In a recent issue of the Journal of Visual Impairment & Blindness (JVIB), Valérie Caron and colleagues published a systematic review of research on “social skills interventions” for kids who are blind or have low vision, entitled “Teaching social skills to children and adolescents with visual impairments: A systematic review.” The review included 32 studies conducted in 8 countries, and the authors generally concluded that explicit instruction can increase students’ demonstrated performance of targeted social skill behaviors, like initiating play with classmates or approximating eye contact. The authors determined that the evidence supports explicit social skills teaching in programs for blind and low-vision students.
I read this article with great interest as both the director of research at the American Foundation for the Blind (AFB) and as a blind person who received social skills training as a child in the 1990s. It is clear that people who are blind or have low vision often (though not always) encounter difficulty developing social relationships. The theory behind social skills training is that individuals can be taught the skills and behaviors expected by their peers and that this instruction will promote social connections. Is this true, though? Or should the social environment instead be the target of intervention?
We can take a lesson from autistic people, who have been subjected to social skills training and other formalized interventions to make them act more like their non-autistic (“neurotypical”) peers. These interventions can produce reliable changes in short-term behavior. However, autistic people have expressed that these interventions fail them in the long term. Instead of helping them build authentic social connections, social skills training instead teaches autistic people to “mask” or “pass” as they pretend to be neurotypical in order to make friends. In the long-term, however, instead of building belonging and connection, this pressure leads to deep feelings of isolation, depression, anxiety, and other adverse mental health outcomes. In contrast, autistic people often thrive, socially and emotionally, in authentic relationships with other autistic people. These experiences suggest that what might be considered a “deficit” in one social setting is neutral, or advantageous, in a different one.
The reflections of autistic advocates mirror my own experiences. The social skills instruction I received in school taught me to perform in specific ways to please my teachers, but those behaviors never felt authentic. I was also keenly aware of being singled out to receive this training, when my sighted peers, even those who bullied other kids, were not. Eventually, I internalized the belief that my social difficulties were my fault and needed to be trained away. Social skills training did not make the playground games accessible, though, or persuade my sighted peers to include me.
Fortunately, though, I found the blind community later in my teen years. There, I was authentically accepted without needing to perform. My relationships with blind peers paved the way for me to create meaningful social relationships with both blind and sighted people as a blind adult.
As a researcher, I appreciate the importance of evaluating the scientific quality of a body of evidence. We need to ensure that interventions are reliably impacting people in the ways they are intended to. However, we also need to ensure that these impacts are ones that benefit the population. The education of children with disabilities has historically been steeped in a societal desire to “fix” the children instead of adjusting the environment to include them. It is time to learn from people with lived disability experiences to create a fully inclusive social environment for all.
For Further Reading:
Masking and mental health implications
When disability is defined by behavior, outcome measures should not promote "passing"
Teaching Social Skills to Children and Adolescents With Visual Impairments: A Systematic Review, by Valérie Caron, Alessio Barras, Ruth M.A. Van Nispen, and Nicolas Ruffieux https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0145482X231167150
On “Teaching Social Skills to Children and Adolescents With Visual Impairments: A Systematic Review,” by Arielle Silverman https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0145482X231188881
