Three moments from an ordinary Tuesday, because "trauma-informed" should mean something you can picture.
Cooking is the excuse; the lesson is everything around it — dividing jobs, asking for the spatula, waiting for a turn at the stove.
Board games are picked because someone will lose. Handling that moment — with support, among friends — is the whole curriculum.
Two group members swap favorite games and agree to bring one next week. Nobody prompted it. That’s the win we write down.
The right fit matters more to us than a full roster. If we're not it, we'll help you find who is.
Real activities, real peers — the skills hide inside the fun.
Group starts with actual small talk — the skill everyone claims is easy and isn’t.
The group decides the activity order. Negotiating that is half the curriculum.
Cooking, a tournament, a project — jobs divided, turns taken, help requested.
Someone loses, something spills, plans change. Practicing that moment among friends is why we’re here.
For older groups, community outings: ordering at a counter, job-adjacent skills, and making plans with friends — and keeping them.
Swapping games, trading numbers, planning next week — connection that leaves the building.
Each member names one win from the session. Theirs, not ours.
Group-based social skills instruction is an established evidence-based practice for autistic children, teens, and young adults — identified as such by the National Clearinghouse on Autism Evidence & Practice. The short version of the research: social skills are learnable, and they’re best learned with real peers. No invented statistics and no guarantees — just practice that looks like life.
Pick your plan. We'll tell you right now — no form, no callback needed for this part.
That criticism is real, and much of it describes practices we reject: planned ignoring of distress, extinguishing harmless stimming, goals chosen without the child. Here, sessions move at your child's pace, a child's "no" changes what we do, stimming isn't a treatment target unless it causes harm, and you can watch any session, any time. We wrote a whole page on this — Why Trauma-Informed ABA — and the best answer is to come tour the center and meet us yourself.
No — and we take the question seriously, because autistic adults have described the cost of a lifetime of performing: exhaustion, anxiety, losing track of who you are. That’s what masking is — suppressing yourself to imitate neurotypical behavior — and it’s not on our curriculum. What we teach are skills the young person chooses because they want what the skill unlocks: joining a game, keeping a friend, ordering food, getting through a group project. Stimming is fine here. Scripted eye contact isn’t a target. “Act normal” is not a goal and never will be — autistic ways of socializing are valid ways of socializing. How to verify: ask your young person what they’re working on and why. If they don’t know, or the answer is about pleasing others rather than something they want — call us on it. We mean that.
Groups are banded by age and stage — kids with kids, teens with teens, young adults with young adults — and matched so every member has peers they can genuinely connect with.
Groups are small, run by therapists, and structured so nobody sinks. Hard moments are planned for and supported — they’re the curriculum, not an accident.
No — social skills groups are open as a standalone service. Many members come just for group. Call us and we’ll find the right one.
Ours are — Nevada Medicaid and most of the plans we accept cover social skills groups as part of ABA services. We’ll verify your specific benefits before anything starts.
Yes — anytime, unannounced. Cameras run in every room during all hours, and parents are welcome to observe in person, or watch the live feed from our in-center family room. The cameras aren’t accessible over the internet — by design. We built it this way on purpose: trust you can verify beats trust we ask for.
Clinically reviewed by Kathryn Mahan, M.S., BCBA, LBA
No pressure — just a clear path. Here's exactly what happens when you reach out:
