Book Review : Learning About Friendship by KI.I. Al-Ghani

October 19, 2010February 23, 2020 Madeline McEwen-Asker

This book concentrate on children with Asperger Syndrome and High-functioning Autism and is designed to address many of the difficulties these children experience with friendships. However, even if your [and my] children have not yet reached this stage of development, the book can still be a useful tool.

The book covers ten different scenarios. Each chapter starts with an explanation to the adult, parent or carer and raises awareness of some of the common pitfalls. This is then followed by a social story to illustrate how they can be overcome. I enjoyed both aspects of these scenarios for several reasons.

Firstly, the explanation told me that the writer knows what she is talking about rather than preaching from on high.

Secondly, it is apparent from the text that her intuitive approach works–she gets the quirks and triggers–in that although you are working on one particular skill, there can be lots of other issues that interfere with the main plan.

Thirdly, she reveals parental errors in a kindly manner. We know our mistakes, or some of them at least, and she understands why we made them. To illustrate:- a child has an obsession and the parent literally buys into it. We end up buying far too many dinosaurs, Thomas paraphernalia and Legos, because as she says, and I quote “a special interest may have been just the key needed to unlock the delay seen in the acquisition of speech and language.”

Fourthly, she used our childrens’ most common obsessions in the social stories – which is a great short cut for us parents as we don’t need to re-write them to fit our children – thank you!

Fifthly, and this is one of the main reasons I would recommend this book] although as I already said, it’s designed for high functioning and asperger children, many of the social stories are easily adaptable for other children. Here, you may be doubtful, but I am sure I can convince you by examining one story in particular, the second one- Spit and Chase. This tackles the issue of children using inappropriate strategies to get attention. It addresses the underlying behavior which results in spitting. Here, the children involved are able to speak, but it could just as easily be the case if they were non-verbal. It’s easier to unscramble the cause of a particular behavior if a child can communicate with words, but it’s not insurmountable if there is no speech.

We may think that some children may not be ready for such material but the underlying tenants described in the social stories are certainly applicable to both of mine, if in a somewhat simplified format and has certainly helped me formulate an approach for the future.

As a final note it would be remiss of me not to mention the illustrations that accompany the stories which are clear cut, black and white line drawings – perfect for my guys who always [used to] had a hard time with photographs of real people and color pictures. They’re a wonderful and useful addition that complement the stories rather than detract from them. It wasn’t so long ago that there were whole shelves of books which were off limits because the pictures triggered all kinds of unpleasantness.