How to improve social skills in a child

6 Ways to Improve Your Child's Social Skills

Few things can be more frustrating than watching your child struggle to
make friends or having a difficult time fitting into certain social settings.
There are several steps parents can take to improve their child's social skills.

1. Follow Their Interests

Enjoying others will come more naturally when a child is doing something they are genuinely interested in. Whether it's participating in a favorite sport, playing an instrument they like or being part of a club they're interested in, this is the first step toward building social skills. It also places a child around like-minded individuals that the child will probably feel more at ease with. While it's important to be able to socialize with those of varying interests, starting out with other kids who like the same things is an excellent way to more easily build social skills.

2. Learn to Ask Questions

Sometimes when children get nervous or a conversation lags, they may become more introverted and ultimately struggle in future social situations. According to the Center for Development & Learning there are several ways children can initiate and carry on positive conversations with others. One important way is to ask questions. The best way to find out about others and form connections is to ask questions that specifically pertain to the person the child is talking with. Encourage your child to ask questions that can't be answered with just a yes or no.

3. Practice Role Playing

Pretend-play, with both younger and older children, is a great way for kids to actively practice their social skills. LD Online gives parents practical tips for effective role-playing. Have your child pretend to be the person they have difficulty talking to or getting along with. This will give you an idea of what this person is like, or at least how your child perceives this particular person. Then switch roles to see how your child does when pretending to interact with the person. Suggest ways your child can more effectively talk with the individual. Don't forget to include body language, such as smiling and making eye contact, when advising your child.

4. Teach Empathy

If children have a better understanding of how others feel, they are much more likely to feel connected to other people and form positive bonds. Parents suggest teaching empathy by talking about different situations and scenarios with your child. Ask how other people might feel when each of these things happen. Part of teaching empathy is to help children learn how to actively listen to others. This involves focusing on what others are saying and then thinking about what the speaker has said once the conversation is over.

5. Know Your Child's Limits

Some children are simply more social than others. A child who is shy and introverted should not be expected to interact in the same way as a child who is naturally outgoing. Some children are comfortable in large settings, while others find it easier to relate to their peers when in smaller groups. It's also important to understand a child's time limits. Younger children and those with special needs may only feel comfortable socializing for an hour or two.

6. Be a Good Role Model

It's important to be consciously aware of how you interact with others when your child is watching. Are you asking questions of others and then taking the time to actively listen? Do you show genuine empathy for friends and family in your life? The Center for Parenting Education states that being an effective role model requires conscious effort and forethought. Children are constantly watching the adults in their lives.

It's important to remember that it will take time for your child to develop good social skills. Social skills are something that are developed and improved upon over a lifetime.

13 Ways To Enhance Your Child's Social Skills And Make Friends - Friendship Circle

BY Emma Sterland

Parenting

Making friends can be a challenge for some children and adults with special needs. They may lack confidence or have difficulty developing the necessary social skills. But there are ways you can help teach your child to overcome their fears and make friends.

Friendships and social interaction are extremely important for self-esteem. But it doesn’t come naturally to everyone. Making friends takes practice, and you can help your child by rehearsing social situations and role playing ahead of time.

When you are teaching the social skills to make friendships, try breaking them down into small, easy steps. Give plenty of encouragement for each goal your child reaches.

The following tips have been contributed to Scope by parents of children and adults with special needs. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution, they may give you some ideas to help support your child in making and keeping friends. We’d also love to hear from you, so please tell us your own tips too!

1. Learning To Ask Questions

I coached my daughter in how to ask questions and make conversation by playing a role-play game with her. I pretended to be a famous reporter interviewing her about her Moshi Monsters collection. Then we’d swap characters. She actually liked being the famous reporter!

2. Picture Cards

Use picture cards that show a variety of emotions in faces and body language. This can help the person you care for interpret the visual cues for when someone is getting angry, bored, sad, frustrated or happy. Work up to using video clips of these emotions acted out.

3. Follow Their Interests

I include friends in my son’s hobbies. My son has had a lifelong interest in art museums, so we often bring along a friend. Another fascination is carnivorous plants, so I brought a group of his peers to the botanical garden to see the venus fly traps and pitcher plants.

4. Ask The Teacher

It can be worth asking your child’s teacher if there are children at school they seem to connect with. Keep these suggestions in mind for ‘play dates’.

5. Find an activity

Build play-dates around fun, interesting activities all children will enjoy. Think creative and prepare. I once gave each child a ball of pizza dough and had a pizza-making lunch. Bear in mind mainstream kids will probably love all the SN kit, sensory features, trampolines etc!

