Basic social skills

8 Important Social Skills For Kids And How To Teach Them

Teaching social skills for kids is one of the most complex, confusing, but rewarding aspects of raising young children.

It’s no secret that preschoolers and kindergarteners are naturally egocentric. Even when playing or interacting with others, many children have difficulty sharing, empathizing, collaborating, and cooperating.

HOMER is here to help you learn eight of the most important social skills for kids, as well as how to incorporate them into your family life.

8 Important Social Skills For Kids

1) Sharing

Sharing is a part of daily life. That doesn’t mean it’s easy!

Sharing is a difficult concept for young children to get behind. Toddlers, preschoolers, and kindergarteners have a particularly difficult time, as they are more focused on their needs and desires than the needs and desires of others.

This is normal. The feeling that something “belongs” to them is typically much stronger than their desire to please others.

Even though it’s hard to share, doing so is critical to a child’s social skill development, as it helps them keep and advance friendships. It’s also a great way to bond and show appreciation.

2) Listening

Active listening is an important skill that even some adults struggle with. Properly deciphering and absorbing information requires significant focus.

We all know this can be challenging for young kids, but active listening can strengthen their receptive language skills (the ability to comprehend spoken language).

Receptive language skills help your child:

Handle social interactions
Answer questions
Understand stories
Comprehend what they’re reading
Understand gestures

While developing their social skills, your child will come to see how important it is to actively listen when others are speaking.

Paying attention to what someone is saying and responding directly to their statements or questions is a big part of healthy communication.

3) Following Directions

The cousin of good listening skills would be executing the instructions your child heard — a.k.a., following directions!

Following directions becomes particularly important once your child enters into their school years.

It’s one thing to follow directions at home with their parents where they’re innately comfortable; it’s another task entirely to follow directions from adult authority figures they may not know well.

Your child will learn how listening and following directions overlap with one another. If they listen well, it becomes easier for them to follow directions accurately. And when they follow directions accurately, they’ll often be rewarded for their hard work!

Keep in mind, however, that multi-step directions are challenging for young children. To help them develop the ability to follow directions, give them one direction at a time.

4) Collaborating And Cooperating

Similar to sharing, your child will learn how to move beyond sharing objects to sharing ideas, stories, and work.

With good collaboration and cooperation skills, children will learn that working in a group gives them a chance to express their ideas and listen to the ideas of others. It allows them to see that it can be fun to work on a shared project!

This may sound simple, but for young children, cooperation can often require real effort. It will take time for them to learn to respect others’ opinions even when they’re different.

By working together toward a common goal, kids can advance their sharing skills to include both intellectual and physical (think: cleaning the dinner table with a sibling) feats.

5) Patience

How many times have you heard the cliche, “Patience is a virtue”? Well, we are here to say it one more time!

It’s normal for young children to be impatient. However, patience really is one of the most rewarding social skills for kids.

Patience is critical for many things, including maintaining friendships and relationships and achieving big goals that can only be completed over an extended period of time.

This is where the concept of delayed gratification comes into play. When you help your child understand that good things often take time (not everything in life is microwaveable!), you nurture them into a patient person.

Learning patience takes practice and, you guessed it, patience! Trust that it will come with time (as everything does).

6) Empathy

When we say “empathy,” we’re referring to the traditional definition — the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Your child will learn how to appreciate the similarities and differences between their lives and those of people they meet. They will also learn how to empathize with these people, no matter how different they are.

For young children, this can mean small gestures.

For example, if their friend or sibling cries because your child is playing with a specific toy, your child may pause and say, “I know you want to play, too. Don’t be sad. We can take turns!”

But this sense of empathy will likely not appear overnight! Empathy develops over time and across a variety of scenarios.

The easiest way to promote your child’s development of empathy is by showing it in action. When you extend grace to your child often, they will learn how to extend it back.

7) Respecting Boundaries

Some people require different emotional and physical boundaries than your child.

This can be a particularly difficult concept to learn, especially for very young children who receive most of their socialization from within the household.

