Help is at hand for parents who feel their children are being left out when it comes to making friends, writes SHEILA WAYMAN
NO ONE wants to hear their child come home from school with the plaintive cry: “Nobody wants to be my friend.” A parent can feel powerless when a child does not seem to be fitting in.
For most children, the ability to make and keep friends develops naturally. They progress from early interaction with parents and other caregivers to bonding with their peers at primary school without a bother.
But for some children, particularly those on the autistic spectrum, it can be a real struggle. Signs that your child might be having difficulty include:
Not making friends easily;
Changing friends all the time;
Refusing to join in games with others;
Coming in upset when playing with other children;
Not being particularly interested in playing with other children;
Play dates in your house never going well.
You may be annoyed at how unkind other children seem to be, but perhaps the problem lies in your own child’s lack of social skills – in which case you can do something about it.
Parents need to know they can teach and practise social skills with their children, says Máire Begley, senior speech and language therapist at the Lucena Clinic, a child and adolescent mental health service in Dublin.
She and a team of colleagues will tell parents how at an information session entitled Getting In – Getting Alongthis evening.
Social skills can be divided into three areas: non-verbal behaviour, verbal behaviour and assertiveness. Parents need to watch their children’s interaction with others and try to tease out what is going wrong.
These skills are “hierarchical”, says Begley, so there is no point jumping in and trying to teach children to be assertive if they haven’t got the basics of the non-verbal behaviour sorted out, such as eye contact, facial expression, gestures and staying the right distance from the people to whom they are talking.
“A child is not going to listen in a conversation – which we think of as verbal behaviour – if they are not paying attention, not looking at the person and not engaged non-verbally first,” she points out.
If you are satisfied with their non-verbal skills, move on to the verbal: do they know how to start a conversation, to join a conversation in an appropriate way, to keep a conversation going and can they end a conversation?
“You don’t just say what you have to say and walk away,” says Begley. “Some of it comes back to what people might have thought of as manners but sometimes children are not being bold or rude, it is just they have not acquired the skill of how to get into a conversation where two or three people are talking.”
Where adults are involved, “excuse me, mummy” is an acceptable “in”; if it is peers, they need to join in what their friends are talking about and playing with, rather than launching in with their own preoccupation.
Practical things parents can do include:
Organise play dates and take a more active role in them. Discuss with your child in advance what game he/she might like to play and what the friend might like to play.
In conversations with your child, direct him/her gently back onto the subject being discussed if he/she is inclined to wander off the topic.
Use personalised “social stories”, developed in the US by Carol Gray (see thegraycenter.org), which help to explain social situations and give reasons behind people’s actions.
Play traditional games with your child such as snakes and ladders to target particular skills, for example turn-taking or accepting that he/she will not win every time.
Tonights Getting In - Getting Alonginformation evening is booked out but, due to demand, will be repeated at a future date. See lucenaclinic.ie for update.
