ABA Therapy and Understanding Personal Space

Children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) commonly struggle with communication and social interactions. They have particular trouble expressing themselves or understanding social norms.

Much of this can come from the fact that identifying and interpreting non-verbal cues such as body language, facial expressions and tone of voice can be challenging for children with autism. Unfortunately, this may compound some of the problems they already face due to their neurodevelopmental disorder.

A major concern for some children with ASD is understanding personal space and respecting other people’s boundaries. This can often lead to issues in forming and maintaining meaningful relationships with peers, which can compound social anxieties that they already face.

Applied behavior analysis, or ABA therapy, can help children with autism understand personal space and boundaries so they can more easily build relationships with others. Here are some ways in which this is taught.

Table Of Contents

Visual Aids

Visual aids are a big component of ABA therapy, no matter what is being taught or what strategy is being followed. It’s a very effective tool that can be used to make it easier for children with autism to understand and grasp certain concepts.

The reason why visual aids work so well is that children with ASD are often visual thinkers. In other words, they can more effectively interpret the meaning of something when it’s accompanied by a visual representation.

Pictures, videos and objects can all serve as visual aids.

In terms of teaching personal space, a good visual aid might be using colored tape on the floor to help the child define separate physical spaces. The therapist might draw squares on the floor using the colored tape, and help the child understand that their personal space is within a certain square.

Anything inside that square is someone’s personal space that needs to be respected. Space outside of that square, then, is appropriate for the child to be in when interacting with others.

Social Stories

Social stories are another effective tool that ABA therapists can use to teach a number of different skills and concepts. With this tool, skills and concepts are taught through visual stories that come to life, and often incorporate familiar things to the child.

In fact, many social stories use the real names and pictures of the child and other people they know to make them feel more comfortable. The fact that they can directly relate to the people and things in the story makes it easier for them to understand that this is a real-world situation.

Social stories can explain to children with autism what personal space is and why it’s important, how everyone has boundaries and that they need to be respected. They can also include examples of what respecting someone’s personal space looks like, as well as examples of what not respecting someone’s personal space looks like.

ABA therapists can then take the concept from social story to real-world to practice understanding social space in real-world scenarios.

Modeling

Children on the autism spectrum often do very well when they can model their behavior after someone else. By showing them how to do something, therapists are essentially providing the child with a model that they can mimic in the future.

This mimicking can serve as the first steps to actually understanding the concept, which can then be built upon in future ABA therapy sessions.

As such, modeling can be a very effective way that ABA therapy can help children with ASD understand personal space. Therapists can work in tandem with the child’s parents, for example, and show the child how they can respect someone else’s personal space.

They might also get too close to the parent on purpose to illustrate to the child what invading someone’s personal space would look like. This visual representation and acting out of scenarios gives the child a blueprint to follow for when they might be in a similar situation with others.

Skill Area	Before ABA Therapy	After ABA Therapy
Personal Space	Doesn’t understand physical boundaries	Recognizes and respects defined space using tools like visual aids
Social Interaction	Difficulty forming relationships	Builds and maintains peer relationships through modeling and stories
Understanding Cues	Misses facial expressions/body language	Begins to notice and respond appropriately with guided ABA techniques

 Children with ASD Can Learn to Respect Personal Space at Blue Gems ABA

Understanding and respecting personal space and boundaries can be challenging for children with ASD, as they might not be able to accurately identify non-verbal cues. That being said, it’s a skill that can be learned over time, following some of the ABA therapy strategies described above.

At Blue Gems ABA, we help children with autism build the essential skills necessary to improve communication and social interaction. This includes understanding personal space, which can lead to an improved ability to establish, develop and maintain meaningful personal and professional relationships.

To learn more, please contact us today.