It is April 1st today and following our usual routine - read and talk about various celebrations at school or in the community at least the day before - we were talking about various scenarios of April Fool jokes someone could play on him today. In an impromptu social story narrative, I told him possible examples of what someone might say to him to make him do something. We covered the more innocent and common ones - for example, "what's that on your chin?", "there's something on your hair" to "you dropped something" but I wondered if I should have also covered some of the possibly darker scenarios of April Fool set-ups he might be subjected to just because he loves jokes and being silly. He, my son who is on the autism spectrum, would never read the expression on a peer's face or be able to distinguish the fun-loving tone from that of someone intending to hurt or humiliate him, someone grabbing the opportunity to bully him. He is not able to gather such information from non-verbal communications, which typically developing children are usually good at, much less predict or avoid the situation. So, I worry. We're still working on goals of recall and generalization skills with him so it will be one happenstance if I hear even a partial story about things that happened to him at school today, much less of someone, how shall I say it, who was "not too nice" to him either inside the classroom or on the playground.
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