Likely, if your child is extroverted, they may assume everyone is OK with hugs, questions, or lots of chit-chat. In some cases, they may be right! In others, they may accidentally cross boundaries in their efforts to be friendly.

Teaching your child how to ask permission and identify boundaries helps them establish a sense of respect between themselves and others. The same goes for helping them establish boundaries for themselves.

Let your child know that it’s OK to say no to hugs, kisses, or other displays of affection from someone — no matter who it may be — if they feel uncomfortable. Model this idea by asking questions yourself (“Would you like a hug?”).

When they make their boundaries clear and ask for others to do the same, it will make both parties feel much more at-home.

8) Positivity

Working on positivity can make it exponentially easier for your child to tackle many of the other social skills for kids we’ve mentioned, especially patience, boundaries, listening, and sharing.

With a positive attitude, your child will find it easier to make and keep friends, succeed in school, and achieve their goals.

The easiest way to demonstrate positivity is by modeling it. The more positive you are about your child’s social skill development (including their inevitable slip-ups), the more reassured and positive they will become themselves.

This doesn’t mean you have to be positive all the time. In fact, a healthy amount of honest criticism can be beneficial in helping your child learn to express their feelings.

To do this, start with your own emotions. Let them know how you’re feeling and how you’re managing it in real time if you can. Kids need to know it’s OK to be sad, angry, or mad sometimes and how to handle it.

How To Teach Social Skills To Kids

Now that you know what social skills for kids to include, how do you go about teaching them at home? Let’s take a look!

Normalize Mistakes

Your child should know that you do not expect perfection. There is no way to execute all of these social skills every time, everywhere, without mistakes.

That is OK! In fact, it’s encouraged. Mistakes are normal; they’re how we learn what went right or wrong.

Make sure you normalize this for your child. If they know all humans learn lessons this way, it’ll be easier for them to push through the sting of a mistake and try again.

Encourage Sharing (Without Violating Boundaries!)

Although sharing is great and should be encouraged, there may be some things that are special to your child that they don’t want to share. This can be especially true of stuffed animals, blankets, or special toys.

This is OK, too! It’s great for your child to set boundaries that you and other children respect. To encourage sharing, try not to force it.

Encouraging without forcing also demonstrates to kids how boundaries can be created, acknowledged, and respected between people.

This will motivate them to share with those around them by taking comfort in the fact that what is special to them has been kept sacred and separate. It will also encourage them to be direct about their and others’ boundaries when it comes to play, school, or emotional issues.

Check Their Listening

During social interactions within your own family or outside of it, pay attention to your child’s listening skills. You can observe them to see if they are listening carefully.

Do they seem engaged? Are the asking questions?

And remember it is just as important to listen to your child. This shows them that what they are saying is important and encourages them to listen to you in return.

Think About How You Give Directions

In teaching social skills for kids, the parent or authority figure is responsible for ensuring the directions they give are something a young child can execute successfully.

When giving instructions, be clear, firm, and gentle. As we mentioned earlier, children have a very difficult time executing tasks with many directions at once. Start with one direction at a time that your child can focus on.

When giving instructions, have your child repeat what you want them to do. Only give an additional instruction when the first has been completed. Repeat until the task is complete.

Your child can give you directions, too! That way they have a sense of what it takes to delegate, manage, and execute a task from start to finish.

Give Empathy To Get Empathy

Show your child that you think about other people’s emotions, too! This is less of a teaching moment and more of an authentic display of empathy.

If you see that your child is expressing an emotion, validate it for them. “Oh, I see that you’re excited. I love that you’re so eager and happy to do this!”

You can acknowledge negative emotions, too. For example, you might say, “I know that must make you angry. Do you know how I can tell? What can we do together to make you feel less unhappy?”

This not only helps them feel seen and heard in the moment, but it also gives them a direct example of how to tackle empathy with others in similar situations.

