Unbelievable Autism Support: Minecraft for Social Skills

So today is exciting if you’ve got a young person age between say eight and about 18 and they have autism and you’re looking to help them build their social skills well this is exactly for you so pretty much um Minecraft is a tool it’s one of many tools but it’s an amazing

Tool helping young people with Autism develop the confidence to interact socially with others and enjoy the process of doing it because there’s ways that your child can just play computer games and literally waste half the day or there’s something like a Minecraft social skills group where they can play

Computer games and they can enjoy hang out with others and they can build their skills for hanging out with others so what’s that look like well long story short is I work for dozens of children who play um Minecraft while they sit on Zoom okay Zoom being able to see and

Hear each other and chat with each other and together they build things you know like um this week we’ll be building like you know a big castle and other weeks we’ve built say an airport or we’ve built I don’t know like a theme park and

So what what our young people do is they get together and they can see each other on on zoom and they’ve got their Leaders with them because we we’ve always got a couple of leaders there who are helping them to make sure we’re saying nice things to each other using friendly

Voices and and that we’re encouraging each other and together we build stuff and it’s great fun and it and it builds social skills now how does this why is this particularly good for people who have autism it’s good because um when you have autism and you don’t always

Know what the social norms are what the social rules are so a lot of young people have a lot of anxiety around being social because they’re like how do I conduct myself you know what what should I be doing um how do I fit in what if people don’t like me well the

The good thing about playing Minecraft together while you’re on Zoom so you can see each other so half your screen to Minecraft or a bit bit over half and then the rest of your screen is zoom so you’re seeing each other’s faces and you’re reading each other’s faces and

You’re listening to each other’s voices um that part of magic is that you’ve got a shared goal like our goal is we’re building a giant house today or our goal is you know we’re building a water park so you’ve got a shared goal you’ve got a reason for being there and then you’ve

Also got a shared topic of conversation so one of the things that holds back young people who have autism with um building friendships is they don’t always know what to say to someone that’s that’s going to be about a topic they want to talk about and themselves

Want to talk about as well like what do we talk about well and and what would I say well if you’re playing Minecraft together and together you’re building you’re saying things like oh we need more we need more materials for the roof does anyone have more materials for the

Roof or what color should should we make the windows you know do we make them plain clear glass or do we make them a different color so we’ve got a a reason for being there we’ve got shared goals and we’ve got a reason for having conversations and obviously you’re going

To have some issues where one person wants to build the build it out of red bricks someone else wants to build out of brown bricks you’re going to have those conversations and that’s where your leaders come in and and they help with that so let’s have a look at this

Why Minecraft for building social skills in young people who have autism I think it is probably the most it’s the second most powerful way I know of helping someone develop social skills um the first most powerful way the most powerful way is to equip someone with explicitly taught social

Skills in formulas for each different type of social situation they encounter which say secret agent Society or peers um social skills course they’re both evidence-based courses they’re going to to literally show your child social formulas that work in the real world and that’s great that’s the most powerful

Way of helping a young person develop social skills the second most powerful way is to put them in a situation ation where they cannot fail it’s not possible to fail so if together we’re building a house it’s not possible to fail we’re going to get the result the house may

Not look like we anticipate it’ll look like but we’ll get there and then we’ll feel a sense of pride in ourselves we we’ll feel like ah that was fun and and I I could do that so there’s right ways and wrong ways how do you make Minecraft

Social well the first thing is you’re going to need to work with people who understand autism who understand how to build social skills and who have your your child’s best interests at heart so what that doesn’t look like is just jump on any server on the internet and hope

That things will go well because it won’t uh your child will get excluded or spoken nasly to or bullied or people don’t get your child they’re not on your child’s side they’re they’re there for themselves that’s not how to do it instead you need a a separate space like

We for example we have our own server that we use for our Minecraft groups and on our own server we have our own staff all of whom are keen and excited about helping your young person build their social skills because Minecraft is just the tool who cares about the tool what

