How it started

LIsten to the podcast episode HERE.

Watch on YouTube HERE. 

On the last episode, I talked about my new purpose. Helping families preserve their relationships with their socially challenged kids while also helping their kids gain friendship skills. Win-win!

Today I’m going to be a bit cliché and share my ‘how it started/how it’s going’ journey with you. Where I am in Starfish Social Club today is absolutely not where I was many years ago when I started my special education journey. I bet my ‘how it started’ story will be something that sounds very relatable to you!

If you’ve known for at least 3 months that your child struggles to make and maintain friendships, then I know you’re struggling with knowing what to do and how to help them, and feeling like you should know and do more. You have invested hours of your time (maybe even days) and thousands of dollars into finding the solution without much progress, and at this point you feel like a worn-out warrior.

I can totally relate.

Let me take you back to 2004…

Crew review

I started my teaching career in 2004. I had gone through an alternative certification program as part of getting my masters degree in special education. The program I went through had an emphasis on working with kids with emotional and behavioral disorders.

I had never been in a classroom before my first day as a teacher. My alternative certification program did not include student teaching. Aside from being a student myself, I’d never been in a classroom. I’d never been in charge of my own classroom until my first day as a teacher. I was hired to teach in an elementary self-contained behavior classroom because the principal ‘liked my spirit’.

As far as behaviorally challenged kids go, my first group of students was pretty tame. They were much more challenged with learning difficulties and self-esteem deficits than actual behavior.

But on top of their academic challenges, two of the boys didn’t have friends. One of them was super friendly, but pretty oblivious to social expectations. The other kids liked him, but thought he was weird. Not annoying, just weird. He would walk around the playground at recess talking to himself, totally content.

Another kiddo was later diagnosed with Asperger’s Syndrome. He would frequently go into a rage when he misinterpreted situations, which meant the other kids chose to stay away from him most of the time. His version of a rage meant a lot of yelling and name calling. He was calling the other kids ‘Mugglebutt’, if that’s the right word from Harry Potter. I think it means your parents aren’t magical? His rage would always turn into crying. Really, his emotions stemmed from not having friends.

My girl was really sweet and kind, but had no idea how to engage with other kids socially. Other kids liked her, but she wasn’t ever part of the group. She was just kind of socially neglected because she wasn’t part of things.

While I was learning these kids, we got new students. Several of them.

One child had been in foster care for several years. She had a history of lying and stealing. She wasn’t allowed to carry a backpack. Her foster parents had removed everything from her bedroom except her mattress. At home she would have meltdowns and break things. At school, that didn’t happen. She was friendly, but tried to make friends by lying and giving gifts, which were often things she had stolen from somewhere. She didn’t have the skills to recognize who would be a good friend, and how to engage with them authentically.

Another kiddo had frequent meltdowns due to anxiety. He was always afraid of getting in trouble, failing a test, being seen as stupid. It was challenging to keep him in the land of positive thinking.

And one more for good measure. This kiddo had been removed from his class for kids with intellectual disabilities because of his behavior. He was moved into my classroom because I had somehow developed a reputation for being really good with my kids. He was physically and verbally aggressive. He was very attention-seeking. He didn’t seem to care what the other kids thought of him. I couldn’t identify a single kid in the school who wanted to play with him. My predominant memory of this kiddo is the time I was sitting on the floor reading a book to the kids, and he came up behind me and put me in a chokehold.

And there was the student whose family was actively involved with CPS. He was angry and aggressive. But also anxious and craving affection. He was well-liked by most kids, but they were also afraid of him and his outbursts.

The last child in our classroom was the kindest, sweetest, most respectful child when he was on his medication. Everyone who knew him wondered why he was in my class. When there was no transportation to the pharmacy and he ran out of medication, he was agitated, spiteful, loud, mean, impulsive, and bouncing off the walls. He was not allowed to leave my classroom on those days because I knew he would get himself in trouble. When he was medicated, he spent most of his time outside of my classroom.

On an island

So here I was with these kids. And everyone expected me to know what to do because this is what I was hired for. This is what I went to grad school for. This is what I was getting paid for.

I also encountered challenges with my co-workers. Yes, we were all teaching kids every day, but my kids were DIFFERENT. My kids attracted a lot of attention. My kids sometimes caused problems with other kids.

No one was ever outright rude about it, but there were always questions.