Social Skills For Kids Are Essential

The more your child experiences the benefits of social skills, the more intuitive these skills will become for them. However, all children learn at different rates. With practice (and patience!), we know they’ll get there.

The Learn with Sesame Street app is an effective tool that helps kids learn and develop their social and emotional skills. With the help of their Sesame Street friends, kids learn how to express their emotions, empathize with others, and create healthy relationships. Explore the Learn with Sesame Street app today!

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12 Basic Social Skills Kids Need

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Social skills are a critical element to helping kids succeed socially, emotionally, personally, and even academically. These are the skills are the behaviors that help kids join in conversations, collaborate with peers, develop lasting friendships, self-advocate when they need help, and so much more. It would be ideal if all learners walked into classrooms equipped with strong social skills ready for success. The truth is, though, that kids are kids; they are still developing, learning, growing, and trying to make sense of the social world around them. As adults, the biggest impact we can have to help kids learn social skills is to teach them.

Quite often, I get asked, “But doesn’t everyone need social skills? Why do you target kids specifically?” To me, the answer is obvious. If we teach kids and young adults these social skills from an early age, they will have the foundations they need as adults. So, when kids need social skills, let’s teach them!

To help highlight how important these social skill are, I created a complete set of Social Skills Visuals. You can use them as a bulletin board, post them as reminders all around, or use the pages to highlight a few skills each week. And if you’re looking for even more ways to teach social skills, feel free to check out my social skills activities for elementary and social skills lessons for older kids.

Here are 12 basic social skills and strategies for teaching them:

Following Directions. This is having the ability to listen, understand expectations, and follow through in a timely manner. Learners need to learn how to follow directions to help them complete tasks, whether it is an assignment in class or instructions from a future boss.

Strategies to teach following directions:

Play games for following directions, like Simon Says and Freeze.
Practice giving both verbal and visual directions.
Teach and practice how to read directions BEFORE starting an assignment.
Have learners highlight or underline directions on assignments before starting.
Have learners make a checklist for following directions for any task (like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich) to help them see why directions should be clear and followed well.

Using Manners. Our manners are the courteous behaviors to we to show we are kind and respectful. All kids need to understand manners so they can be socially appropriate in a variety of settings, such as a restaurant, at the library, or even answering the phone.

Strategies to teach using manners:

Post visuals of “manner words,” such as please, thank you, and you’re welcome as reminders.
Make it a habit to model and say these words with students and colleagues.
Explicitly teach about manners and discuss what manners we use in different settings.

Having a Positive Attitude. A positive attitude is the first step to having a growth mindset. By having a positive attitude, kids can learn to be more optimistic and see the bright side of things.

Strategies to teach having a positive attitude:

Model having a positive attitude, even when things don’t go as planned (ex: “I was really looking forward to outdoor recess today, but now I am excited to play some chess instead!”).
Practice and discuss positive self-talk.
Read picture books about a positive attitude: Ish by Peter H. Reynolds and Because Amelia Smiled by David Ezra Stein.

Working with Others. All learners need skills to positively work with others by listening, collaborating, helping, and doing their fair share.

Strategies to teach working with others:

Explicitly teach skills for working well with others.
Make a list of “group ground rules” for how to work successfully with others (listening to each other, staying with the group, staying positive, etc.).
Give lots of practice in partners and small groups.
Make sure students are frequently working with different people.
Sometimes give learners the chance to pick their partners, while assigning students at other times.
Keep a list of sentence starters kids can use in groups to collaborate such as, “I really like how you…” and “Can we try…”

Good Hygiene. Proper self-care means keeping yourself well-groomed and neat. This is an important skill because not only is it about being clean, but it helps everyone make a positive first impression.

Strategies to teach good hygiene:

Talk about what good hygiene means, such as washing hands and showering/bathing daily.
Give reminders for hygiene, depending on age level.
Talk to the school counselor or social worker about coming in for a lesson on hygiene.

Using Polite Words. Using kind and polite words is just another way to spread kindness to others. Sometimes, I call this “using kind words only.”