We’re actually here for the goal is build our social skills but we don’t get that without the tool okay so you need you need a separate area where young people can play you need people matched by ability Minecraft ability um you don’t want someone who’s never played before building with someone who’s a

Total expert otherwise they’re going to feel silly you you need leaders who um who understand how Minecraft works but way more than that they understand how young people learn social SK skills and understand that don’t just expect um this young person to learn by osmosis instead like don’t expect them to learn

By just watching others and then magically internalizing the formulas that’s not how most young people with Autism learn instead they learn by here in this situation here are the steps you know how to how to start a conversation you know how to ask someone what their

Opinion is and be okay about what their answer is even if it’s different from yours okay so let’s go through some Q&A of what what parents and what professionals ask asking us I mean it was less than a week ago I was working with eight speech therapists and showing

Them how to do this and they were so excited um and because just because you’re a speech therapist or a psychologist or an occupation therapist um doesn’t mean that you’ve got a playground for young people to work in you might be able to teach them the skills but then they need a playground

To practice in and that’s where something like Minecraft A Minecraft social skills group can come into its own so the first thing we need to do is we need to make sure that the adults um the leaders have a way of helping young people regulate their emotions because

Kids will get excited and they will also get upset very easily when when they’re emotionally attached to what they’re building so I see we see that a lot say if two young people are building houses side by side one person will get really upset hey he’s building too close to my

House I wanted to put a pool there and now I’ve got no space for a pool okay well in a Minecraft social skills group we get our our Tech Guys our um our young men and ladies who are good at you know Minecraft world to press a few

Buttons and it moves that person’s house over so oh we’re okay we’ve got space again to build the pool fantastic um so but you need the adult moderators there to make it work and then and then as well as that you need to have zoom running because you can’t

Just rely on people’s voices what’ll happen is if you don’t have zoom running so you can see each other so you can chat with each other so you can see each other’s um faces what you’ll end up with is basically an impersonal situ sitation where everyone’s building for themselves

That’s not teamwork that’s not helpful so you must have zoom running and um with zoom you want your cameras on so you can see each other’s faces you can read each other okay the other thing is kids will and young people and young adults will build friendships by

Interacting on Zoom by seeing each other they won’t just be talking Minecraft they’ll be doing things like hey here’s some Lego that I built the other day or go get your dog oh here’s my dog and everyone’s like oh cute dog awesome dog let’s go back to building the house it’s

It’s building a community it’s building friendships you know because really what are friendships it’s people who have something in common that they like to get together and talk together well that’s that’s exactly what um Minecraft social groups can do so um the magic of

It is like what do you need you need all the things that I’ve talked about before you also especially need adults who get what’s the point of being here your Mom is not going to be equipped to do it okay one you doesn’t understand Minecraft chances are she doesn’t

Understand Minecraft but two um not every child listens to their mom don’t know if you’ve noticed but that’s not how the real world works so will children get upset yes they will um and we deal with that now sometimes kids get really upset occasionally there’s tears or whatever the magic of using Zoom

Rooms is that you can just you just press a few buttons and that person who’s feeling really upset can be in a different Zoom room where they’re not seeing whoever it was that they’re upset with and you put them in a different group with a couple of other young

People instead and they keep building they can decompress they can deescalate and then once they’re feeling okay once the problem’s been solved usually it’s a it’s a problem that you know someone was building too close to me or or whatever was a problem your Tech Guys fix a

Problem and then they can go back to be with their with their group so do people get upset yes they do do we deal with that yes we do is that part of building emotional regulation skills yes it is because we’re not we we’re definitely here to help young people build their

Social skills but it’s also building our emotional regulation skills to be able to handle when someone wants something different to what you want and to be able to talk that through with them with the leader they’re going yeah I think what Jimmy’s saying is he likes red too

But he thinks that the brown will go better with this color of the trees do you reckon we could let him have it this time and then next time we we’ll make we’ll make the garage part of it um red you know it’s it’s like there sort of