6. Invite friends home

Encourage friendships by inviting others to your home. The person you care for will usually be more relaxed in the home environment and will be more able to work on appropriate social interaction.

7. Know the limits

Sometimes I push my son to tolerate longer periods of socialising; but I also know how to make a hasty retreat when I see a shift in mood or agitation. When he was younger, I limited play dates to about 1 hour, but now he enjoys 2 hours. Being sensitive to his mood increases his interest in planning future play dates.

8. Review and re-boot

At the end of the day, talk about what you learned and what you would like to do next time. With friends, there’s always a next time!

9. Practice turn taking

My adult son still struggles with sharing, taking turns, going ” first” or “last”. I try and practice and prepare him as much as possible at every opportunity, be it dishing up at the table or getting into the car. It definitely helps with his social skills.

10. Peer Mentors

A good mainstream school should set up ‘peer mentors‘ or ‘buddies’ for your child with special needs. Teachers should look for existing positive relationships other classmates have with your child, and identify someone who they can guide to help with encouraging appropriate communication skills.

11. Raise Awareness

It’s good to be honest and upfront about the needs of the person you are caring for. I noticed my daughter was getting stared at in Brownies so I did a short talk to the pack about her disabilities and how they affect her. It really helped.

12. Parallel Play

Don’t knock parallel play – its a start! My son with ASD doesn’t like to interact much but he will happily engage in the same activities alongside other people. It can fuel interaction or friendships – especially if they’re is a common shared interest.

13. Identify Goals

Think about short-term and long-term development of social skills. Break down those stages of development into tiny steps and create the “scaffolding” to support each step for the person you care for.

How to develop social intelligence in a child: 7 tips from a psychologist

Publishing house "Alpina Publisher" 123007, Moscow, st. 4th Magistralnaya, 5, building 1 +74951200704

December 13, 2017

2353 views

6 minutes to read

Success in life is often achieved by people from whom neither teachers nor parents expected it. “A bully, a slacker, a C student” suddenly turns out to be much more successful than his classmates, who spent all their childhood sitting at textbooks. The answer is not in "accidental luck" or "happy fate", but in social intelligence. Our social adaptation, the ability to understand people and, ultimately, success depend on how developed it is.

Social intelligence, unlike formal intelligence, can be developed. And it is better to start doing this from an early age. How exactly?

Pay attention to who and how the child communicates. To begin with, we need to take the most objective position and look at the child's social circle. Where and with whom does he spend his free time? Does he have real (and not virtual) friends with whom he meets regularly, visits them? Does he have the opportunity to choose friends on his own? Or do we conduct a thorough audit of his acquaintances and, in an attempt to protect him from bad influence, we forbid him to communicate with "unequal", "bad" boys and girls? Does he know how to get out of difficult situations, resolve conflicts, or does he run to his parents for help?
Expand the child's social circle. By limiting the child's contacts, we inhibit the development of his social skills. Growing up, he goes out into the world, not understanding how to live in it and how to interact with people who live in this world. There is a rule in aikido training: each athlete must work out the same technique with the maximum number of sparring partners, because with each of them it will be a little different - the athlete learns to see the strengths and feel for the weaknesses of the opponent, adapt to his height , weight, speed, and at the same time find their advantages. That is why the child must communicate with people of different ages, different material wealth and cultural levels. He must practice his social skills.
Give experience of various social situations. Relationships with people are always a risk. We are all different, someone likes you, and someone annoys and repels you. Someone can treat you kindly, and someone can intrigue. For full development, children need unplanned, unexpected, sometimes even conflict situations. The experience of getting into and out of such situations helps to develop social immunity. The child got into a fight - let's not rush to figure out who is right and who is wrong. It’s better to ask him what happened, and together we will discuss how it was possible to resolve the conflict peacefully and how to behave in the future.
Use social equipment. Even if a child is driven in a car with a personal driver, it is useful for him to take a ride on the subway or tram from time to time. Traveling by public transport is an ideal option for practicing social skills. Despite the apparent simplicity, even the ability to correctly find a place in the cabin is developed gradually. Which one is considered good? The place where we do not interfere with others and no one interferes with us, from where you can clearly see what is happening around. The task of “squeezing between people” is solved much easier if you turn to your neighbors with the words: “Are you not going out now? Please let me pass!” The child learns from experience that words are much more effective than brute force.
Teach communication boundaries. For successful social interaction, it is very important for a child to learn to understand the boundaries of the personal space of other people and try not to violate them. This is especially true for the boundaries of strangers - in public places, on the street, in a restaurant, on an airplane, on a train. For example, a child rushes screaming around the restaurant from table to table - you need to stop him and say that he is bothering everyone. And if he does not understand, punishment should follow. Demanding compliance with external boundaries, we thereby give impetus to the formation of internal self-control, that is, the ability to monitor ourselves, cope with our impulses, emotional outbursts.
Learn to understand your feelings and the feelings of other people. Life sets tasks for the child, for the fulfillment of which it is necessary to achieve something from people with different views, values and characters. To successfully cope with these tasks, it is necessary to be able to understand and anticipate the behavior of other people, evaluate their motivation, intentions and determine who can be trusted and who cannot. But often we ourselves do not know what we feel - resentment or anger, annoyance with ourselves or envy of another, joy or satisfaction. The ability to recognize your feelings is a very useful skill. Only by learning to understand our feelings can we learn to empathize, that is, to understand the feelings of other people.
Teach the child to respond adequately in various communication situations. In the big world, the child will have to solve his own problems, win a place under the sun, determine who is a friend and who is not. Somewhere you have to step aside, somewhere you need to agree and compromise, somewhere you need to actively insist on your own and directly express your opinion. To do this, the child's arsenal should have many ways to respond and cope with different situations. The more diverse the child's experience, the more rehearsals he had, the more convincingly he will play the performance called "life".

