The Complete Summer Social Skills Protocol for Autistic Kids

If you've read "Why Summer Playdates Are So Hard for Autistic Kids," you understand the three mechanisms: peer unpredictability, the masking cost, and script failure. You know why 12-minute playdates end in meltdowns. You know why comparing your child to the neighbors makes everything harder. What the free article couldn't include is what to actually build — the architecture of a playdate your child can succeed at, the week-by-week curriculum for building social capacity over the summer, the exact scripts for the eight most common breakdown moments, the decompression protocol for after every interaction, and the communication kit for when playdates aren't happening yet. This guide is all of that. If you have one summer, this is the protocol.