As a parent of a child with a disability, you have likely already come across the idea of social stories or social scripts as narratives that illustrate various situations and how best to handle them. Maybe a teacher or behaviorist made a script or story for your child, or maybe a therapist suggested you try a social story to address a particular behavior. The use of social stories in social and emotional education and in behavior management is an evidence-supported practice.
But perhaps you’ve never thought about social stories being “invented.” Undivided sat down with Carol Gray, the widely respected creator, or “keeper,” of Social Stories™, to discuss how she developed the practice and how parents and educators can use Social Stories (with some attention to possible pitfalls). Gray provides regular training on the practice of writing and using Social Stories.
If you are unfamiliar with the concept, social stories are commonly used to help children understand events taking place in their lives as well as social norms and how to interact with the world around them. For example, situations such as going to the dentist or getting a haircut; learning new routines such as dinner time or bath time; preparing for upcoming events such as a field trip, family vacation, or a new school; learning about safety and boundaries; and even Santa Claus!
A social story is a simple book individually created for a particular child that addresses a social convention that they may find challenging. Social stories are usually less than 10 pages and can even be a single page. They are often printed on regular paper and stapled to create a “book,” but they can also be stored as a PDF and opened on an iPad, computer, or other device. There are also some apps you can use to quickly create social stories. Children can read the social story themselves, or you can read the social story with your child. In many cases, children want to look at the story repeatedly. Because social stories are illustrated, even children who aren’t yet reading can benefit from “reading” the story to themselves over and over, using the pictures to help them narrate to themselves the story.
Social scripts vs. a Social Story™
While Carol Gray has trademarked the term Social Story™ to designate the specific stories created using her standards, you’ve probably noticed the terms “social stories” and “social scripts” also being used to describe the general concept we just described in the previous section. Note that "social stories" and “social scripts” aren’t actually interchangeable with Gray’s Social Story™. Many speech therapists, teachers, and behaviorists use social scripts or stories in their practice, but from Gray’s point of view, they are not all Social Stories™ because they do not always conform to her principles.
When we consider research studies using Gray’s Social Stories to demonstrate their effectiveness, we must remember that those studies do not provide evidence for the use of scripts that don’t conform to Gray’s standards. Gray’s concerns for the misuse of her concept led her to trademark the term Social Stories so that if a script does not conform to her principles, it is possible to say that it is not a Social Story. Gray is concerned with preserving the quality of Social Stories, which is why she trademarked the term. In this article, we will mostly be speaking of Gray’s Social Stories, but may occasionally reference social stories or scripts in a more general sense.
It is the quality of Social Stories that Gray is interested in preserving. On her Carol’s Club website, anyone with an email address can join for free to access a library of Social Stories. On her website, in addition to explaining the history of her development of the process and use of Social Stories, Team Social Stories offers a number of sample Social Stories — a great place to start out if you are developing one of your own.
“Double empathy” in writing a Social Story
For Gray, the development process for each individualized story is more important than the way the story is used because within the first part of development, the adult is seeking to understand the social situation or context from the child’s perspective. This in itself opens up their understanding of the challenges that neurodiversity brings. Writing a Social Story in effect becomes an exercise in double empathy, which is the idea that “autistic people experience the world and express emotions differently to non-autistic people. We communicate, experience and display emotions, interact with others, form relationships, and sense the world around us, differently to non-autistics. That doesn’t mean that we don’t have emotions or feel empathy. But it makes it difficult for non-autistic people to understand and to empathize with us. And us with them,” according to Dr. Damian Milton, an academic and father with autism.
This means that authors of Social Stories need to not only understand the thinking and feelings behind the child’s response, but also try to understand how our responses are understood by the child. Often, this process of discovery in itself is sufficient to change the adult’s approach to the child’s response.
