News and Knowledge

Teaching any child safety skills is essential; but it is especially important for those with disabilities. Unfortunately, people and children with disabilities are more vulnerable to abuse. While studies exist that examine safety skill interventions for individuals with intellectual disabilities, few studies address the use of these interventions with children who have autism.

In a recent study, Teaching Children with Autism How to Respond to the Lures of Strangers, at Anadolu University in Eskisehir, Turkey, researchers Nurgul Akmanoglu and Elif Tekin-Iftar examined the use of videomodeling, graduated guidance, and community-based instruction to teach four children with autism how to respond to strangers who try to lure them away. Akmanoglu and Tekin-Iftar used teaching techniques proven effective with children who have autism spectrum disorders (ASD) and used a three-step sequence to teach this safety skill.

1. The children were shown videos of typically developing peers modeling a response to approach and lures of a stranger. The response consisted of saying “no” and walking at least five steps away from the stranger.
2. Students practiced these skills with graduated guidance from their teacher both in the clinical setting and in the community. Graduated guidance consists of prompting moving from most invasive (physical prompts) to verbal prompts and visual prompts. Students practiced the skills until they could complete the sequence with 100 percent accuracy independently.
3. Each day the students were put in a situation where they were tested. A stranger would approach the child and the child would respond with the sequence learned from the video model.

Each child in this study began the intervention with zero correct responses to an approach from a stranger. After participating in the intervention, all participants responded by saying “no” and walking away from strangers. This technique generalized to new settings and the children maintained this skill after the study, and instruction, ceased.

This is a simple method to teach stranger safety skills to children with autism that parents and teachers can use. One challenge could be finding unfamiliar adults to act as strangers when practicing the skills.
Also, while some of the participants had intellectual deficits as well as autism, they all had the prerequisite skills of waiting, distinguishing different people, imitating verbal behavior, maintaining a task for five minutes, walking independently, and following simple directions. This intervention may not work for children with more significant adaptive skill deficits.

Researchers noted that each participant needed a different number of training sessions and sessions with prompting to learn the intervention. This could make it difficult to use this strategy to teach safety skills in a group setting.

More research needs to be completed on safety skills and children with autism but this study does present some ideas that can be used by teachers and parents.

References

Akmanoglu, Nurgul and Elif Tekin-Iftar. (2011). Teaching children with autism how to respond to the lures of strangers. Autism. 15(2) 205-222.