By Lynn McCann author of Stories that Explain *Social Stories are a Trademark of Carol Gray https://carolgraysocialstories.com As an autism specialist teacher, I have been writing social stories for over 15 years. But I’m the first to admit that social stories can be ineffective, damaging and even dangerous. The trouble is that many people have heard about Social Stories and mistakenly think they are a tool to sort out misbehaviour, or to get a child to comply with something. These sort of Social Stories are ineffective because they are badly written with no reference to the actual structure and rules created by Carol Gray in the early 1990s for very good reasons.  At best you might have wasted your time and the child and the staff end up feeling that Social Stories are not worth using a tool. Sadly, badly written social stories can also seriously damage a child’s self-esteem or put them in danger.  The relationship with the adults around them can be damaged through them insisting that the child complies with something that is actually very difficult for them to do. The adults’ wrong assumptions can affect the child’s mental health and make them very vulnerable to exploitation. This is a serious matter. I would always be fair to parents and teaching staff as they are often told by educational psychologists, advisors, autism trainers that they should use Social Stories without being given any training in how to write or even choose a good one from the millions of templates there are out on the internet. Wanting to help, people might search the internet and copy something that they’ve seen online and hope that it will help the child.  Often, what they end up with is a script that breaks all the rules of how to write a good Social Story. These are some of the things that make a script not a Social Story Only talking about negative things;Using language such as must, always, you need to, you will, you must, you have toAssuming how someone will feel;A list of rules or punishments;What you must do to please somewhere else;Explaining how your actions hurt other people and blaming the person for getting it wrong;Insisting that the person understands your point of view;Insisting an autistic person behave in a typical way or trying to make them stop being themselves.  A Social Story works really well if first we understand the experience or the issue from the autistic person’s  perspective. This means we look at the situation from their experience.  This certainly ties in with Dr Damian Milton Double Empathy Theory.  We write the story in a way that acknowledges the persons perspective in an affirmative way. We use carefully chosen words to explain what we would like to help the person understand in a way that makes sense to them.  Carol Gray’s rules on sentence types allow us to do this. Following her guidance means that we can write good Social Stories consistently and be more certain that there are helpful resource, and not a waste of time.   I have written Social Stories to help autistic children and young people understand many different social situations that they found tricky or confusing. I’ve written stories that help autistic children manage many different anxieties and prepare for new experiences. The topics I have written them about, range from “what happens to poo when it goes down the toilet”, to “why we can use other people’s ideas in our writing and how that helps us know what to write”. I have written about death, loss and fears as well as celebrations, affirmations and how awesomely autistic someone is. You can write Social Stories for very young children, for those who do not use verbal language or cannot read, right through to those who can discuss and consume very complex explanations when they are written in a way that makes sense to them.  I personally write most of my Social Stories with teenagers who are trying to understand the complex world around them.  We have covered politics, gender, revision, relationships, sometimes with a huge dose of humour as we seek to reassure and celebrate the young person’s life and help them navigate through school and beyond.  Their views and aspirations are celebrated and often by this age, we write the account together so it is for them and with them.  Illustrations are chosen for the child, whether they draw them themselves or we find character pictures from their favourite computer game, take photos or use Widgit symbols.   Have you found Social Stories helpful?  Here's some free Social Stories that I have created in partnership with Widgit symbols and some others so you can see how these techniques are put into a story.  https://reachoutasc.com/resources/downloadable-resources/