Developing a child’s social skills allows them to interact with their environment and communicate with the people around them. Social skills may help students build positive relationships and set goals for themselves.
For some parents, having good nutrition like eating a balanced diet and maintaining proper hygiene like good dental health may help children gain confidence to socialize. See more information about this on this article.
However, developing children’s social capacities also involves teaching them various skills to help them express themselves and build better relationships.
Ways to Improve Children’s Social Skills at Home
Here are some ways parents can develop their children’s social skills in the comfort of their homes.
Teach Them to Express Emotions
Children need to learn about emotions so that they can better express themselves. When children are more capable of managing their feelings, they may effectively manage relationships with other people and solve problems.
One of the ways to teach these emotions is by showing various facial expressions and asking the child to guess what the person is feeling. For example, one may make a facial expression or use a picture representing a person’s emotion.
Another method is to read stories to the child then tell them to guess what the characters in the book are feeling. For example, if a character is celebrating their birthday, one can ask the child what that character’s feeling is.
Songs and dances are also used to express various emotions. The song’s lyrics may contain expressions, and the children may be asked to respond to them by describing their feelings while singing.
Some people may use puppets or toys and act out different kinds of emotions. The children may then be asked to identify the puppets’ emotions or may even be asked to imitate the puppets’ expressions.
Provide Them a Place to Play and Socialize
Play provides many benefits to a child’s growth, including intellectual, emotional, physical, and social development.
Play may come in three forms:
- Guided play - In this form of play, adults set up a context in which children participate. For example, a game host may provide children with toys or props and ask the children to create a game using those props.
- Social play - Children may play with adults or with one another. One example is a mixed dodgeball where children and adults form teams and play together on the front lawn.
- Independent play - Children play independently or by themselves. This form of recreation may involve playing with stuffed animals and action figures or going up and down the slide in the backyard without other people.
When developing a child’s social skills, play may help the child listen, pay close attention to social cues, and view things from another person’s perspective. Learning these skills is a factor in developing empathy.
While playing has numerous benefits for children, there may be times when parents and other adults have little to no time to assist their children in this activity.
Despite the tight schedules, there are ways to encourage play without taking too much of the parents’ time. These include:
- Planning and providing space for play - Adults should consider scheduling their children’s playtime in advance.
For example, a parent who gets a day off the next day may tell their kid that their friends can visit and play in the garden on that day.
- Playing together with the child - When adults have a limited schedule, they must consider playing with children whenever they have the opportunity to do so.
There are many activities that adults and children can do together, like playing board games, telling stories, or playing ball sports.
- Acknowledging small risks - Part of a child’s development is knowing that they may get injured while playing. For example, the child may fall while running and scrape their knee.
Trusting the children to take small risks and acknowledging the possibility that they may get hurt lets them learn new things and enjoy the world around them.
Encourage Them to Communicate
Learning to communicate is essential for children to interact with other people and allow these people to understand their needs.
Language may be verbal or non-verbal. Children must learn these languages so that other people can understand what they want to convey.
Developing the child’s communication skills involves making them capable of expressing their thoughts and feelings through words.
A 2013 paper by the Human Development Institute of the University of Kentucky mentioned a study assessing communication needs involving students from seven U.S. states.
The study mentioned that 12% to 13% of third-grade students communicated primarily with facial expressions or cries. Those students also had no explicit use of gestures, words, signs, or pictures.
The percentage represents only a small population of students with significant cognitive disabilities. However, the researchers noted the importance of the findings for language development.
Conclusion
Social skills are essential for children to establish good relationships with other people. Parents can help their children develop these skills even at home.
Parents whose child has difficulties developing social skills may consult with a behavioral therapist to determine how to best build the child’s social skills.
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