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[quote=Anonymous]DS (13) is ADHD, never got a ASD diagnosis but has a lot of personality quirks like ASD.

He's always struggled with new people, situations he wasn't anticipating etc. Even as a baby or toddler, putting him into a setting with new people was when he was at his worst - completely discombobulated, badly behaved, didn't apply social norms.  In our own house, he's polite and in control.

We've worked on certain situations - like if someone is coming to house, tell him he's expected to shake hands, make eye contact.  He doesn't pull it off quite like NT kids (darting eye contact, slouchy) but he makes a good effort and it's close enough.  He's also quite good in restaurants with servers (eye contact, clear voice etc) because we've done training on expectations.

But when we're not expecting a scenario, his behavior is unacceptable.  He started a new summer camp yesterday that is a cool program run through the county courts. He really really wanted to do this camp so was excited in the lead up.  Kids have a dress code etc.  But when i dropped him off, i was so embarrassed by his behavior.  He was slouchy, no eye contact, having big rude yawns while we were doing sign in.  I know DS, and these are his 'social anxiety 101' symptoms. He's not perfect in our home life, but he's certainly a lot better than that. Even the yawning is like an involuntary stress response, but then his body language surrounding the whole thing is so rude.  The other kids were all coming in shaking hands, etc even if they were visably nervous. DS's behavior came across as straight up rude, not nervous. We came down on him hard that night, told him expectations, why this matters, etc. Today was better.

For what it's worth, he comes across very quirky and social inept, but he actually fails a lot of ASD criteria because he understands a lot of social requirements, but is just simply indifferent to them.  He's indifferent to having deep friends (prefers books and ideas) so he doesn't care about impressions, body language, hair, clothes.

Does anyone have any ideas for where a SN kid can build these skills like learning about body language, impressions, etc?  Is something like cotillion my best bet? Or would that be cruel and unusual for a SN ASD kid because all the other kids are rich snoots (or maybe I watched too many 80s movies)?  Or is this just a thing that mom and dad have to keep drilling into him? Are there smaller group settings to work on these skills?  I imagine if i drop him into a big program with lots of kids, the problems are just exacerbated?

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