Our poor rich children

Marina Melia

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How to develop social skills in a child - Child development

Parents are upset when they see how their children cannot share a toy among themselves or cannot find friends. If a child has developed social skills, he can cope with such difficult situations. Socially adapted children know how to make friends, play, start conversations with peers and adults.

Social skill: “The ability to ask”

It can be difficult for a child to approach other children and ask to play with them. In the end, children may answer, “No.” Fear of rejection can prevent a child from even trying, and then they will miss out on the fun of playing with peers, as well as the opportunity to learn something new in the process of playing.

The child is most successful when he first finds out what the peer group is doing, then finds out how he can be useful, and then invites him to join the game. For example, if the children are playing school, he might ask, "Can I be a student?"

How to help your child learn to ask

Watch other children play with your child. Ask him leading questions: “What do you think Sasha uses cubes for? Does he have enough dice to share with you? Maybe we need to look for more cubes so you can play with Sasha?” Invite your child to play with someone else. For him, it will be easier than joining a large group.

Social skill: "The ability to carry on a conversation"

Children usually need some practice before they learn how to talk - take turns talking, not interrupting and listening to the other person. Introverted children require someone to start the conversation and keep it going. Extroverts, on the contrary, must learn not to interrupt the interlocutor and give him the opportunity to speak.

How to help a child to learn how to talk

A good way to develop this skill in a child is the example of parents and role-playing games. Show your child how to communicate properly by talking to him as often as possible.

Ask for his opinion on various issues and show genuine interest in what he has to say. If his speech is too long, carefully bring him back to the topic of conversation.

Play games in which everyone takes turns playing their turn. Make sure your child has opportunities for imaginative play. Scripted games: "Let's imagine that ..." will help him see different situations from a different point of view.

Social skill: "Understanding the emotions of others"

To fully participate in social situations and develop relationships with others, children need to read the emotions of the peers they play and interact with. Then they will be able to understand them and respond appropriately. This requires confidence from the child, because it is quite difficult to interpret the feelings of another person. If a confident child sees that two of his peers are arguing, he understands that now is not the right time to start the game. Moreover, he may try to defuse the situation. Or, if the child feels their friend is sad, they can offer support.

How to help a child to understand people's emotions

First of all, teach your child to identify his own emotions: “You have a smile on your face! You must be feeling happy” or “I see tears on your face. Are you sad?" After that, you can suggest how to apply this skill to others: “Sasha seems angry. What do you think happened?" or “How do you think Anya felt when she fell off the swing? How can we help her?"

Social skill: "Self-confidence"

When a child is generally well, it also has a positive effect on his social skills. If he understands that making mistakes or failing is normal, it is easier for him to express his opinion, ask for help or communicate with each other. If a child is denied something, he does not take it personally and is ready to insist on his own, while not going beyond the bounds of politeness.

How to help your child gain self-confidence

It may seem paradoxical, but children must fail in order to succeed. They need to know that they have to try something over and over again - and in the end, they will succeed. The key to mastering new skills is self-confidence.

It is also necessary to properly praise the child.