watched by the autistic child , because this procedure also helps him greatly in progress.

School.com and its role in developing individuals with autism

The Madrasa.com platform works to support, help and develop individuals with autism by sharing articles that help spread an important culture, which is knowing a lot about autism and how to deal with it, in addition to all the information you need to help develop individuals with autism . The Madrasa.com platform also offers training courses with flexible morning and evening times provided by specialists, helping children and students with autism develop their skills and help them develop their language and behavior in a completely confidential manner. It also offers courses for parents who need support and assistance to deal with their children with autism in a healthy manner.

Developing social relationships for autistic individuals helps reduce the violent behavior that most autistic individuals exhibit. An autistic child suffers from a brain disorder that prevents him from communicating socially. Therefore, our good treatment and understanding of the suffering of autistic individuals in our society contributes greatly to developing their lives and enabling them to integrate into society without fear or shame.