Five-Week Summer Program Boosts Social Skills in Young Autistic Children, Study Finds

A five-week intensive summer intervention developed by researchers at the Institute for Autism Research at the University at Buffalo produced measurable gains in social performance among autistic children between the ages of four and six who do not have intellectual disability, according to a pilot study published in July in the journal Advances in Neurodevelopmental Disorders. The program, called summerMAXyc, adapted the structure of a long-running intervention for older children and packed skill instruction, cooperative play and self-regulation practice into six-hour days, five days a week. The findings arrive at a moment when clinicians and families are increasingly focused on the earliest possible window for building the social foundations that shape long-term developmental trajectories.

The study was led by Christopher J. Lopata, PsyD, and Marcus L. Thomeer, PhD, co-founders and co-directors of the Institute for Autism Research and professors of pediatrics in the Jacobs School of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences at UB. According to Lopata, completion of the five-week summerMAXyc program was associated with significant social, behavioral and autism symptom benefits for the children who took part. He argues that developing such foundational skills early in development sets the stage for the acquisition of more advanced abilities later in childhood, adolescence and adulthood, which in turn can lead to better long-term outcomes across school, work and community settings.

The rationale for targeting this particular age group rests on a well-documented service gap. Thomeer notes that although programs for autistic children ages four to six without intellectual disability do exist, very few provide intensive social programming of the kind delivered in the summer model. The population also tends to participate in significantly fewer group recreational activities than their peers without autism, a disparity that further limits opportunities for social development during a period when such opportunities matter most. In the researchers’ view, this constitutes a significant gap in social intervention development and service provision, and it was the direct motivation for designing a program tailored to younger children rather than simply lowering the age range of an existing curriculum without adaptation.

The structure of summerMAXyc reflects a deliberate engineering of practice opportunities. Each six-hour day was divided into eight cycles of thirty minutes. Every cycle began with roughly ten minutes of explicit instruction in a specific skill, such as how to hold a conversation or how to accept consequences, followed by a twenty-minute cooperative activity in which the children could immediately apply what they had just been taught. This tight pairing of instruction and application is consistent with evidence-based teaching models in which new skills are modeled, rehearsed and reinforced in naturalistic group contexts rather than taught in isolation. Over five weeks, the schedule generated a high density of guided social exchanges, repeated across varied activities and peers, which the researchers consider central to the program’s effects.

The intervention inherits its design from summerMAX, the institute’s evidence-based summer program for older children, which has been refined over twenty-three years and has helped improve the social skills of hundreds of participants. Translating that model downward in age required attention to the developmental capacities of four-to-six-year-olds, including shorter attention spans, emerging emotion-regulation abilities and the need for concrete, teachable coping strategies. One such strategy illustrates the approach: children are taught to squeeze an imaginary orange while taking a deep breath in order to calm themselves. The technique surfaced in a striking way outside the program itself, when the mother of one participant reported that her child not only noticed that she was frustrated but instructed her to squeeze the orange, suggesting that the self-regulation lessons were generalizing from the classroom to family life.

Satisfaction data from the pilot were notably high. The children rated the program an average of 14.9 out of a possible 15, describing it as fun and reporting that it helped them learn skills and make new friends. Parent satisfaction averaged 69.8 out of a possible 70. Parents reported significant improvement in their children’s social skills, behaviors and autism symptoms over the course of participation. Thomeer says family members began to notice changes that extended beyond structured settings: children who had previously played alone were observed playing with others, making eye contact, asking about other people, playing games without becoming upset, and recognizing and understanding different emotions. These everyday markers, he suggests, are often what parents notice first and value most.

Parents, in fact, are frequently the first to recognize the need for intervention. Thomeer describes families reaching out because their child has difficulty navigating the social world, describing autistic children who want to have friends but do not know what to do in social situations. That gap between social motivation and social know-how is a common clinical profile in young autistic children without intellectual disability, and it underscores why interventions that teach explicit, rehearsable skills may be particularly well suited to this group. The broad consensus in the field that earlier intervention is associated with better outcomes lends additional weight to programs designed specifically for the preschool and early elementary years.

One of the study’s major methodological strengths was its use of objective observers to assess the children’s social performance. Lopata explains that while parents are a critical source of information, there is an inherent risk of bias because they know their children are receiving an intervention. Most social skills intervention studies for autistic children rely on parent ratings alone and therefore carry this limitation. To address it, the research team employed masked observers, trained individuals who were unaware that the children had received an intervention, thereby eliminating expectancy effects from the behavioral assessments. This design choice gives the pilot findings a degree of objectivity that is uncommon in early-phase social skills research and strengthens the case for the larger trial the team now plans.

Equally notable was the consistency of the results across individual differences. The authors report that the intervention was similarly successful in improving social performance and autism features regardless of a child’s age, IQ level, communication ability or level of diagnostic symptoms. That pattern is significant because the field widely recognizes that no single intervention will be effective for all autistic children, and there is a pressing need to determine which children are most likely to benefit from a given approach. Lopata argues that answering this question helps ensure that scarce resources are allocated efficiently and that the children enrolled in a specific intervention are those most likely to gain from it. In a pilot study, uniform responsiveness across subgroups is an encouraging signal, though confirming it requires larger and more controlled samples.

The next step for the research team is to test the intervention in a large-scale randomized clinical trial with a control group, which would be the first such trial for a social intervention of this kind in this population. A randomized controlled design would allow the researchers to separate the effects of the program itself from maturation, concurrent therapies and other environmental influences, and to examine outcomes with the statistical power that a pilot cannot provide. For now, the pilot offers an evidence-informed template for early social intervention: explicit skill instruction, immediate cooperative practice, embedded self-regulation training and objective outcome measurement, delivered at an intensity that matches the developmental urgency of the early childhood years. If the forthcoming trial confirms the pilot’s results, summer programs of this design could become a practical and scalable option for families seeking to support their young autistic children’s social development during the critical years before formal schooling accelerates social demands.

Subject of Research: A pilot study of an intensive summer social skills intervention for young autistic children ages 4-6 without intellectual disability.

Article Title: Autistic children ages 4-6 showed improved social skills after summer program conducted by UB’s Institute for Autism Research

Article References: Autistic children ages 4-6 showed improved social skills after summer program conducted by UB’s Institute for Autism Research. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: autism, social skills intervention, early childhood, summerMAXyc, University at Buffalo, Institute for Autism Research, Advances in Neurodevelopmental Disorders, randomized clinical trial, self-regulation, parent satisfaction, masked observers, developmental outcomes