swoops across the screen, revealing a chapter heading:

"The Early Development of Social Skills."

TOM MILLER: We begin to pick up social cues

and develop social skills from birth.

I mean, the bonding of the parent and the child

develops a sense of trust, mutual respect, turn-taking,

communication, all the things that we build on

throughout our lives to enhance our social skills.

NARRATOR: Two young girls who are visually impaired

sit on the floor facing one another and play with a ball.

Sitting behind each of the girls is a teacher,

and the teachers prompt the girls to take turn.

TEACHER: Ready?

One, two, three.

MILLER: Well, if you have vision and hearing,

you develop social skills through observation, primarily.

You know, you're able to see what other people do

and begin to make judgments.

And you see things over and over again, so you see...

in the playground, you'll see kids playing games

and you'll learn the rules from your interactions,

many times just by watching,

whereas if you don't have sight or hearing,

you miss all those cues.

NARRATOR: We see several blind and visually impaired children

playing on a swingset and other playground equipment.

Social cues and how we see them relative to ourselves

or reactions of others to us

and how we react to others are really essential.

If you can't pick up on social cues, you begin to--

you'll see it in regular education, too--

you begin to lose friends, because all social relationship

is based on the ability to give feedback

and, you know, for many of us, that feedback comes visually.

So I can look at someone, they're nodding their head,

you know, I can look at them and they're sitting like this,

then, you know, I know they're not listening.

And I use those cues to interpret things all the time.

NARRATOR: In a series of photos,

we see three teenage friends who are blind

sitting on a low stone wall,

chatting with a young woman in a motorized wheelchair.

In the next photo,

a boy who is visually impaired approaches the group.

We then see him engage the girl in the wheelchair

in a conversation about the contents of a box he is holding.

I think the challenges of not learning social skills early on

and then not having them when you reach adolescence

is that you can tend to become more and more isolated.

I go into public schools all the time, and you observe--

and it can happen even at a residential school--

but you can observe isolation among students

because they don't know how to reach out to others,

or their social skills

have fallen so far behind their peer group

that they're not able to connect with them.

NARRATOR: In a photograph, we see a young boy

who is nonverbal and in a wheelchair

being introduced to a young girl in his new classroom.

The boy's interpreters are positioned

on either side of the wheelchair.

One uses tactile signing to communicate with the boy,

and the other talks to his classmate.

So I think the danger of not getting social skills early on

is that the gap gets broader, you know.

We know that if we have students here,

say, at Perkins or at other schools

that take a long time to learn something,

if we wait until adolescence to try to teach them

appropriate social skills and behaviors,

they've already lost a big chunk of time.

They'll get some skills, they'll be able to succeed,

but they've missed a lot of opportunities.

NARRATOR: Fade to black.