Social skills are mostly learned in early childhood and they have great impact on academics of the child. These skills are not only effective in building peer relationships but they are helpful in developing self-esteem, understanding others, learning emotional control, problem solving skills, team management abilities.
Social skills in children can be increased by working on the following:
- Parents to be role models: parents should demonstrate great skills in presence of their children. Studies have shown that 70% of the behavior depicted by children is modeled. They have the instinct of learning the behaviors they see.
- Acceptance of their mistakes: often,children don’t claim their act or put blame on others for their doing. Parents should teach them that it’s OKAY to be at mistake, but they should take the accountability of it. And when they do, teach them not to repeat it by slightly penalizing them.
- Empathize with other children: teach your child to be more compassionate and empathetic towards other children. They should take initiative to support others, sympathize when other child is hurt, and give him a helping hand.
- Teach them friendship activities: instruct them how to be good listeners and optimistic speakers. Teach them to be open to sharing their stuff with their classmates. Make them understand the importance of respecting others and team work.
- Encourage them: give positive appraisals to your children when they practice newly learned skills by rewarding or verbal recognition. This will increase the likelihood of the skills to be instilled in their personalities.
- Emotional regulation: children should be taught to control their emotions and ways to calm themselves down when necessary. Exercises like counting 1-10 backwards, deep breathing, and thinking about happy moments help a lot.
Following activities can also be included in their daily lives to promote social skills. Like:
- Role playing: they should be asked to play certain roles in the created situation. This will improve their imaginative skills as well and they will learn better with practice.
- Emotion Charade: one child shall act out the given emotion and rest must guess which emotion is being acted.
- Board games: give them activities on board that require team work, it will forge friendship among them.