Our daughter has high functioning autism. Her struggles include challenges with peers in social settings. Before finding Xcite Steps our child’s needs and challenges were that she had difficulty in maintaining on topic conversations with peers and establishing and maintaining friendships. We initially heard about Xcite Steps at a vendor booth at San Diego Autism Society’s Splash for Cash fundraiser.

Our initial experience with getting to know our program was I spoke with Matt and Stephan at the booth and later had follow-up meetings with Matt and Pam at our home. We liked the objectives of the program andthe quality of mentors hired to administer the program. We were looking for a social setting where our daughter could experience peer social outings and conversations. We liked the aspect of the mentors helping the kids to initiate conversations and other social interactions. We are involved in social groups on Saturdays, one on one mentoring, camp and sports. There are not any groups in San Diego that take high functioning pre-teens to develop social skills.

I would recommend this to another family for their high functioning child to help develop social skills. Our daughter loves the outings – especially the mentors. I think it makes her feel like she belongs to a group of friends and she loves the various activities that change from week to week.She always says that she had a good time and seems to be very happy and relaxed when we pick her up after an outing. I think her social skills and appropriate behavior in social situations have improved. She had to stop the Saturday meetings last Spring when she started swimming and her biggest complaint was missing Pam.

I think Xcite Steps has a good reputation but are still largely unknown by a majority of the community. I do think Xcite should split their groups into different levels of functioning and maybe incorporate some typical peers into the higher functioning groups. There are, most likely, high school students who would be willing to volunteer to incorporate on their college resumes.

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