Pivotal Response Training

Autism is seen as a mental disorder that occurs in early stages of child development, making it hard to communicate with other people or even forming relationships. Children that are born with autism has developmental delays and it’s very difficult for them to evolve their social skills. They are completely unaware of tone of voices, gestures, and body languages. These children with this disorder can have several characteristic damages in their social interaction skills. Autistic children struggle with comprehending what others think or feel. Social deterioration causes the child to act inappropriately and preventing them from interacting with other children. Social cues and responding to social cues is important in communication. Pivotal Response Training, Applied Behavior Analysis, and Social Stories are used in therapy that help the children with this disorder to learn acceptable social behavior. Some people may refer to a person with autism having a lack of “Theory of mind” is knowing other people’s mental states such as their emotions and also theirs.
When your about eighteen months, they should be able to know the intentions of others. This development progresses when you’re to the age of three and four the kid begins to understand the other person’s knowledge or beliefs. A researcher by the name of Janet Astington, shown that children's performance on standard false belief tasks where they know that its pretend an understand what’s going on and are not fooled. The success of the child on this test relies on representing different and opposite beliefs and goals with the others while playing. In order to have social development, it is vital for the child to be able to communicate information by themselves. Without any knowledge about the mind or how others think, makes pretend play interactions very difficult autistic children. Social stories are used to address social shortcomings, it is a short story that is written in child format creating a picture of a particular social situation, person, skill, or event showing relevant cues and giving appropriate social responses. Every one of these stories are created to help teach the child to handle their own behavior when put in real social situations, making them aware of the place where it went down, who is being involved, and explain to them why they should behave in that particular way. Creating these stories may bring out some qualities that the child with autism have giving them a sense of personality and confidence. A child with this disorder strangely cling to routines, and the social stories purpose is to make a routine or sort of a guide allowing the child to follow and apply to real-life occurrences. While this technique keys in on the child strengths it also places them in a less stressful environment. The social stories allow them to absorb the guidelines that governs their social behavior in a manner hopefully making the child benefit in the end. A study that was done by Swaggert with this particular technique and was intertwined with behavioral social skills. In this study reinforcement was used in this social skill strategy to get the response that was desired. The stories that was presented was child specific and had photographs incorporated in these stories. By having the stories specifically suited for child with autism that may possess aggression or may have trouble greeting others and also having pictures helped improve their behavior making them implement what they see and hear. Pivotal response training is a way to engage autistic children in illustrative play behavior.
A child with autism doesn’t have symbolic play skills, which simply means they have no imagination for example thinking a stick is a sword or a brush is a microphone also thinking a toy apple is edible. Many people think that the absence or lack of symbolic play makes them think that the child is mentally retarded, but they just don’t indulge in extemporaneous symbolic play. The sort of play that is done in this training is used with objects that is appropriate to their purpose of use. The research show that modeling and verbal aspects on symbolic play makes them perform more and interact after modeling rather than in spontaneous situations. Most children play with an imagination pretending to be someone else making other think that something is wrong with them, but they just need learn how to
play.