Tag: personal space

German translation of this book

Irish translation of this book

Hebrew translation of this book

I created this resource for several reasons.

First, although there are many resources available to help children with autism to learn about personal space, the resources tend to be simple and formulaic. In my own experience helping young people on the autism spectrum to learn about personal space, the actual unwritten rules are so complicated that merely relating some simple rules isn’t good enough.

Second, there are few resources on personal space and distance designed to help older children, teens and young adults. As children on the spectrum grow up, the personal space rules affecting them get more and more complicated, especially if the young person is involved in a variety of challenging interactions in the community.

Third, I have come to view problems with getting too close as part of a spectrum of challenges that includes getting too far away. My own clients over the years who made mistakes with getting too close or inappropriately touching people also had difficulty with getting too far away from the expected social grouping.

I designed this eBook to help young people, over a wider range of ages, with a more broadly defined set of challenges involving personal space and distance.

The pictures below show some pages from the book, illustrating the wide variety of personal space problems that autistic youth are constantly under pressure to solve. The examples come from my many years of work with autistic children and teens in therapy, classrooms and especially in my ten years of running summer youth programs for teens on the spectrum.