Gray tells us, “A Social Story is defined as both a process and a product.” She finds that people mistakenly focus on the story, “[b]ut there is a defined process that precedes and follows through the entire development and implementation of the story. What Social Stories do is they help to eliminate some of the common mistakes that we as adults make when we communicate with autistic children. It helps to eliminate that probability, not by changing the behavior of the person with autism but changing the behavior of the adults who are attempting to develop the Social Story. It's like riding a bicycle. It's difficult at first, then you do it without thinking. After that, after some practice, it's great.”
Gray developed Social Stories while working with children with autism as a teacher and as an inclusion specialist. She noticed that for many children, their behaviors often were logical responses to a situation from the child’s perspective, even sometimes in line with what they had been taught to do by behaviorists, teachers, therapists, etc.
Gray had worked with a student named Eric for many years on repeatedly interrupting others. As a teen, Eric was included in general education settings but still had a tendency to interrupt. Gray and Eric were reviewing a video of a school assembly with 500 kids and an invited speaker. The speaker came in and talked about change, and Eric shouted out his dislike for change, disrupting the whole assembly. Gray realized that when talking about who was present, Eric mentioned only the speaker and himself. Eric was using the rules of conversation as taught to him. In the context of a two-way conversation, Eric’s response was polite rather than rude.
Gray remembers thinking, “He's doing exactly what I taught him to do at age four. And that is: when somebody talks to you, you answer. I forgot to teach him the relevance of the other people in the room. Context is critically important to being social. And as a result, I realized I have to do things differently.”
Eric wrote down some rules on a paper list, such as “raise your hand,” and from then on, he began raising his hand in class instead of interrupting. Eric’s experience gave Gray the idea to try it with another child being included in general education by writing “social packets” for him to understand things like the recess schedule, standing in line, and playground games.
Understanding the impact of social context on our behavior is the root of the success of Gray’s Social Stories. Often, a behavior (or “response,” Gray’s preferred term) might be acceptable in one social situation but not in another. Many neurotypical people learn these social rules quickly by picking up on social cues around them and almost seem to need no instruction. But children with autism, for example, often need explicit instruction on how social context impacts the rules of behavior.
Who are Social Stories for?
Although Gray developed Social Stories as a tool for teaching children with autism about behavioral expectations, the process also works for many other children with cognitive disabilities and even young children without disabilities who may need explicit instruction about a social situation. The key in creating the individualized story is the process of seeking to understand how the child perceives the situation and what Information might be missing (or challenging to them about the situation) in their perception. For children with autism, it may be the context of a situation. For children with intellectual disabilities or Down syndrome, it may be their knowledge of the world or how to communicate with others.
Many children with disabilities spend much of their time in classrooms and programs in which typical social norms are not practiced, so they lack opportunities as well as sometimes cognitive skills to make inferences about social norms. A Social Story can provide explicit instruction to help the child navigate the situation, but first the adult has to know what information the child is missing that provides cues to others how to behave.
Carol Gray started developing Social Story Guidelines in 1991. Over three decades, Gray has periodically revised her process and guidelines in pace with her ongoing research and experience of how social stories have worked in practice. Gray has responded to critiques of behavior intervention, such as ABA, from the adult autistic community, some of whom experienced social skills instruction as an attempt to eradicate their neurodiversity.
Gray explains, “Now we have adults who grew up with ‘social stories,’ and in talking with them, they've discovered that a lot of the stories that they were presented with were not Social Stories at all. We have learned from their experience as well. A lot of people don't realize that for it to be a Social Story, half of all the stories that you write on behalf of any person have to apply to what the person currently does well. You cannot continually present somebody with new information.”
The later iterations of Social Stories are neurodiversity-affirming and explicitly rule out stories that try to change behavior only from the adult’s perspective. Gray calls this a philosophy of “social humility,” which has been the foundation for Social Stories since their introduction and is now set out explicitly in the criteria.
Gray has created a list of 10 principles to guide you through writing a Social Story. Anyone can follow the principles and write a Social Story, but Gray herself says that parents write the best Social Stories and often are the most faithful to the principles.