Negotiations so that we can handle our emotions we’re like okay that’s fair we’ll go with that because again with autism you often have a very strong sense of personal Justice it’s not just it’s not right is what what things often feel like to a young person with autism

And to be able to to have an adult help you negotiate things through helps you now there are times where we’re super excited we’re super loud you know because we’re excited that’s okay the leaders can help our young people to just press a few buttons on their audio

And suddenly their volume drops easy or just get them to move their microphone a little bit further away from their mouth because um some of the other young people with Autism are going to be triggered by like high volume of um of someone’s voice um another another thing that we look at

Is um why insist on zoom while we while we’re playing Minecraft zoom is what builds relationships otherwise we’re just playing Minecraft zoom is what lets us see each other hear each other um that builds relationships another thing that builds relationships within a Minecraft social skills group is that

You want you know young people coming at the same time each week to their to their session so they can be with their same group they can know their leaders most of our kids have got two or three leaders in their little mini group of say you know three or four young people

Okay so we’ve got and then we’ve got they get to know the tech support people there’s a there’s a lot of us adults there um and but for our young people they just think oh I’m looking forward to turning up I get to see my leader Sebastian and my leader will and my

Leader Michael oh and I get to work with Jesse and Kevin and um and JMA you know like look forward to seeing those people because I’ve built with them before I know them they know me they’re always nice to me okay there’s something magic about that but it starts with having

Zoom going okay um quick Q&A someone asked us how did you get this started how did you come with the idea of using Minecraft to build social skills it was actually a couple of years ago back in lockdown we were doing um secret agent Society with

Primary school kids and we do um peers um social skills course for high schoolers and for people in young people in the workforce but we were doing these social skills courses and it was fantastic for our young people but in lockdown they didn’t have a a place to

Practice those skills that’s when we started doing it in Minecraft and then it just took off from there and it’s expanded at a massive Pace because for me a young person who doesn’t love computer games um find me a young person with autism who doesn’t want to make

Friends if they’re in an environment that’s conducive to it you know so pretty straightforward um a lot of well actually when I was working with those eight speech therapists last week um they’re asking you know so how do we use this you know because we all know that

When it comes to helping a young person with autism develop their social skills they’re going to need to spend their time learning the social formulas not just being thrown into a playground so what we do is each week we have a different theme um sorry a different

Social skills theme we’ve got a building theme we’re building a house we’re building castles or we’re building a theme park that’s the building theme but we’ve also got the social skills theme so the social SK skills theme might be different ways we can negotiate you know

How to negotiate for an outcome that you and others are happy with or the social skill might be how to express your own opinion even if it’s a bit different from what others would think okay or the social skill might be um how to say no

To someone but to say it politely no I don’t really want to build the house um near the hills I want to build it I want to build it over near near the the river um and and here’s the reason why you think maybe we could do that you know

Just just gently um expressing ourselves so we’ve got a social skills curriculum that we cover that last of a couple of months but by the end of it our young people have have been looking at things like you know how do I say yes how do I

Say no how do I accept other people’s opinions how do I handle it when other people um are actually completely disagreeing with me like how do I handle that you know um how do I have conversations around topics that other people want to talk about in other words

How do I have a conversation how do I not make the conversation all about a monologue of what I love to talk about because that’s not building friendship skills so we we’ve got a social skills curriculum that makes sense um but really the big benefit of Minecraft

Social skills group is that it’s a playground where children can use their social skills that they’ve been learning with their psychologist their occupational therapist or speech therapist or where they they can use their social skills they’ve been learning in say the peers course or the secret Society course or they can use

The social skills that their teacher at school’s been trying to teach them uh I want to go through a few other questions people ask one of them is and this is very much a mom’s question it’s a valid question um I hear it from a lot of Ms

Isn’t Minecraft dark and and nasty actually and a couple of dads of us have have been like that as well um so moms and dads parents concerned isn’t Minecraft dark and nasty aren’t you going around killing stuff it’s like whoa hold on it’s not it’s not like that

