Growing Portland business teaches social skills to young people with autism.
Businesses run on deliverables. For emerging Portland training company IRL Social Skills, deliverables look a little different.
They include, for instance, the boy who proudly reports he’s now making friends at school. And the girl who reached out to an old friend when she sensed the friend needed help.
Three and a half years ago, Chicago-area native Mara McLoughlin founded a unique business in Oregon focused on teaching social skills to young people with autism and others struggling to make connections. The business offers parent-mediated skills coaching through curriculum backed by research from UCLA and taught entirely via Zoom.
A speech pathologist, McLoughlin began her career working with nonverbal autistic students and later focused on socially struggling students. Her skills coaching idea has quickly proven popular. Today, IRL now offers a range of programming including a 16-week class for teens and young adults. The program’s reach has spread from five families to 90, reflecting to McLoughlin a clear need that schools can’t meet.
IRL has now been recognized two years in a row by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. McLoughlin hopes the acclaim will help IRL spread its reach and improve social skills training around the country. To that end, IRL now takes insurance, making the brand more accessible to a wider audience. McLoughlin aims to scale further by training more providers and offering locally based programs focused on building relationships and partnerships.
McLoughlin, 53, spoke this month with Oregon Business about the loneliness epidemic, common misconceptions about autism and how we could all use a little coaching.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
First of all, I want to use the proper terminology. Is it, “autism spectrum disorder”?
I always just say autism or autistic. It doesn’t help anyone to say “autism spectrum disorder” like there’s something wrong with you. There’s nothing wrong with you. You don’t need to be fixed. You’re not broken, you know? You have a different operating system.
This is an area that’s gotten a lot more focus recently. What do you attribute that to? It seems like either more people have the condition now, or maybe there’s more awareness of it. You tell me.
It’s both. There’s more awareness. Identification is getting a lot better. And by the way, the criteria in the DSM is based on little white boys, and that leaves out a lot of people. Girls are woefully undiagnosed and misdiagnosed. Same with people of color. They’re not getting identified and therefore they’re not getting services.
What’s the scope of programming you offer?
So we teach people ages 11 and up. Teens and young adults and their parents. This is a parent-mediated program, meaning parents also participate and learn how to be effective social coaches for their teens and young adults.
In addition to that, we started getting a lot of calls from older adults. They might be married or they have a job but they don’t have friends and they don’t know how to make friends. It’s the loneliness epidemic. So we wrote our own curriculum and we started to serve them. I just started a new adult program last night. It’s full.
Is it harder to do this over Zoom? I assume it’s harder to pick up cues.
Cameras have to be on because 80% of communication is nonverbal, right? We want to be able to see how our instruction is landing. What’s their face doing? It can actually be a really beneficial interface for our clients, because of the sensory component of autism.
When you go to a new, unfamiliar place, there are different smells, different sights. It can be a lot for the sensory system to take in. And we know that autism, as a disability, involves challenges with sensory processing, social interaction and social communication.
And the research bears this out. The program that we teach for teens and young adults is based on the UCLA Program for the Education and Enrichment of Relational Skills. It’s recognized as the only research-backed social skills program available for teens and young adults. It uses a social-relational approach. It’s not a behavioral approach. Autism is not a behavior. It’s a neurotype that’s been around for a while and has distinct evolutionary advantages and challenges.
It’s taught in 150 countries in 12 different languages. And in the research, they compared providing the intervention via Zoom to archival data, and they found the exact same outcomes on all of the measures and on some of the measures, even better (outcomes).
What do parents tell you they learn more than anything else?
That it’s lonely for parents. They have a child who is developing atypically. They see their child struggling socially. The child has never had a sleepover. They’re eating lunch alone. They’ve never been invited to a birthday party. These are big deals and it’s painful for parents, because parents want to help their kids. But the apple doesn’t fall far, right? So a lot of parents don’t know how to help them.
Our classes teach parents the skills to be effective social coaches using a Socratic method of inquiry. They learn to ask, like, what could be the problem with not responding to a text from your friend? They learn to ask questions in a way to draw out the answers.
