The role of families in supporting social inclusion 147Understanding one’s disability is also important from an advocacy point of
view. It is usually parents who act as advocates of their children with ASD. They
are the ones to notice first that their child is socially isolated or even bullied,
and they act on these situations. As important as this is, children with ASD need
to learn how to appropriately advocate for themselves. This includes having an
awareness of their needs and available adjustments. Interestingly enough, self-
advocacy was perceived as only somewhat important in Carter et al.’s study
(2013) of 627 American parents of children with intellectual disability and
Autism. This demonstrates the need to raise parents’ awareness of self-advocacy
and its importance for their child’s future, as well as to provide parents with rel-
evant tools and strategies.
Social skills development
Developing social skills, particularly the skills that are important for establishing
and maintaining friendships, is another area that can be supported in the home
environment. These skills can include: (a) changing a game when a friend is bored,
(b) interrupting appropriately, (c) making empathetic statements, (d) showing
appreciation, (e) staying calm, (f) taking turns, (g) taking responsibility for one’s own
behaviour, and (h) initiating and maintaining social conversation (Leaf, Dotson,
Oppenheim-Leaf, Sherman and Sheldon, 2011; Ostmeyer and Scarpa, 2012).
An approach that has been found to be particularly useful to teach conversation
skills to students with ASD is self-management (Koegel, Park and Koegel, 2014).
When using self-management, children and young people with ASD are asked to
observe a specific aspect of their behaviour, and to self-record whether and when
the observed behaviour occurred (Wilkinson, 2008). Walton and Ingersoll (2013)
however pointed out that most of the research on social skills for children and
young people with ASD was conducted with those with high-functioning Autism.
This leaves children with low-functioning Autism, and particularly those who have
Autism and severe intellectual disability, a rather forgotten population.
One of the things that families can do in regards to the social skills develop-
ment of their children is simply reminding them to apply the skills they already
possess in diverse circumstances and situations. Parents can also encourage their
children with ASD to use social skills applications on mobile devices. There is
an emerging research evidence of the effectiveness of using mobile devices by
children and adults with ASD to learn social skills (Strnadová, Cumming and
Draper Rodriguez, 2014). Applications of mobile devices can be a successful plat-
form for using evidence-based practices to learn social skills. For example, video
modelling and social narratives (Odom, Collet-Klingenberg, Rogers, and Halton,
2010) are the basis for mobile apps, such as stories2learn™ , Social Skills Builder™ ,
or iPrompts™. Furthermore, children with ASD can role-play the acquired skills
with their parents. It is also important to focus on practicing generalisation of the
skills learned, in which a child’s sibling or grandparents can be of a great assistance
(Hong, Neely and Lund, 2015).