Minecraft is a Lego playground okay there’s two types of Minecraft there’s survival Minecraft where you can have you know go and you know kill the baddies sort of thing um which is pretty low level If we’re honest but anyway um and then there’s creative Minecraft where it’s basically like have a billion

Lego blocks go and build stuff okay Lego is where almost all of our sorry Lego creative that’s like Lego is where almost all of our young people start and then as they start to get a bit tired of that then we introduce them to like um

Play like team games in that happen in the survival Minecraft long story short is Minecraft dark and evil no it’s it’s Lego Lego on a computer um here’s another one that we get asked but hold on how do you know that that my my child is safe when they’re playing Minecraft with others

It’s like well you don’t know that if your child is just on some random server somewhere in the world surrounded by people you’ve never met that’s not conducive you want somewhere separated from that in a in its own environment like all of our Minecraft children children and teens and young adults they

Play on our server where only our people are allowed to be only our young people and and our leaders can be there it’s it’s safe it’s protected uh because the world is full of people who don’t have your child’s best interests at heart you want them to have a great outcome so you

Need the right people around you another one is like hold on isn’t it antisocial to be playing computer games instead of like out in the real world well you have to meet young people where they’re at I mean some of the people look there’s a young lady who we work

With who she came onto Minecraft it was her first social experience in a long time she hadn’t left the house in over a year um except for like the most basic of Basics she just stayed home the whole time so for her getting on Minecraft and

On Zoom that was a big step for her you know um she she even turned a camera on the very first day that she came you know a lot of those conversations weren’t even about Minecraft they were about pets and um I don’t know like M favorite bands and favorite TV shows and

Stuff because Minecraft is remember it’s not about Minecraft it’s the tool to create conversations so the idea that you know it’s antisocial it’s like it’s not antisocial we’re talking all the time you know we’re chatting with each other that makes it social and someone else’s ideal idea of the perfect world

For young people with Autism is out there in the real world talking to people that is a very intimidating Prospect for a lot of young people and they’ve met with a real lack of success in that in the past so this is a place where they can rebuild their their social

Confidence um what else another question people ask is well okay so I get using Minecraft as the playground and zooms interact with each other um does it actually work to build um interpersonal skills does it work to build friendship skills um I can tell you straight out

Yes yes yes and yes and even say my own son he’s been doing the Minecraft groups for over a year now which is a very long time and in that time he’s gone from being a young man who can’t express his own opinions very quiet answer you with

Three-word answers to being a young guy who he will Express his opinions he’ll be straight about it he will negotiate he will he will um spark conversations like he’ll say things like oh you know um Johnny tell me like what do you building there you know or he’ll say do

You need help that’s one of the skills that we equip our young people with is is to say people oh do you need a hand with that is there anyone here who needs a hand so people can say yeah can you help me with this you know it’s building

Those skills so my own son I’ve seen it in my own son you know gaining so much confidence gaining like just learning to be himself and be brave you know I I really love that and I know that he’s got that from largely I mean who knows what where he

Got all those skills but a lot of it was from every single week hang out with his little crew of guys with his couple of leaders thank you will thank you Sebastian if if you’re ever watching this um thank you Lonnie thank you um um Patrick like thank you to all you people

Who’ve worked with my son and who continue to work with my son because I can see the impact um another question people ask is are the skills that are learned in Minecraft social skills group transferable to the real world well yes they are as per what I was just

Describing with my son he’s an example but the reason they’re transferable to the real world is that they are real world skills because once you’ve got Zoom running you’ve got Minecraft you’ve got Zoom you’re seeing each other you’re talking to each other that is living in

The real world it wouldn’t be that if you were just playing Minecraft in isolation or if you were I don’t know typing to each other in the chat or something okay so there’s something there’s something really cool about hang out with each other from the safety of your own home

Where you’re relaxed where if you do get a bit escalated the leader can say go get your dog we’d love we’ love to see your dog again we’ve missed seeing your dog and you can just reset that way there’s something really healthy about that it is real world and and so the