Strategies to teach using polite words:

Teach about kindness and why it matters.
Discuss polite and kind words.
Teach about using a social filter, including thinking about how our words impact others.

Taking Turns. Learning to turn-take involves alternating between two or more people. This is an important skill to show courtesy and respect during conversations and other activities.

Strategies to teach taking turns:

Explain what it means to take turns and discuss scenarios, such as in sports, conversations, games, and more.
Practice turn-taking with board games.
Practice turn-taking with conversations (whole class and small groups).
Have students hold a special tangible (a ball or stuffed animal) when it is their turn to talk.

Greetings. Welcoming others and making them feel valued is an important social skill. By teaching kids and young adults how to properly greet others, it can help create a positive community for all. This is also an important lifelong social skill for the workplace and beyond..

Strategies to teach greetings:

Model greetings each morning with each student as they walk in.
Teach different greeting and allow students to choose how to greet each other.
Start the day with a morning meeting and a greeting.

Waiting and Having Patience. Developing patience is a critical skill during times when we have to wait. Kid and young adults might have to wait in line at the pencil sharpener or wait for their turn to speak in a group, just to name a few. By having patience, they show that they are courteous and respectful to all.

Strategies to teach waiting and showing patience:

Teach strategies for what to do when waiting (doing something else, using positive self-talk, etc.).
Discuss scenarios when kids have to wait and discuss how they can handle it.
Read picture books about patience: Waiting by Kevin Henkes and Are We There Yet? by Dan Santat.
Use social scripts to help teach skills for how to wait in social situations.

Being a Good Sport. Learning to be a good sport can help kids and young adults be respectful when they engage in games and activities. It can also help them positively cope with losing by focusing on having fun instead of winning.

Strategies to teach being a good sport:

Teach and discuss expectations for being a good sport.
Focus on having fun, playing, and learning rather than winning.
Give reminders about being a good sport before activities.
Use social scripts to remind about being a good sport before activities.
Practice being a good sport during games (anything from board games to outdoor sports during recess).
Practice and discuss having a growth mindset to help when students lose.

Listening to Others. Skills for listening are critical to building positive relationships with others. Kids and young adults should learn how to focus their attention to others, put away distractions, and really think about what someone else is saying.

Strategies to teach listening to others:

Start the day with a morning meeting and give time to share thoughts.
Teach the basics for listening: making eye contact, putting distractions away, thinking about what someone is saying.
Give discussion time in your content area subjects.
Practice listening with discussion times.
Teach students how to summarize what they heard: “So what I heard you say is that…”.

Understanding Personal Space. Having a good understanding of personal space helps everyone feel more comfortable in social situations. It also gives way to teaching that consent is needed to be in someone else’s personal space.

Strategies to teach personal space:

Teach students that they have an invisible bubble around them called their personal space. Explain why having personal space is important.
Teach and discuss expected behaviors with personal space such as standing an arm’s length away while talking and keeping hands to self.
Act out what personal space looks like in different scenarios.
Teach students how to ask permission if they would like to give a friend a hug.
Read picture books about personal space: Personal Space Camp by Julia Cook.

If you have more suggestions or ideas for teaching these skills, feel free to share! I would love to add to the list. Be sure to also check out all of my social skills resources to get started teaching these important skills right away!

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6 types of social skills and what are they for? / psychology

Throughout our lives we are forced to face a number of social situations in which we must interact with other people. In order to deal effectively with each of these situations, people must develop what is known as social skills.

These abilities allow us to communicate with others and resolve situations and conflicts in our interactions with others. In addition, there are different kinds of social skills which are classified according to their complexity and according to the functions they perform.

Article on the topic: "Assertive communication: how to express yourself clearly"

What social skills?

At present, there is no consensus in the world of psychology that allows unequivocally and equally to define the concept of "social skills". However, if we take into account both its characteristics and its functions, we can define social skills as a set of tactics or behavioral maneuvers that people naturally learn and which are used in situations of interaction with other people in order to successfully solve a social situation.

