Book Review: The Social Skills Picture Book

The Social Skills Picture Book for High School and Beyond, by Dr. Jed Baker, was recommended to me by a fellow autistic person.  It\’s meant to be a kind of rudimentary \”how to\” for social skills.  Unlike most such books I\’ve read, this one is mainly pictures rather than words.  The pictures demonstrate, in the most basic way, various common social interactions and how they should go, ideally.  They include word bubbles and thought bubbles to help people understand the pictured situations better.

This was an unusual read.  The idea, I think, is to appeal to and teach more visual autistic people.  While this category does not include me, the idea itself is sound.  Teaching in pictures rather than textwalls is a very reasonable way to try to make this knowledge accessible. I didn\’t love the picture quality, or perhaps the printing quality, of the book itself.  Sometimes the pictures were hard for me to parse, though that could also be my poor visual processing capabilities shooting me in the metaphorical foot.

The implementation was, um… well, probably as good as could be expected, really.  The problem with trying to teach real life social skills is that the types of reactions, facial expressions, postures, etc, vary on the person and situation.  The pictures in this book were taken of people posing for these situations, not of actual live situations.  So as good as the intentions were, as an autistic person who has learned to interact relatively successfully, I didn\’t personally think the pictures really conveyed the kind of visual information needed to truly generalize from.  The pictured people tended to over-act their body language and use stiltedly formal verbal language (like saying \”do not\” fairly often instead of \”don\’t\”). 

Obviously, doing this can help get the point across more clearly to new students of body language, but I\’m not sure the method is good for anything other than the most basic introduction to the subject.  Which I guess could be the point?  But if so, where\’s the advanced version?  Where does someone who\’s mastered these basics go?  There\’s a great deal more to social skills than these very few situations listed in the book.

Also, despite the title, I really feel like most of the situations listed in the book are more for late elementary school to middle school, not high school and beyond.  By the time you\’re in high school, you should probably be familiar with these skills and trying to learn more advanced ones.  Which makes me wonder if the book is actually meant for middle schoolers and they\’re just being clever with psychology.  Y\’know, the \”well this is only supposed to be for the older kids, but you\’re pretty cool so we\’ll make an exception this time\” trick that younger kids and people with low self-esteem (see: most middle schoolers) eat right up because they want to feel like they\’re mature and worthy.  

About the only section I read and said \”yeah, sure, this is for high school and beyond\” is the very last one, the one that deals with interviews.  And even then, while the advice is good, it\’s very very basic.  

Honestly, reading this book reminded me of how many obnoxious nuances there are to neurotypical-handling.  It\’s not just what you say, it\’s how you say it… and it\’s not just what skills or expertise you have, it\’s how well you can put others at ease.  If there\’s one book I have yet to see in my reading, it\’s a philosophical and detailed \”autistic\’s guide to neurotypical handling\” that goes indepth about the how and why of the systems and typical reactions people have.

Which I guess is a book I could probably write, given time.  

In any case…

You want a refresher on the Very Basics of social interaction, or need to teach an autistic person the Very Basics of social interaction.  Parents, professionals, and teachers could all find a use for this book, assuming the autistic person in question is visually-inclined.  This book may be more approachable for some autistic people than others, and the pictures can help convey the concepts better than any textwall.  I loved the idea of this book, but in practice it\’s very limited, hence calling it \”Very Basics.\”