Reason the skills are transferable to the real world is that you’re seeing each other you’re hearing each other it is real world okay now um another question people often want to know is how do you handle meltdowns so remember a meltdown in autism world is when someone’s

Emotions have just got so big that they can’t handle it and they will just like Let Let Go their emotions with either an looks like an outburst like they’re just they’re like ra you know really upset they they might be growling at someone or or telling them off or losing the

Plot a bit is what it looks like um or a meltdown can be internal where not going not exploding at the world out there but exploding at myself like oh I’m such an idiot oh everyone hates me I can’t believe I stuff that up so badly and

Just like on this Perpetual cycle of self-destruction so we we need to keep in mind that a meltdown is not a tantrum a lot of people confuse meltdowns or Tantrums a tantrum is when a child is manipulating a situation to get what they want that is not a meltdown a

Meltdown for someone with autism a meltdown is when their emotions are just getting so big they can’t handle those emotions so how do we deal with that like I said before we can just switch which group young people are in sometimes a young person will just um

Sit with say two of our Tech Team and build with them for a couple of minutes while they fix whatever was the issue um meltdowns happen because emotions happen and part of building our skills is that is that you know like the the technical stuff is you’re in the zone of proximal

Development you know you’re in that spot where your skills are being pushed meltdowns are okay you know sometimes we’ll find mom or dad and be like hey can you just um just just take can you just take Jesse out for for a drink of water and just a quick reset and bring

Him back in five or 10 minutes when he’s deescalate a bit because he’s struggling and we want him to have a really positive experience um so I guess there’s also a lot of teamwork there working closely with parents making sure that young people get what they need um

Another question someone asked that I want to look at is the question is I thought you need a systematic approach to teaching social skills this doesn’t sound systematic so it is true you need a systematic approach to teach social skills the systematic approach being this this social situation here’s what

We do here’s a social formulas for it that social situation here’s the social formulas for it for example going to the pool what do I do I I take my tow in my my gear and I hang out with other people while I’m there and if I’m if I’m

Feeling a bit bored I can get out of the pool I can go and get an ice block or whatever from the the Cante there the little mini shop it’s like social skills for that environment great okay with in Minecraft the social skills are going to be um transferable but

They’re they’re going to be systematic because it might not be skills for the pool it’ll be skills for how do I start a conversation skills next week might be how do I continue Contin your conversation skills the following week might be say how do I ask open questions

About topics that other people want to talk about so you’ve you’ve got um a very systematic uh social skills thing there but it’s just not um location based um trying to keep things super transferable I hope I’ve answered that question um someone else has asked look

There’s a lot of social groups in the world Minecraft being one of them another social skills group that amazing skills um that we do is is an art social skills group it’s not about the art it’s about the social skills where we do art or the Lego social skills group you know

It’s not about the Lego it’s about hanging out with each other and we build Lego while we hang out because the goal is to build social skills so it’s like well what sort of what sort of person is the Minecraft social skills group best for is for someone who loves Minecraft

Or who loves computer games and they’re happy to learn Minecraft and it’s for someone with autism who needs to develop their social skills and develop their emotional regulation skills so it’s like we have to remember it’s it’s pretty much for anyone who’s happy to use Minecraft as the topic the shared topic

That we’re going to be chatting about now that’s no difference from you or I as parents if we go and say watch our young P our own child play soccer where they’re on the sideline with other parents we can talk to them about soccer and about the soccer game because we’ve

Obviously got that in common okay so in Minecraft social skills group what you’ve got in common is we love building stuff and we’re building something right now okay um let’s have a look at the next question oh how do I get my child involved if my child is resistant okay

So um sometimes we’ll find that young people will be a little bit resistant to doing their first session of Minecraft because they don’t know how to play and that’s that’s valid because no one there’s not many people I know who have autism who want to step into the realm

