146 Iva Strnadová
Rausch, 2002), and especially of children with ASD (Chamberlain et al., 2007).
These themes are also areas in which family involvement is crucial. It is families
who teach their children social skills, especially the skills essential for developing and
maintaining friendships. It is also families who monitor their child’s acceptance by
peers, and often raise concerns in this area with their child’s school (Chamberlain
et al., 2007).
Fostering self-determination
There are a number of ways in which parents can support social inclusion of
their children. First and foremost, it is essential to focus on developing the self-
determination of their children with ASD. Self-determination is defined as
“acting as the primary causal agent in one’s life and making choices and deci-
sions regarding one’s quality of life free from undue influence or interference”
(Wehmeyer, 1996, p. 24). Self-determination encompasses a number of skills,
such as choice- making, decision-making, problem-solving, self-awareness, self-
advocacy, and self-efficacy. There is a body of evidence proving the link between
a level of students’ self- determination and their positive outcomes in adult-
hood (Zhang, Wehmeyer, and Chen, 2005). Therefore promoting students’ self-
determination is viewed as an essential part of education nowadays, especially
when it comes to students with disabilities. It is also acknowledged that not
only teachers, but also parents play a pivotal role in fostering their child’s self-
determination, with parents understanding the importance of self-determina-
tion (Carter, Lane, Cooney, Weir, Moss and Machalicek, 2013). As highlighted by
Carter et al. (2013), parents are in a distinctive position to observe their child’s
self-determination skills across a variety of settings, such as their home, the
community, and other non-school environments. There are a number of ways
in which parents can develop and nurture the self-determination of their child
with ASD, such as providing opportunities to make decisions (e.g., about which
extracurricular activity they wish to be involved in), and helping them to make
connections between their goals and their actions.
An important aspect of self-determination is developing children’s knowledge
of their own disability and how it may portray to other people in their envi-
ronments (e.g., their literal responses might be viewed as arrogance). Obtaining a
solid understanding of one’s strengths as well as a disability’s symptoms allows for
identifying appropriate strategies to develop social skills to address these. Yet, it is
surprising that some students with ASD, while receiving support at their school, are
not aware of having a disability. For example in Danker, Strnadová and Cumming’s
(unpublished data) study on student well-being of high school students with ASD,
it became apparent that a number of high school students with ASD recruited for
the study were not aware of having ASD, therefore their parents and teachers asked
the researchers not to reveal this information to these students. This is alarming, as
not having knowledge of one’s disability does not allow for sufficient development
of self-determination and self-advocacy.