Signs Your Child Needs More Social Skills Training

Social skills training teaches children how to create and maintain healthy relationships. These skills help us to know what to say, make good decisions, and how to behave in different social situations. While we can all have awkward social moments, children and adolescents with social skill weaknesses routinely have trouble connecting with people and making and keeping friends which can hinder performance in academics and extracurricular activities.

Signs of Social Skills Deficits

Perspective Signs

• Doesn’t understand facial expressions or body language
• Is a poor listener and loses the point of what is being said
• Has little interest in social interactions
• Not noticing rejection actions by others
• Is overly literal and doesn’t get sarcasm

Response Signs:

• Shares information in inappropriate ways
• Interrupts or blurts out answers
• Constantly moves arounds and fidgets
• Goes off-topic
• Doesn’t adapt language to different situations or people
• Gets aggressive with others.

How Training Helps

This specialized training targets proactive and reactive interactions while using reinforcement to reward good behaviors and discourage negative behaviors. These skills can first be practiced in one-on-one sessions with therapists before moving to therapy sessions in group settings with other children, where most of the social training happens. Training social skills is commonly broken down to 7 main steps repeated until success is acheived for each skill, including learning how to share, listen, maintain eye contact, use manners, cooperate, respect other’s personal space, and more.

1. Set A Realistic Goal Clearly define what the desired behavior is going to look like and pick age appropriate behaviors that can be developed in small, manageable steps that you can be charted to monitor progress.
2. Explain Why Explain why the desired behavior is important. This helps the learner understand its important and encourages motivation.
3. Model The Behavior Demonstrate the desired behavior. This can be done by role playing, watching videos, or watching others and pointing out the desired behavior.
4. Practice It takes a lot of practice to succesfully change a behavior. Rome was not built in a day and neither will desired behaviors be.
5. Prompt Teach when the desired behavior should be used by setting up a natural cue or prompt for the behavior.
6. Reinforce Reinforce good behaviors by celebrating the success! Associating the desired behavior with the great feeling that comes with accomplishing a goal helps keep the behavior in place.
7. Generalize Getting a behavior correct in one setting is one thing (literally), but understanding how to apply the behavior to similar situations that don’t look exactly the same is another. Generalizing the skill is the final step to true mastery.