This is hard stuff, and being with other parents who actually get it — it’s the empathy of the shared experience. Autism is very misunderstood. This is not a support group, per se, but it is very supportive.
How much do courses cost?
The 16-week program is $4,398. And we take insurance. Insurance has been covering 50 to 100% of the cost. We take OHP. We are vendored with the Oregon Department of Vocational Rehabilitation because this is workforce development.
So it’s been three years, you have 12 employees and a range of programs. That’s pretty wild. Was the goal always to get to this point?
This was the goal. I knew there was a huge need for this — an ocean of need. And 90 minutes a month on an (individualized education plan) for a student doesn’t cut it, not nearly.
And most people want to work with the littles, right? But we get older and the social demands of life increase, but services decrease. Middle school is just ground zero for the social milieu, and what worked for an autistic student in grade school does not work in middle school. Like sharing toys — that’s not happening. Relationships are more based in conversation. That’s the developmental shift that happens at the middle school level.
What does success look like for you? Do you have some success stories you could share?
There are so, so many. Just last night in one of our programs there was a girl around 11 years old and her parents told us that they encouraged her to reach out to an old classmate who now goes to a different middle school. And it’s a rough transition to middle school.
So the girl did the hard thing and was brave and she reached out to this old classmate. And the old classmate was like, “I’m so glad you reached out. I’m having a really hard time.” They were crying. And when you share that experience, that makes you closer. So now they’re planning to have a get-together.
A lot of people come to us and they don’t have any friends, or they used to have friends and they lost their whole friend group. Some were bullied so severely, they got pulled out of school. Some have had several suicide attempts. So this is serious, and success means that our clients realize, “I’m not for everyone, and everyone’s not for me. Cool people get me.” Because you know, autistic people are very cool.
I wanted to ask about that. Some people say autism is like a superpower or that because of this condition, autistic people have aptitude in other areas. What are your thoughts?
Well, I wouldn’t call it a superpower. I mean, it can be. But it can also be a significant disability. And it’s a spectrum, right?
At the beginning of this interview, I said there’s distinct evolutionary advantages to the neurotype. Visual-spatial skills are off the charts, typically, for autistic people. In that regard, most autistic people are actually really smart, even the ones who can’t speak. A lot of people don’t realize that.
It’s part of why I started this business, because I wanted to work with cool people all the time. And now I get to.
What are some of the other big misconceptions?
That they don’t want friends. I mean, come on, who doesn’t want friends? Give me a break. We are humans and humans are social.
Is your instruction different at all for boys and girls?
That’s a good question. It is not but we know that girls and boys do it differently. And every single class, we have a trans person. So we’re mindful of that.
We talk about, for instance, how banter is kind of a more male thing to do. It’s like teasing but it can be risky, right? Because feelings can get hurt with stuff like “your mama” jokes. That kind of stuff can get out of hand, and sometimes our folks struggle with sarcasm. They think like, “Are they serious, or are they kidding?”
We say, you have to pay attention. Are they looking at you? Are they talking to you? Are they facing you, or are they giving you the cold shoulder? Are they rolling their eyes at you? Are they looking at other people and laughing? You know, what is happening?
Do you have programming about dating?
We teach four classes on dating etiquette, and I could really do an entire 16-week program on it. Dating is super complicated: Letting someone know you like them. Asking someone on a date. Going on a date. Then there are dating do’s and don’ts, a lot of which is around consent.
A lot of times, people start to engage in what could be referred to as stalking. But they’re not trying to be a stalker. There might not be any nefarious intent behind it. They are trying to connect and they don’t know how. So you have to directly, explicitly teach them.
Is your programming much different from what you’d teach any young person? I imagine everybody could benefit from some of this.
I wish that everyone took our program. Really. It would be an awesome reset, because there’s been a devolution of our social skills. We hear that in school cafeterias, it’s now ghostly quiet. Because they just don’t know how to have conversations — how to ask a question, then ask a followup question. Or how to make a comment or give a compliment.
I mean, everyone can use these skills. How many times have you been in a situation like a work event, where people don’t know each other that well? You want to have some skills in your back pocket because you don’t want to have to sit there and talk about the weather the whole time. People want to have interesting conversations.
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