Of the unknown with others and feel silly so what we do in that spot is that we’ll get one of our um our Tech Team and one of our technical support team to build alongside your young person for a little while um so that we might have

Your young person with say Patrick and lannie okay and she and he like Patrick and lannie will be working with your with your child they’ll be teaching them what buttons to use and then they’ll put them in a group that um has is building using very basic skills so that can be a

Reason to be resistant is oh I haven’t played it before another reason to be resistant um trying to think what’s another reason to be resistant would be if if your young son or daughter had maybe um an experience that was hard you know they built they built a house

Someone built too close to them they felt upset and if that wasn’t resolved well you know like sometimes if if a young person is having a meltdown outwardly it’s really easy to see we can solve that sometimes the meltdowns going inwardly I hate these people well they

Hate me I don’t belong here that those sort of thoughts can go across someone’s mind and if we’re not aware of that until you know Mom sends us an email a bit later or sends us a text or gives us a call and goes oh he he really felt

Excluded well like I did not know that let me fix that for him and then the following week we’ll make sure that or at his next session we’ll make sure before he even gets on the leaders know um he he had a rough time last time he

Wasn’t coping we’ll make sure he’s with a group of people who are building something non-controversial where um it’s only that first five minutes needs to be positive and then they’re back in the zone so I guess you’re seeing the picture that we work really really hard to make sure that

Young people have a great time and we work really hard to make sure that um that when things don’t go right because never in the history of the world have you had a group of young people with Autism and everything just went right like they’re learning social

Skills things will go off track and things will need to be brought back on track but you’re seeing how much work goes in behind it and that sort of work it’s like that’s why you can’t just put your child onto some Minecraft server somewhere in the world and hope for the

Best like we work so diligently to make make sure that every child gets what they need and there are so many things that we need to do to make that work it’s not going to happen by chance um and then if I if I look at all

This it’s it’s like one more question parents ask is is it a waste of time to be playing computer games absolutely not in fact it’s so important you catch this that idea that my child playing computer games is a waste of their time and a

Waste of their life is not the truth the truth is if all your child does is play computer games yes it’s a waste of their life but if if playing a computer game is a tool is a key to your child developing their social skills wow what an opportunity I mean my

Goodness me I I know that um I remember talking to a psychologist about this um a while ago that it’s just amazing that there can be a group where young people would want to go and develop their skills because you ask any psychologist it’s not always like that with the in

The realm of you know one-on-one sort of psychology it the young people don’t always want to be there but my goodness young people do want to be at at Minecraft and they do want to um they do want to be able to experience that success you know so when people say oh

But my child plays computer games he plays too much computer games you know that’s that’s such a waste of his life firstly if your child is sitting on the computer playing games by themselves it possibly isn’t the best use of their time but at least they’re feeling successful at something they’re

Developing their sense of oh I can do things because when you think about it most computer games whether it’s Minecraft or something else are a series of small goals small achievable goals yep that’s goal one tick done that’s goal two yep tick done and that sense of success because you’re young person

Probably goes to school or work doesn’t feel successful feels hassled feels isolated feels like not even wanted sometimes and then they come home and then they’re playing computer games for that experience of success so we don’t want to take that off them you know so the idea that computer games

Are a waste of time not true computer games are a place where you’re young person can have a lot of fun and and have some success but compared compare that though to a social skills group with a common interest of a computer game where they’re following a social skills curriculum and building their

Skills and building their confidence and experiencing friendship because the the the thing is it’s like in the real world you might not have friends but in Minecraft social skills group your friends are right there you may only see them during Minecraft social skills group but they’re still your friends

You’re experiencing friendship and once you’ve experienced what friendship is then you can more easily go after that and and do that in the real world well if you have any other questions let us know um please have a look in the down the bottom of this in the description

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If you’re in the rest of the world like UK or wherever you are it’s amazing skills. org all right keep being amazing parents and professionals who are watching this keep being amazing I appreciate the work you’re doing and last night if there’s anything else we can do to help you