New teaching kit to help autistic teens make friends
Two social welfare groups on Wednesday introduced a new teaching kit to help teenagers with autism make friends, saying they often find it hard to fit in.  The Family Planning Association and Wai Ji Christian Service worked together to design games and story cards that teach autistic teens to interact with others in different social scenarios. Maggie Fung, a clinical psychologist with the Christian group, said autistic children struggle to read other people’s emotions. “Their main difficulty is they don't really recognise the facial expression or the reaction from others. Therefore, they might have a lot of difficulties recognising their reaction and coming up with an appropriate response to them,” she said Chau Wai-wai, an education officer from the association, said the teaching kit helps them understand what's expected in social situations.  “With these stories shown to them, they can actually say, 'Oh, this is what people expected, this is what's going wrong.' So they can learn from seeing. They can learn from understanding,” she said. A report published by the Census and Statistics Department showed that 22,400 people are living with autism in Hong Kong as of 2020, making up 0.3 percent of the total population.