Autistic teens helped into adulthood at Los Angeles-based Spark Social Club, from dancing and make-up to dating and sex
- Natalia Geldin felt there were few social opportunities for her autistic 15-year-old daughter so she created the Spark Social Club
- The Los Angeles-based club helps autistic teenagers make friends, explore new relationships and navigate young adulthood on their own terms
Being a teenager is hard, but for autistic kids on the cusp of adulthood, teenage years can be excruciating. Those same challenges that make being a teenager difficult for everyone – making and keeping friends, experimenting with relationships, navigating a burgeoning sexuality, and contending with the often cruel judgments of their peers – are even more daunting for autistic teens.
Their specific challenges, such as difficulties communicating verbally and non-verbally and in reading social cues, can put them at a serious disadvantage on the perpetually shaky grounds of adolescence.
A new programme based in Los Angeles hopes to address those challenges. Called the Spark Social Club, it gives autistic teenagers the tools they need to make friends, explore new relationships and navigate their young adulthood on their own terms.
Characteristics typical of people with autism include a need for consistency, routine, and order; difficulties in understanding and expressing language as used in typical communication, both verbal and non-verbal; and difficulties in understanding and expressing typical social interaction, according to the US-based Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN).
It is these challenges that Natalia Geldin, a sexuality educator, community organiser and social practice artist, hoped to address when she founded Spark in partnership with the Foothill Autism Alliance in Southern California.
“I started creating and hosting community events for teens on the spectrum about four years ago because I felt there were few social opportunities for my autistic 15-year-old daughter Sophia, who is non-speaking, uses AAC [augmentative and alternative communication] and needs a high level of direct support to navigate through her daily life,” Geldin explains.
Geldin envisioned Spark as a series of workshops that would help autistic teens learn basic social skills, culminating in a dance where they could spend time with new friends, put into practice the skills they had learned and, most of all, have fun.