The fact that these skills are not innate but acquired spontaneously throughout our lives makes them susceptible to learning and improvement through social skills teaching methods. feelings in an adequate and satisfactory manner. In the same way, it also gives us the opportunity to express our opinions and thoughts according to the situation in which we live..

Thanks to them, we enjoy favorable and positive interpersonal relationships; we feel better with ourselves and help achieve our goals in our social life .

These skills are also observed in the animal world. In nature, we can observe communication skills and relationships between members of the same animal species, these abilities are similar to what we know as social skills.

Finally and finally, social skills have a number of characteristics that distinguish them and distinguish them from other types of human abilities. These characteristics:

They are learned and therefore is able to learn and improve .
They are essential if we are to have good mental and psychological health.
They are not rigid patterns of behavior but norms that adapt to every situation.

Types of social skills

There are various ways to group different types of social skills according to the classification criteria used. In this case, we will stick to the classical classification of social skills, within which, as we will see, there are 6 different sets.

It should be added that all these categories are modulated by two main attitudes in establishing interpersonal relationships.

1. Basic Social Skills

They are the first to be acquired, being important for creating and maintaining satisfactory communication . These include:

Know how to start a conversation.
know talk .
Active listening skills.
Wording of questions.
Introduce yourself .
Thank you.
The ability to give compliments.
Empathic skills .

2. Advanced Social Skills

After a person has acquired basic social skills, he has the necessary base to work on advanced social skills, which gives us strategies for conveniently dealing with social relationships. This category of types of social skills includes the following skills:

Opportunity to express your opinion.
Ask for help.
Opportunity to apologize .
participation.
Offer and give instructions.
Follow instructions.
Conviction ability .

3. Affective social skills

These types of skills are related to the ability to effectively identify and manage both our feelings and the feelings of others. Within this category there are:

Identify and recognize emotions and feelings.
Understand the feelings of others.
Container express feelings and emotions .
Expression of affects.
Respect the feelings of others.
Capacity for to face the wrath of others .
Independent ability.
Management of fear of communication with people.
Ability to inspire others.
Container for comfort others .

4. Negotiation skills or alternatives to aggression

Social negotiation skills enable us to avoid or manage conflicts. They lie in the ability to solve problems in interpersonal relationships without the use of aggression or violence. They are:

Know how to ask for permission.
Possibility to share .
Ability to help others.
The ability to love yourself.
Ability to tolerate and respond to jokes.
Negotiation skills .
Ability of self-control.
Ability to defend one's rights.
Don't get into fights .
Ability to avoid problems for other people.

5. Stress Coping Skills

These types of skills are essential for successful conflict resolution in situations of tension or stress. This group includes:

The ability to manage feelings of shame.
Ability to protect others.
Tolerance for failure.
Ability to respond to beliefs .
Ability to respond to an accusation.
Ability to formulate complaints or claims.
Ability to respond to complaints or grievances.
sportiness.
Know how to resist group pressure.
Manage a difficult conversation .
Tolerance to be ignored or disregarded.
Ability to deal with conflicting messages.

6. Planning skills

In the category of social skills related to planning, we can find:

Recognition of one's abilities .
Ability to make decisions.
Setting targets .
Determine the cause of problems and solve them.
Collection of information.
Ability to focus on a task.

What social skills? / welfare

We are social beings, so communication with others is essential it allows us to survive, grow, nurture other points of view and live in harmony. To do this, you need to know how to communicate and have a number of social skills, because in most cases we will avoid misunderstandings and conflicts..

Now, what exactly are social skills? successful in life. However, more than success we must talk about well-being, about how to know how to live together in harmony, share experiences, communicate effectively and conformity with the social cohesion in which agreements are reached and well-being is formed, which is directly returned in any aspect: professional, personal and medical.

"Success, character, happiness and achievement in life really matter a certain set of social skills, and not just cognitive abilities, which are measured using ordinary IQ tests."

