The REAL reason your autistic or ADHD child struggles to make friends

This episode is all about what I call the STARFISH scale. STARFISH is an acronym, even though it didn’t start out that way.

In last week’s episode I told the Starfish story about the girl on the beach, and that’s how I came up with the name Starfish Social Club. I LOVE patterns and things becoming other things, so acronyms and number puzzles are super fun for my brain. I will sometimes play a game where I think of a random word and see if I can turn it into an acronym for something.

So this is what I was doing when I had all that free time during lockdown. I decided to see if I could turn the word ‘starfish’ into an acronym. I was actually surprised at how easily I came up with a ‘soft skill’ we teach here that fit nicely into the acronym. Soft skills are things that you don’t learn in a class or a book, but they are the skills that truly determine someone’s success in life.

To prove this point, I did a quick Google search for most important skills in life while writing this episode. Here were some of the responses: focus, self-control, perspective-taking, making connections, communicating, critical thinking, taking on challenges, and stress management. Interestingly, these are all either included in our STARFISH acronym or they are directly taught in our program, SC3 Academy! Don’t you love it when the internet validates you?!

After coming up with the STARFISH acronym, I created a 4pt scale for each letter. Ramiro and I then picked 4 Starfish Social Club students of different ages and abilities to test the accuracy of the scale. We each completed the scale independently for all 4 students, then compared our results.

Two things happened: First, we either had the same response OR we engaged in a dialogue about why our responses were different and were able to come to an agreement. Second, 3 of the 4 students we chose have been Starfish students for a few years, and we could see the growth they had made! Since what we do is pretty abstract, I’m super excited to now have a way to be able to measure progress for our kids!

So make sure you have your scale score sheet handy as I walk you through the different letters and levels. I have found that the easiest way to do this is to start with level one and build from there so if we get to a level that you realize your kiddo hasn’t reached yet, you just go back to the previous level and check off that one!

We are going to start with S for self-awareness, which is really the overall concept throughout the scale. You’ll see as we go how the other letters fall in with self-awareness. So let’s go!

You can listen to the podcast episode HERE.

You can watch this episode on YouTube here.