Squag™ & The Social Frontier
This is a special post by Sara Winter, mom of two boys, a classroom aide to kids with autism and the founder of Squag.com, a new application for kids on the spectrum to connect with one another.
Loving someone with autism is a transformative experience; we all enter a new level of consciousness and are opened up in ways we never could have imagined.
I have an eleven year-old nephew on the autism spectrum. I’ve been lucky enough to be his aide at home and at school for over nine years. Being with him as he navigates his daily life has changed the way I look at everything and has deeply impacted our family from the inside out.
About two years ago, I could see that “Leo” needed autonomy from me at school; we had been together almost every day for years and although we tried everything to keep our relationship dynamic, the very function of it worked against his first steps toward independence.
I needed to do something with everything that he had taught me, and because of the way my sister had structured his program over the years, I wasn’t partial to any one therapy. My passion was creating recreational, creative, and social opportunities for kids with autism.
When Leo received a diagnosis almost ten years ago, there was no Google, Twitter or Facebook. Families were isolated by their autism with very little support. But now, social media is changing the landscape for a newly diagnosed parent by connecting them with others in real time, through mentorship, hope and shared experiences.
I decided that kids with ASD (with the involvement of their parents) should have that opportunity for this kind of connectivity too. It just made sense to me that kids on the spectrum should have a safe place online that reflected their needs and appreciated their differences.
Ironically, I was the least tech-savvy mom out there. But as I built Squag™ I got a much-needed education. Filtering through the current technology can be incredibly overwhelming for parents. Oftentimes, kids are more adept at using the computer than we are! We built SquagTM to be as easy to administer as possible; the kids’ side of the technology doesn’t work without the parental involvement and vice versa.
Most of what we see on the internet is brash and assaultive. We wanted to create a different environment: something that would help these kids regulate, self-reflect and engage in way that would empower them to build a sense of competency with the idea of friendship.
The first priority had to be security. So many different kinds of safety had to be taken into consideration. But then it became really simple: You’re not getting in unless we know you. We will take as long as we need to process your application and if we have to, kindly send you away. We plan to work with autism organizations and schools to make this process easier for those who are well intended.
These kids are capable of so much more than most people give them credit for. But we have to be able to move with them, moment to moment and what has more agility than scalable technology?
SquagTM has a matching system to help parents gives their kids a starting point with the app; they can scaffold from behind the scenes as much or as little as they like.
The launch of Squag(LITE) (our first version!) is exciting for our whole family. We love hearing from our testers from all over North America. Kids are so intuitive when it comes to technology and know exactly what they want (or don’t want!).
It is our mission to give these kids a safe place to self-reflect, create original thoughts, and reach out to their peers without being spoken for.
This is what energizes us and keeps us going.
And the best part?
This is only the beginning.
