How do I help my child develop basic social skills?

As parents of little preschoolers, we know that you’re their whole world. But as important as you are to them, we also know that you’ll be keen to help them develop and maintain other positive social relationships as they grow up. After all, building healthy relationships is one of the central elements of your child’s emotional development and well-being as a whole.

But in order to develop positive social relationships, your child will have to develop their social skills, gain a better understanding of how they relate to others, and how the way they display their emotions can affect the feelings of others too.

But the question is, how do you help your child move towards these goals? Help them to become a more emotionally aware and skilled person who makes friends easily in school and beyond.

How do I help my child develop social skills?

We know that although clear direction is often important, simply telling your child what to do won’t establish the knowledge they need, nor the motivation to develop emotional and social skills. You need to help them connect thinking, feeling and action, and provide them with the opportunity to reflect, consider alternatives, problem-solve, enhance their imaginative thinking and take responsibility.

Here are 8 simple but effective steps you can take to help your children develop these skills:

Help your child raise awareness of feelings

Practice talking to your child in a way that helps them gain awareness of both their feelings and the feelings of others can be very helpful. For example, you could say things like:

“You enjoyed that funny little poem, didn’t you? Would it make you happy if I read it again?”

Provide commentary on the emotional component of experiences

Or, you could comment on the emotional component of experiences by saying things like:

“Please be careful when you run around, it hurt when you ran into me.”

Provide commentary on finding ways to feel better

Or, to help them find ways to feel better, you could say something like:

“I was so upset that my team lost the match that I went out for a long walk — and I kicked all the leaves on the ground and didn’t feel so bad after that.”

Use puppets

Puppets are a particularly useful tool to present a particular narrative to your child, as the indirect nature of this interaction allows them to make a connection to their own behaviour.

For example, you could play out a scenario like this:

Puppet 1: I have hurt myself in a fight, and it is sore. I don’t want to feel hurt.

Puppet 2: I was in the fight and I got hurt too. I don’t want to get hurt.

Use pictures and books

Engaging children using pictures and books has always been one of the best, and most creative ways to help them learn. And using this aid to explain emotional and social situations to a child is also another way to help them focus on feelings and emotionally challenging situations, and to depict feelings and relationships in an expressive way.

In addition, the use of drawing and paintings are a simple way to provide children with the opportunity to explore and experiment with their feelings and problem-solve in an indirect way.

Cooperative interactions

We know that playing is one of a child’s favourite things to do. And luckily, learning to engage in cooperative play is also an important way for your child to develop key social skills, and to understand how to modify any displays of anger, distress, and uncontrolled excitement. You could help them do this in a few different ways:

Point out your child’s desire to play with others and what they need to do to facilitate this. For example: “You want to play with George, but George doesn’t like it when you jump on him like that.”

Ask what they would want if they were the other children: For example, “What could you do so George will want to play with you?”

Pretend play

The wonderful thing about children is how imaginative they are. A quality which assists them to engage in dramatic and symbolic play scenarios, to help them with working out emotions and exploring ways of managing them. Not only do play scenarios give your child the chance to control their environment, but also to experiment and imagine and practise many ways of dealing with situations and experiencing emotions.

Use role-play

For everyone with preschool children, or looking after pre-school children, role play is usually considered a very effective and enjoyable way of teaching them a particular narrative. For example, as parents, you can help to structure a role-play for your child by getting them to act out stories from books, or even ones that you can make up together!

How do I help my child develop basic social skills?

Set your child up for strong friendships with Unii’s tips.