Friendships are such a wonderful and special part of life. From memory making to going through the highs and lows with your peers makes life so much richer. As a child, learning social skills and how friendships fit is a huge learning curve as they go through their childhood and find their ‘people’. As a parent, how do you connect and how do you teach your kids basic social skills and about what a great friendship can be?
Today Janine is joined by Caroline Maguire and in this episode they discuss:
How do we teach our children social and emotional awareness in a fun and play filled way? Eventually our children will become adults so when they walk out into the world, we want them to step into their lives as aware and in control of their emotions as possible.
In this episode we discuss:
The transition to preschool to elementary school can be such an anxious time for both parents and for the children. There’s a lot of unknowns to get them ready for and sometimes we think there’s lots we have to do to prepare them for starting. Today we discuss what you can do to help reduce anxiety for your little one with nursery practitioner, Caroline Allen.
In this episode they discuss:
A few weeks ago, I wrote a review of the book It’s So Much Work to Be Your Friend by Richard Lavoie. I absolutely love this book, and I wanted to focus in particular on one of his interventions that can help kids learn from their social errors in the moment - The Social Skill Autopsy. Addressing a social misstep and using it as a teachable moment is a great way to help kids identify what went wrong and what they could try again the next time.
If your child is trying to figure out who would be a good friend, or who would be a good peer to invite over for a playdate, start by talking with them about what to look for in a friend. There are so many different attributes your child might want in a potential friend, but they may not always be the best things to look for in someone. If your child is having a hard time making friends, they might say they’d like to be friends with the most popular child or the one that has the biggest, coolest stuff in their house. It makes sense to talk about attributes and characteristics they want to see in someone they’d want in a friendship. Here is a brief list of characteristics you can use as a starting point for a conversation about attributes in a good friendship:
My kids tend to get along pretty well, and even when there’s an argument, they can get past it pretty quickly. However, at the end of the summer and for the first week of the school year, our kids seemed to be more cranky and less patient with each other than normal. I’m not sure if it was because their bodies hadn’t adjusted to the new schedule or if they were just tired of going all day. All I knew was that I wanted to change how they were acting toward one another. I wanted them to focus on showing kindness to one another. When I was a School Counselor, I helped start a Kindness Wall of Fame at my school. Every time any adult saw a child do something kind, the adult could choose to give that child a star for being a kind member of our school. I decided to implement our own Kindness Wall at home.
One of my colleagues and dear friends recommended that I should read this book. I’m so glad she did. I absolutely love it! The central focus of this book is that “children with learning problems tend to struggle with social relationships”. The author gives practical advice and everyday ways you can help your child improve their social functioning. He recognizes that due to children’s learning disabilities, they may not be able to pick up on the social cues like other kids, so they need more direct instruction and guidance to learn how to interact with others and be a good friend.
I've written before about how you can use videos to teach social skills to kids (check out this blog post for more information about using videos in general). One of my favorite lessons to teach using videos is about personal space. I loved showing the two videos below because of the laughter and conversations that happened when we watched something a little silly together. Here’s what you can do if you want to use videos to start a discussion with your kids about personal space:
Just because it's scheduled time doesn’t mean it lacks imagination.
Kids need to play in order to practice creativity and flexibility, solve problems and learn ways to regulate emotions, and I’ve already addressed the importance of play in this blog post. A new phenomenon in play has evolved since I was a child, the scheduled play date. The play date has been getting some negative press recently, with people listing all the things they don’t like about them. There are pros and cons to everything, so I decided to explain why I appreciate play dates. I’ve found them to be helpful for a number of the children I‘ve worked with over the years, and I schedule play dates for my own children from time to time.
Being able to have a conversation is an essential social skill to have. Your child will need to be able to start conversations if they want to get to know people, make friends, or play with others. It can be hard to think of things to talk about when you don’t know someone. Here are some ideas to help kids start a conversation.
I read this book several years ago; I loved it then and I continue to recommend it to parents as a great guide to understanding the world of girls. I also saw Rosalind Wiseman speak in person several years ago, and I found her to have a down to earth, practical and reasonable approach to working with kids in these tough relational situations. She doesn’t claim to have all the answers or say that these things won’t happen. But she does have some ideas of how to work through things and is great at explaining things in a way that parents understand.
I finally got a chance to watch Temple Grandin’s TED talk from 2010. I first heard about Temple Grandin a few years ago when I watched the HBO movie about her life. I found it interesting and insightful and I’ve wanted to learn more about her. I haven’t had a chance to read any of her books yet although they are on my reading list. She has a lot of interesting things to say about children on the spectrum as they get older and enter the workforce. Here are some of my takeaways:
Book Review: Best Friends, Worst Enemies Understanding the Social Lives of Children by Michael Thompson, PhD and Catherine O’Neill Grace with Lawrence J. Cohen, PhD
This book is a thorough examination of children’s social lives, from infancy through dating. The authors explore more specifics of how children develop friendships, manage and work through conflict, group dynamics, teasing and bullying. The only thing I think is missing in this book is that the authors do not delve too deeply into LGBT issues, and I think that adds a whole other dynamic to social lives, friendship and dating. Here are my highlights from the book:
Several people have recently recommended that I read this book, so I was eager to do so. How this book was even written shows a great determination by Naoki to share his story. The author can’t communicate verbally, but instead tapped out the words using an alphabet grid, where he points to the letters and spells out his answers. This in and of itself is pretty incredible, but then he articulately describes what it’s like to be autistic. It was a powerful read, but a couple of things really stuck with me. He talks about how neurotypical people assume that people with autism want to be alone and by themselves, and it makes you think twice about your interactions with people who seem like they want to be by themselves.
Recently, I’ve been using videos to help teach during my social groups. It’s a wonderful way to be able to talk about a lot of different social skills and social thinking. I always preview what I’m going to show the kids and think about what our focus will be. I will often pause the video in the middle to have a conversation about a scene we’ve just watched. It’s always fascinating when I watch the same video with different groups, it often leads to some very different group discussions. Here are a couple of examples of videos I’ve used with kids.
One of my colleagues let me know about this TED talk by Amy Cuddy about body language. I found it fascinating to think about the fact that not only can our minds change our bodies, our bodies change our minds. We can fake having positive powerful body language and it changes the way we think. Two quotes I love from this video are:
“Fake it til you become it” and “Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes”