The philosophy of social humility has five elements. We must recognize that:
The definition of a Social Story also guides the process: “Recognizing that every human experience and perspective is unique and valid, and that social impairments and their solutions are shared, a Social Story accurately describes a personally relevant topic (often a context, skill, achievement, or concept) according to 10 defining criteria. These criteria guide story research, development, and implementation to ensure an overall patient and supportive quality and a format, voice, content, and learning experience that is descriptive, meaningful, respectful, and physically, socially, and emotionally safe for the audience (a child, adolescent, or adult).“
Goal One is ”to ensure that the intended message remains intact from Author to Audience.”
The creation of each Social Story begins with gathering relevant information about the present understanding of the audience (the child, teen, or adult the story is being written for) and the most critical focus of the story.
It's always a two-step process:
For many of us, this remains the challenge. Gray often explains her process through examples. Gray explains how important the information-gathering process is with the story of how she developed “The Garbage Book:”
There are many ways to gather information from the child and it can be unique to your child and their communication preferences. For example, Gray talks to the child about their experience, asks open-ended questions, and often asks the child to draw their feelings or experience. The key is to work out what information the child is missing, which then becomes the topic of the Social Story.
For many of Gray’s best stories, the topic isn’t always obvious, or ends up being something different than what the writer originally may have wanted to address. Understanding the child’s perspective often leads to new insights and approaches that draw on the child’s strength, such as curiosity. For example, Gray’s Social Story on trying new foods uses the example of a paleontologist using scientific methods to learn about dinosaurs (available in Carol’s Club for free).
A Social Story has one title, a maximum of two types of sentences, and three parts.
It’s important to understand the difference between descriptive sentences and coaching sentences:
Authors tailor each Social Story format to the abilities, attention span, learning style, and, whenever possible, talents and interests of the audience.
Gray’s Social Stories have a patient and supportive voice and vocabulary defined by five factors:
Social Stories never use second-person “you” statements. If the author uses second-person statements, they run the risk of writing a script that tells the child how to respond. Many teachers and behaviorists see this as the point of the social script — to explain the “replacement behavior” to the child, such as “You must not run away” or “You must stand in line with your class.” However, this is not something that should be in a Social Story.
Gray also points out that second-person statements can come across as dictating what the person should do. “What we discovered in practice, and from stories that were sent to us very early on, was that the ‘you’ statements tend to harbor our assumptions. And…it’s not helpful, because I can't think of anybody who likes to be told what to do. And so, I'm not going to, for some reason, assume that a person who is autistic would want to be told what to do — that would be silly.”
A Social Story answers relevant “WH-” questions that describe the context, including:
A minimum of 50% of any Social Story developed for a child should praise what the child does well. Social Stories make celebration a habit!
A Social Story that celebrates:
In every Social Story, descriptive sentences appear at least three times as often as coaching sentences, with a maximum of one sentence per story that coaches the audience. This formula ensures that every Social Story describes more than directs.
Every Social Story is reviewed and revised until it meets the 10 Social Story criteria.
The guides to implementation ensure that social humility and the 10 criteria that guide story development are consistent with the story’s introduction and review over time.
Social Stories are also very effective in explaining to children about crises and emergency situations. For example, Carol’s Club includes a wonderful Social Story that was designed to talk to kids about Covid-19 during the pandemic. For many kids, the situation was very scary, involving a lot of change overnight. The Social Story introduced a wonderful way to make sure children had the facts they needed and some coaching about an appropriate response.
Writing a Social Story can be a response to many questions or challenges in a child’s life, such as starting a new school or having a parent be away for a week. Although you might want to hurry the process, it is most important to spend time gathering information and really exploring how the child perceives the context. Only then can your story be written with social humility.
Gray’s Social Story Sampler also has a number of interesting variations on a social story, including a way of talking about what it means to be autistic and stories on safety, tragedies, discovery of Self and Others, and Advanced Concepts.
Now that we've learned all about Carol Gray's guidelines, follow along as we create our very own story — with a template and a sample.
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