Module 6: Social Skills and Perspective Taking, Mental Flexibility

Topics:

1. Social Referencing: Cindy does not typically look to her mother to determine if a situation is safe or not. She appears to have minimal awareness of safety and would easily run into the street, touch a hot stove, or walk off with a stranger. Cindy has recently demonstrated an increase in joint attention during pleasurable tasks however. When being bounced on a ball during an OT session, Cindy actively looked between her mother and her aunt to express her excitement for the activity.


2. Perspective Taking: Cindy tends to demonstrate preference for details (local processing) and has demonstrated rigidity in the past as to toy/object preferences and activities. Resistance to participate in less desired activities appears to have been influenced by sensory processing differences and lack of anticipation. With an improvement in these areas, I have seen an increased interest in what others are doing and an increase in attention to previously non-preferred tasks. Cindy recognizes me upon arrival. As soon as I arrive, she pulls her child's size table and chair to "our spot" to work. During sessions, she is fixated on the task at hand and demonstrates minimal initiation and maintenance of eye contact. During sensory based play however, especially on the ball and especially when I am working on anticipation like "ready, set, go" or "wait, wait, go", I see a huge improvement in eye contact, engagement, and emotion! We also play a game where I say "good night", when she says "good night" back to me, I pretend I am asleep. If she touches me or makes a sound, I wake-up and shout "who woke me up?!" She loves this and quickly says "good night" to indicate to me that she wants to start the game all over again.



We have been working on the formation of circles. To make the task a little more motivating, I add facial features inside the circle to address emotion. Cindy enjoys "happy" and "scared". Once, when demonstrating what sad looks like, she stared at me and appeared to become upset..... I think that this is a good indication of the emergence of perspective taking by Cindy.