Save the Last Dance, audition scene
I kind of hate the above scene. It's sort of cringe and probably highly unrealistic but movies do a lot of things to try to communicate plot points to the audience that a more realistic scene wouldn't communicate.
The backstory is her mother died in a car wreck while she was at an audition if I recall correctly and she ends up moving in with her loser father, going from a big house in a very White suburb to a cramped inner city apartment and predominantly Black high school. She stops dancing, feeling like it's her fault her mother died.
She gets involved with the boy in the above scene and on the phone a friend from the old neighborhood expresses surprise that there are any White boys to date at her new school and classmates give her a hard time about "a white girl taking one of the few good men we got."
So there's a lot of social baggage here and he encourages her to resume dancing, helps her learn new moves from his inner city culture and encourages her to apply to Juilliard, her dream that she gave up on following the death of her mother. And she messes up on stage, feels unable to do this and he shows up and tells her "Ain't nobody watching you but me."
In reality, something that blunt tends to not really work but the scene captures something I would like to try to communicate about helping children with social challenges to overcome them.
My oldest son is someone I always found delightful and funny but other people find him extremely difficult to deal with. He once told me "You were the only adult in my life who saw me as HAVING problems instead of BEING a problem."
Yes, he makes me crazy too. His most common memory from early childhood was his mother facepalming or eye rolling about something he was doing and trying to figure out how to redirect him to something not so problematic.
But I also always thought he was adorable and I still do.
Before he hit school, he was something of an attention mongering clown and then he started school and didn't like the way people at school interacted with him and he made a conscious decision to stop playing to the crowd and for some years I was the only person he opened up around.
We began homeschooling when he was eleven and a frequently expressed concern about homeschooling is "But what about socialization?" And if you have a kid with social challenges like him, people get doubly concerned that if you pull them out, they will NEVER learn ANY social skills.
His school experience that year had him coming home in tears regularly and I felt this was not going to do anything for him socially. Pulling him out so he wasn't being traumatized socially was a good decision and his ability to cope with social stuff dramatically improved merely by removing him from that environment.
When he was sixteen, I started an email list called Wired for Science, which I've written about before. And for him it was a little like the audition scene above: He was writing for his mother and other people happened to be getting access to it, so he was able to be the delightful charming person I knew when no one else was around and it helped him figure out how to do that with other people if and when he feels like it.
In person, he still DECADES later barely talks to anyone but me and his brother and he doesn't do small talk with cashiers or anything like that. But online, he gets viewed as interesting and funny though he doesn't really have friends even though he does have something of a social life.
He explicitly told me that me moderating that list designed around his interests was a critical detail of him figuring out how to come out of his shell on terms that worked for him when previously he mostly only shared that with me.
I think a key detail is that I simply didn't see him as broken or whatever. I liked him and understood he had a lot of negative social experiences that drove his aversion to opening up.
Other people saw him as Aspie and difficult. I saw him as mistreated and in need of more positive social experiences to help him figure it out on his terms.
I also like this scene from Shine.