“Why was M yelling on the playground today?”

“What got into Z? I saw him on the floor in the hallway.”

“I said hello to M and she ignored me. Aren’t you working on her social skills?”

“I know A likes coming to my class for science, but it’s hard when he can’t work with the other kids. I’m not sure how much longer he can stay.”

Not only did I feel frustrated and ineffective, I also felt very lonely.

So I did what most of us do when we don’t know what we are doing, but we really want to: I started spending time and money trying to figure it out.

Throughout my 15-year career in the school system, this is what I spent most of my time doing. Buying programs. Attending conferences. Watching videos. Reading books. Buying resources. Making activities. Following people online who made activities. Buying their stuff. Making more stuff. Learning more stuff.

I bet this sounds familiar.

If you feel:

Unsupported

Disconnected

Discouraged

Like you don’t know what you’re doing or why you were gifted with this child

or have experienced:

A research frenzy regarding your child and their struggles

Trying all the things

Buying all the resources

Taking all the classes

Scheduling all the appointments

Signing up for all the activities

Still not sure your child is getting the help they need

You are on the Social Skills Spiral.

Just like I was.

The Social Skills Spiral

I have to admit I spent YEARS on the Social Skills Spiral. Years. Most of us do.

I spent thousands of dollars on programs, curriculums, books, activities, conferences, trainings, etc. Lots of money and lots of time spent trying to figure out how to help my kids be more successful.

It was frustrating. And exhausting. And expensive. And worst of all, it wasn’t always effective.

I would try things I’d learned, and they would work for one student but not another. Or they would work in one situation but not the next. I was constantly making level systems and point sheets and reward programs. Sometimes they worked, sometimes they didn’t. They worked for half the kids, and not the other half.

I also made some mistakes. Implementing picture schedules that caused kids to be MORE rigid. Trying to be the authority for kids with social anxiety, causing them to retreat even more. Teaching scripts to kids who were well-liked, causing them to be robotic. Using social stories for kids who just wanted to find all the holes and the ‘yeah, but’s.

I’m sure you feel my frustration.

If you are on the Social Skills Spiral like I was, I guarantee you are trying to implement programs/strategies that actually cause your child to struggle MORE when it comes to making friends, without even realizing it!

I did it, too. For a long time.

The ‘Expert’

After 3 years in that classroom with those amazing kids, we had some real results.

Some of the kids moved away during that time, so I don’t know all their outcomes. I was able to get the two boys who didn’t really need behavioral support into academic support classes and out of the behavior program before they went to middle school.

I was able to significantly improve the behavior of the two kids who were aggressive as well as the friendships for the student who had a history of lying and stealing.

But I also knew there were so many things that hadn’t improved. And there were so many mistakes I made along the way. And there were kids who had moved before I was able to really help them.

I went on to become a specialist and a consultant. Now I was teaching people how to support our kids. But I still felt like a bit of a fraud. I still felt like I hadn’t really cracked it.

I found one program liked more than all the others, and I clung to it for several years. It’s what I was using when I opened Starfish Social Club in 2016.

But over time (several years, actually) I realized that this program was also focused on social compliance. While it wasn’t as obvious as the traditional social programs where they literally tell kids what to do and what not to do, it also had an underlying concept of certain behaviors being ‘right or wrong’, ‘good or bad’. Even the language used promoted the concept of what’s socially typical and what isn’t.

Now I know better!

Here’s the good news: I finally figured out how to crack the code. It’s what I do every day now with the students in my program. It’s what has allowed several of my students to advance to becoming teaching assistants in my program, where they actually get paid to support other kids! Even though some of them started out as my most challenging kids.

I’m about to open registration for my new program, which teaches parents and teachers how to identify and teach strategies that ACTUALLY WORK for their kids and students. Even if you are a teacher like I was with multiple students. Or a parent who has more than one kiddo with social learning challenges. You’ve already realized they are different from each other!

Update: This program is no longer available. Please visit www.StarfishSocialClub.org to learn more about our current programs.

On the next episode, I’m diving into my ‘how it’s going’ story. We’ll talk a lot more about the things WE have to work through to be able to move forward with our kiddos and all the things I am now able to help our kids learn and grow based on what I’ve been able to shift in my own thinking. I’m really excited to be able to share this journey with you! I’ll see you then!