Teaching Your Child Play Skills | Autism Play Activities & Social Play Skills

Dr. Mary Barbera covers how to teach play skills, specifically autism play activities and social play skills. Teaching your child play skills is critical to developing leisure activities, so don’t miss this video!

Play skills development can be difficult in children with autism, especially if they end up becoming stim activities. Play skills are crucial in a child’s leisure skills, but social skills through play can also be developed which help increase language. In general, there are two types of play skills: independent play skills and social play skills. In my experience as a behavior analyst and autism mom, I’ve often seen other skills developed through play which really show how impactful play skills can be to children with autism.

If you’ve been stuck teaching play skills to your child or client with autism, I’m confident that some of the strategies I provide in this video can help you make some progress. And if you’re looking for more information or extra help on teaching play to kids with autism, I encourage you to sign up for one of my free workshops. Autism play skills are vital to avoid a child from becoming rote with toys, and helping a child reach their fullest potential to be as independent, happy, and safe as possible.

Subscribe on Facebook for more free resources:

Watch my video on activity schedules here:

If you enjoyed this video about play therapy for autism and teaching social play skills, be sure to subscribe to the channel, like this video and visit my website below. If you have more questions, leave them down in the comments section, and I will do my best to answer you. Thanks for watching today's video blog, and let's #turnautismaround together!

Interested in learning more about teaching a child with autism, special needs parenting, or other autism and special needs topics in the mental health in children niche?

You can also connect with us at:

Dr. Mary Barbera. I fell into the autism world as an autism mom in 1999 when her first-born son, Lucas, was diagnosed with autism. Since then, she became a Board-Certified Behavior Analyst and best-selling author of The Verbal Behavior Approach. Since 2015, she’s created 3 autism online courses based on applied behavior analysis for professionals and "gung-ho" parents. Whether you’re looking for autism parenting strategies, working with development delays in children, or in search of autism help for professionals, I can encourage you to subscribe to the channel and join me on my journey. I’ll be providing weekly autism resources that you don’t want to miss.

[jaimecohen]

I’m a behavior therapist and I work with the little ones and I use this all the time!! The activity schedules are great, thanks so much for the video!

[blessedbeyondmeasure]

I am happy I found this I am working with a three year old who just places the toys between his fingers

[kanikadubey]

From the very initial days your videos helped me a lot.. thank you so much mary❤

[insaneprophet]

I am 22 yrs old and I am a play partner for a grandmother and mother duo for their 20yr old daughter who has severe autism with asbergers. I have them helping them out for a few months now with playdates and activities and now they want me to talk to their therapist to get me to change my appearance to a younger version of myself to make the daughter feel more comfortable and open up more around her.. Is this right??

[catinaclaytor]

With the pandemic virus going around there is no social play at all and children can't attend the local autism center for ABA

[ofrsghu]

What is independent stim/stem time? Not sure what wording was used in the video and unsure of what was meant by this

[pramz]

Mam, thanks for your videos, they are very nicely explained.
1.I want to ask what to do if a child is not ready to leave the toy even when time is up
2. How to teach a child to play with the toy like sitting in a toy car instead of just rotating the wheels
Thank you

[balaramireddysathi]

Explain about speech regression i mean my boy stopped his words an communication after his 2nd year, now he talks for his needs not for communication he can make sentence but only whenhe need, he is not answering somerimes, help me mam