- Daniel Goleman -

Professor David Deming, Ph.D. in Education and Economics at Harvard University, did an interesting study in which he summarized some data that we certainly agree with. We've reached a point in our society where you need more than technical skills to have a job or aspire to a position. Social skills are a fundamental pillar in any scenario today. Therefore a factor of great importance in the world of organizations.

We are going to delve into an aspect that decisively determines our relationship to the world and, consequently, to many aspects of our daily lives.

Definition of social skills treat others.

An interesting aspect about them is that they can learn, strengthen and develop them day by day with practice.

While it's true that this won't always be easy due to the complexity of some of them, it's also not impossible to achieve.

An important aspect we need to consider is that cultural and socio-demographic variables are necessary for learning and assessing social skills, because Habits and relationships change depending on where we are .

Therefore, it is important not only to have a good set of social skills, but also You must know when and where to put these skills into practice. The latter is known as social competence.

so, the fact of owning them allows you to avoid anxiety in difficult or new social situations , facilitate emotional communication, problem solving and relationships with other people, if they adapt to the context.

"An emotionally intelligent person is capable of four areas: identify emotions, use emotions, understand emotions, and regulate emotions."

-John Mayer-

If certain social skills are lacking, will be passive in coping with situations avoiding them and accessing the demands of others. But you can also become aggressive, imposing criteria and violating the rights of others.

Types of social skills

There are a large number of social skills, but At a general level, we can distinguish two types that encompass and organize the rest: basic social skills and complex social skills. Let's look at them in detail.

Basic skills

listen . Listening is not the same as listening, only when we can take an active, close and empathetic approach to who is in front of us, we give form to this first step of our social interaction. This dimension, however basic it may seem, in many cases we fail.
Start a conversation . No matter how curious we are, knowing how to create the right conversation start always says a lot about us. Requires ease, requires politeness and intimacy, requires positivity and communication skills where it does not seem threatening or unsafe, but quite the contrary.
Ask a question. To know how to ask is to know how to demand and also to use the appropriate self-confidence. This social competence is one of the first things children are taught in the classroom, and the ones that can help us the most in our daily lives, in almost any context..
Thank you. Have you met someone who is incapable of giving thanks? Knowing how to recognize the other is a core dynamic in any personal or professional relationship. This is courtesy and respect. Let's never forget this great tribute to social skills.
Introduce yourself and other people. We do this in the context of friendship and family, as well as in the workplace or at school. Knowing how to present or introduce others is a very important basic skill. or another, depending on the characteristics and complexity of the same.
- Empathy and emotional intelligence. These competencies are now required in every dynamic and circumstance. This is another root that exclusively feeds our relationship and that, without a doubt, we must know the practice effectively.
- assertiveness. We mentioned this a minute ago. In a complex world such as social relationships, being able to defend ourselves with respect, talk about our needs, communicate and listen, claim rights, and also care for others is a great skill.
- Ability to identify a problem, negotiate and evaluate solutions. This dimension is something we should all practice daily and maximize. In this way, we could more easily reach an agreement, agree and set goals in which both parties will benefit.
- Ask for help. The realization that we do not know everything, that we need advice, support or other aspects, is an act of maturity. Knowing how to effectively ask for it is an example of good social skills..
- Persuade others. To know how to convince is not to manipulate. It is the ability to argue, connect, and reach an understanding where to make the other see that a certain behavior or act can be more helpful. Creating impact and performing it with respect is an art worth learning.
Why is good social skills management so important??
As we can see, the problem of social skills is present in our daily life, both because of their presence and because of their absence, both in the family environment, and at work and with friends.. Learning and developing these skills in oneself is important for achieving optimal relationships and satisfactorily with others.

There are many benefits that we will get from its implementation, how to ensure that they do not prevent us from achieving our goals, knowing how to express ourselves and taking into account the interests, needs and feelings of others. also they will help us get what we want, communicate satisfactorily with others and promote good self-esteem, among other aspects.
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