Potential Barriers to Social Interaction for Children with Complex Communication Needs

Elizabeth Biggs

10/5/2016 1:33 PM

What is seen in schools as well as the research literatureis that simply being in the same physical space often is not enough to promote meaningful, positive social interaction between children with complex communication needs and their peers. If this is the case, it is really helpful to think about why. What are some potential barriers that might be keeping this meaningful social interaction from occurring? A helpful framework is to think about three different types of barriers to social interaction among students with disabilities and their peers: (1) Intrinsic, child-focused barriers, (2) Environmental and support barriers, and (3) Peer-focused barriers. We’ll take a closer look at each.

Potential Intrinsic, Child-focused Barriers to Social Interaction with Peers: These are things that prevent or challenge social interaction with peers that are directly related to the child with the disability. We might think about these potential challenges as being related to children’s motor skills, language skills, personality, behavior, or motivation to communication or interact with peers. Much of our time as educators and service providers is spent addressing these types of challenges by doing things like ensuring children have a reliable mode of communication, building children’s language skills, tapping into children’s interests to build motivation, and addressing challenging behaviors.

Potential Environmental and Support Barriers: These are things that prevent or challenge social interaction with peers that are related to either (a) aspects of the physical environment or (b) the ways educators and other adults provide support and instruction. For example, children’s present environment may be set up in a way that children experience difficulty physically accessing materials and spaces used by students without disabilities. Students may have very few or no shared opportunities to meet, learn alongside, and get to know peers because they are always engaged in separate curriculum and instruction. Finally, an almost constant presence of adult support can definitely be a potential barrier to social interaction with peers. Many children with complex communication needs receive extensive support from an adult, such as a paraprofessional. Research has identified concern with this support model because it can lead to little social communication, few interactions with peers, and little to no opportunities for students to build relationships with peers. (For more on this, see Giangreco et al., 2005).

Potential Peer-focused Barriers: These are things that prevent of challenge social interaction with peers that are related to the attitudes, skills, and confidence of peers. The available research suggests peers without disabilities hold a broad range of attitudes toward their schoolmates with disabilities—particularly those with complex communication needs (For more on this, see Carter, Biggs, & Blustein, 2016). Peers may be nervous to talk with their schoolmate with complex communication needs, may not know their classmate would want to interact with them, or may have the interaction skills they need to support positive interaction.

So often, we might think only about the child-focused barriers to social interaction with peers, and we may be rather unaware of how potential environmental/support barriers and peer-focused barriers create challenges to meaningful, positive social interaction. Later this week, I’ll share more about important intervention elements to try to combat some of these potential barriers.

References:
Carter, E. W., Biggs, E. E., & Blustein, C. L. (2016). Relationships Matter: Addressing Stigma Among Children and Youth with Intellectual Disabilities and Their Peers. In Intellectual Disability and Stigma (pp. 149-164). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Giangreco, M. F., Yuan, S., McKenzie, B., Cameron, P., & Fialka, J. (2005). "Be careful what you wish for...": Five reasons to be concerned about the assignment of "individual" paraprofessionals. Teaching Exceptional Children, 37(5), 28.

Social,Intervention Strategies,Peers

This post is part of the collection