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This month's blog article was featured in the June 2025 issue of our digital newsletter, Aspire Wire.


By Molly Jagoda, MS, BCBA
Associate Manager, Child Services

 

Aspire Child Social Groups are opportunities for children to connect with peers with similar neurological profiles and interests, to work on skill-building in various areas and make meaningful social connections. For a lot of families, Aspire groups are where their children meet some of their first real friends. Some of the skills we work on include following a group plan, engaging in conversations with peers, self-advocacy, compromise, and engaging with novel activities. In many cases, we rely on participants’ interests to guide programming, but we always encourage participants to explore new things they may not yet know if they are interested in.

For children ages 5-7, we focus a lot on following a group plan, playing games with other people, and sharing attention. Some groups engage in more social exercises like board games, while others spend time working with manipulatives and practicing fine motor movements while engaging with preferred items alongside peers. We work with children to expand the limits of their flexibility once they are comfortable, encouraging them to collaborate with others as much as they are able. 

As participants get older, 7–9-year-olds are often still working on following a group plan and stretching their willingness to engage with less preferred or less familiar activities, topics, and games. Groups for this age range focus on get-to-know-you activities and games as well as preferred activities like crafting or baking. We give this age group a bit more opportunity to provide input around the group plan and the ability to engage in brainstorming activities to discover common interests and guide programming in a direction that interests them.

Our 9-11-year-old participants are usually ready to engage with activities with some more independence. We ensure participants can follow a group plan and strengthen skills around conversation and compromise through structured, supervised activities. At times, with this age group, we will introduce independent partner work. For example, in Collaborative Games, participants may be given a partner and asked to choose two board games to play together. Adult facilitators are present to observe and provide support when needed, encouraging compromise so that one child is not making all the decisions.

For our oldest child participants, 11-13 years, we often move toward a more independent but still highly structured model in Hangout Hub Groups, where participants may be challenged to choose leisure activities as a group and think about utilizing a small budget. Group Gaming groups leverage highly preferred video games to encourage group members to engage flexibly with preferred material to play together and practice taking turns and collaborating.

Aspire groups are always focused on emphasizing social competency, self-awareness, and stress management. Social competency is targeted in all our groups through direct teaching, consistent structure, and repetition with steady expectations. Self-awareness is targeted on a more individual basis, often using strategies like feelings check-ins or self-rating scales that may be reflected upon as a group. To work on stress management, we help our participants anticipate potential stressors, such as losing a game or the group not voting on their preferred activity, and we work with them to process their feelings when those things occur and help them react in a way that preserves their existing relationships and allows them to continue participating meaningfully.

Child group programming is one of the many services Aspire offers, and we are proud of the progress we can see our participants make in and outside of groups.