It seems these days that parents are faced with a never ending array of challenges when it comes to child rearing. While reading and math practice may be relatively straightforward (at least in the earlier years of elementary school), some areas remain more challenging to address. Building social skills falls within this domain. With the increasing rates of ADHD and Autism, it is no surprise that many parents report that their children need help improving their social interactions. Yet making real changes in this area remains more elusive to parents, and with good reason. This is no easy task!
Consider your average conversation with a friend or coworker. This exchange requires active listening skills so that you can ask questions and respond with comments relevant to the conversational topic. But strong social skills go far beyond just being able to stay on the topic! While you are talking, you are probably also maintaining eye contact, nodding along to show you are engaged, reading the other person’s facial expressions and body language, suppressing urges to interrupt, and filtering out other distracting stimuli in the environment. These basic interactional skills do not include other nuances like making inferences, or interpreting sarcasm and humor.
See why social skills are so challenging to address? There is just so much to cover! Below you will find some helpful tips to assist your child in making some pragmatic progress!
- Start small.
Rome wasn’t built in a day, right? Social skills won’t be either! Attempting to work on all of the skills mentioned above, all at once, will only lead to frustration for you and your child. While this can be a long term goal, you will want to pick one or two skills to start addressing. The idea is to pick the biggest barriers to positive social interactions first. So for some children that may be remaining on the topic, while for others it may be reducing interrupting. Whatever you choose, try to work on that single skill consistently. When they are reaching mastery, you can always choose something new to practice.
- The power of positivity!
Everyone likes positive reinforcement right? This is going to be key for helping your child build these skills. If they feel overly criticized, they may just want to withdraw instead of engaging more frequently. Rather than spend too much time critiquing, teach and model the single skill you are targeting. It may be helpful if you talk about your own thought processes while you are targeting a skill. For example, if you were working on maintaining a conversational topic, you could say something like this:
Child: I like this movie.
Parent: What do you like about it?
Child: All the animals
Parent: I like the animals too! The tiger is my favorite. Do you have a favorite?
Parent (After listening to the child’s answer and providing feedback): See how I asked you questions about the movie? I was thinking of asking what we should have for lunch, but I decided to wait because it is important to stay on the topic we are already chatting about. It can be hard staying on a topic, but if you have nothing to add to the conversation, asking questions can help! Let’s try to do this more often. It will help you have conversations with friends at school.
Once you have done the teaching part, get ready for the rainbows and butterflies phase! Provide tons of positive feedback whenever you see your kiddo demonstrating this skill. Remember to be specific too. Rather than saying, “good job,” try something like, “Wow! Great job staying on our topic!” This helps them know exactly what they are doing right while also building confidence and inspiring them to continue making progress.
- Involve your child actively in the process!
Everyone likes control and children are no different. If you are going to work on taking turns, or handling the frustration of losing a game, why not ask your child what game they want to play to practice these skills? You will absolutely be met with much less resistance if your child feels like they are a part of the decision making process. If you are working on staying on conversational topics, you can take turns choosing what topics to discuss. Whatever skill you decide to target, you can provide small choices to help your child be more comfortable, even if it is just selecting what area of the home they wish to sit in while you are doing an activity together.
- Safety in Numbers
Enroll in a local social group to help your child work on their pragmatic skills. Speech language pathologists specialize in communication and have unique ways to address these skills. Getting help from a professional allows parents to gain access to valuable insights about their children’s social interactions. They also often provide fresh solutions and ideas to further increase progress at home. As an added bonus, social groups typically involve fun activities that help children strengthen their pragmatic skills. Seeing that other peers also need to work on these skills can help to build confidence and self-esteem by illustrating that they are not alone.
Using these tips consistently will help increase your child’s pragmatic skills over time. Remember to be patient with them and yourself in the process. If you need more social support, your friendly, neighborhood SLPs at Project Speech are here to help! You can always call or email to find out about our individual speech sessions or social group offerings!