Just to be clear, despite the title, I’m not questioning the idea that social skills are real or useful.

No, instead I’m asking why social skills are useful.  What is their purpose?

It’s not a pointless or stupid question, because I can think of at least a couple of good answers:

1. They are useful for building and maintaining friendships, social connections that are valuable because of their inherent worth; or
2. They are useful for instrumental social interactions: for use in job interviews, networking, discussions with coworkers, office/workplace politics, and so forth.

Generally speaking, today, we tend to incline towards purpose (1).  That’s understandable, because most social skills interventions target kids, who are often socially isolated.  The more instrumental uses of social skills might seem like something for the future.

However, I’m going to question that dominance of purpose (1) just a little.  I’ve said before, and I’ll say again, that often building social connections doesn’t so much require learning new skills as it does finding the right peer group.  We especially don’t want to try and change who we are in order to fit in with peers: if they won’t accept us for who we are, perhaps they aren’t the right peer group for us.  I think being in the right group can even help us learn social skills through practice, whether that group happens to include neurotypical people or autistic people.

Now, don’t get me wrong here.  I know some autistic people can genuinely struggle to understand how social interactions work that some explicit social teaching can be helpful in those cases!  Some scaffolded social practice can also be great.  Social skills training is therefore valuable, and some of that probably should focus on maintaining social connections – I certainly know some autistic people who are difficult to get along with and who could probably have benefited from some social skills teaching.

But for other people, for those who have already mastered these basics, changing the peer group could be a better solution for building meaningful social connections.  Further developing the social skills one would use in adulthood, however, could be handy even for these individuals.  (As long as we don’t make social skills training replace job experience, because getting early job experience is really important.  It’s real-life social practice!)  Thus, we might want to set up different social skills group models, varying in the degree to which they focus on purpose (1) or (2), for individuals at different levels.

Furthermore, we can also try to make social skills groups a place of autistic community.  That’s very different from the current reality.  As we said before, social skills groups are often focused on building social connections by changing the autistic person.  They tend to be run by neurotypical interventionists.  Often, they bring in neurotypical peers – and I’ve already argued that autistic people can sometimes learn social skills more easily from other autistic people.  Instead of just having neurotypical peers, why not also/instead bring in some older autistic people, either “graduates” of the social skills group or people from the community?  Instead of just teaching social skills, why not also use social skills groups to teach students about autism, about the history of the autistic community, and about the neurodiversity paradigm?

As with many things, I think running a social skills group is all about finding the right balance, and there’s many factors that go into that balance.  Unfortunately, I believe we haven’t found the balance yet.