Children, Youth and Adults with Asperger Syndrome: Integrating Multiple Perspectives

Leon Sloman and Jonathan Leef

Children with Asperger Syndrome (AS) have difficulty coping with many social aspects of daily life. Although some social skills group interventions have improved the communication skills of children and adolescents with AS (Mesibov 1984; Williams 1989; Ozonoff and Miller 1995; Howlin and Yates 1999), the quality of their social interaction has not shown significant improvement (Gillberg 1991; Bowler 1992; Greenway 2000; Klin and Volkmar 2000). Recently, Krasny and colleagues (2003) agreed that such interventions fail to significantly improve the social disabilities of children with AS.

We hypothesized that a more effective treatment would comprise concurrent groups for children with AS and their parents, with good two-way communication between the groups. Moreover, we believe that when designing interventions for latency children and young adolescents with AS, it is necessary to consider the defining features of this syndrome, as well as the individual characteristics of each child. Understanding and targeting the child's deficits is essential for designing successful interventions. We use a systems approach (Sloman and Konstantareas

1 We wish to thank Margot Nelles for initiating this program, and the group leaders
Carol Nelles, Ian Roth, Elaine Schiller, and Greg Riley, as well as the numerous staff,
students, and volunteers who participated in the groups. These groups were a joint
venture between the Aspergers Society of Ontario and the Centre for Addiction and
Mental Health.

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