How To Help Develop Your Child’s Social Skills

Social skills are some of the most important aspects to a child’s development. No matter what age your child is, this is the kind of thing that you are going to need to start helping them to develop, although the focus and the ways in which you do this will of course vary by age. In any case, it’s a really good idea to try and help develop your child’s social skills, as that is always going to be one of the best ways to ensure they are going to develop generally as a person as strongly as possible.

To that end, let’s take a look at what you can do to help this process along. You should find the following things all helpful tips towards that. Some of them might be more relevant for your child than others, but as long as you are making good use of a number of them, you should find that this makes a world of difference.

Start With Self-Acceptance

One of the main stumbling blocks for a lot of kids socially is that they are entering social spaces without a strong degree of self-acceptance. Because of that, they are going to struggle to bring their best self to the group, and that can be something of a struggle. If you want to make sure that your child is going to have great social skills, you will need to think about what you can do to help them develop some self-acceptance. As it happens, this might be easier than you think, though there is no doubt that it is often a challenge.

Essentially, this is all about loving oneself, not seeing one’s foibles as a lack or a loss, but just part of one’s whole. The earlier you can teach your children about this stuff, the better it will be for them, so that is definitely something that you will want to think about here. However you do it, encouraging this kind of self-acceptance is going to lead to much more confidence, and you’ll find that they are going to therefore be able to be in social situations much more easily from an early age.

This is something of a superpower, and one of the best things you can do to help your child to develop well, so it’s absolutely important that you focus on this.

Explain Basic Social Skills

Another good early thing to do is to explain to your child about various social skills – what they are called, how they look and why they are going to be important. This is one of those things that you are going to want to think about generally when it comes to ensuring that they develop well socially. It’s like teaching them about anything else – at first you just have to go through the basic concepts and make sure that you are going to be clear on what they are. Once they know about those, they then know what they are aiming for, at least roughly, so that is something that you are going to want to be aware of.

What kinds of social skills might you want to teach them about first and foremost? There are quite a few that you will consider, and it’s vital that you are going to be doing all you can to try and be aware of this. In fact, the next few sections are all the kind of skills that you might want to talk to your child about early on, as they form the bedrock of good social skills.

Listening

This may be the most important skill of all when it comes to developing as a social being. As long as your child is able to listen properly, that is going to help hugely in being a social person. It’s much more important than talking, which is something that is generally overrated. Being able to listen will mean that your child is respected and admired in social settings, that people are happy to be around them and that they are much more likely to enjoy themselves in social settings too. So all of that is clearly beneficial, and will come naturally from them listening a little more.

If you want to try and help them develop their listening skills, it’s easily done, although it may of course be a skill that some kids take to better than others. In any case, just engaging your child in conversation and asking them questions about what they have heard is going to help a lot here, and it’s the kind of thing that you are going to want to think about for sure. Once they have some good listening skills, everything else can seem to fall into place, as it is really that important that they have this skill first.

Playing

There should ideally be a certain playfulness to social interactions, and as long as there is, this is the kind of thing that can really help your child’s experience of the social to be much better and more enjoyable. As children, they are obviously going to find that play comes naturally to them, but nonetheless it’s something you might want them to try and develop as much as possible, and it is therefore worth trying to encourage this if you can. Good playing skills are just as important as anything else, and this is something that you should be careful not to overlook if you can help it.

Actually, the theory is that there are some specific levels of play which children develop through at various ages fairly automatically. This is something that you might notice in your own child. They might go from unoccupied and solitary play to parallel play and beyond. In fact, there are many benefits of parallel play which you won’t find in earlier stages, and so on, so each part of the process is hugely important and central to the development in general.

All you really need to do is to encourage your child to play with others, and hopefully to enjoy it as much as possible. If you can do that, it’s going to bode very well for them all in all.

Communicating

We have looked at listening, which is actually one of the main kinds of communicating. But there are also the outward-facing forms of communication too, and these are vital social skills which your child needs to develop at some point as well. So you might find that you need to encourage them with this if you are going to be able to help them develop their social skills as well as possible. Otherwise, it might be that they are not necessarily as developed as you would hope.

The main form of communication that you might need to help teach is talking. Verbal communication is actually the minority in terms of human communication – most of it is non-verbal. But the non-verbal stuff is generally automatic, and you won’t really need to teach it as such, whereas verbal communication might take some training.

It’s important that you encourage your child to express themselves fully, honestly and openly. This is a good way to be and it encourages a general mode of communication which will serve them well throughout their life. So you will find that this is a really useful thing to encourage.

All in all, strong communication skills are a godsend, and can make life a lot easier for your child, so make sure that you are helping them to develop this as well as you can.

Personal Space

The concept of personal space is really important too, and it’s something that you are going to find hugely vital to teach your kid about as best as you can. This is for their own sake, as well as for other children that they will be spending time with. In other words, you want to make sure that they are aware of how to protect their own personal space, but you also want to ensure that they are not invading other people’s spaces either. It works both ways, and you are going to find it’s hugely important to be aware of that early on.

So talk to them about what personal space is and how you can think about it. This might be one of the most important concepts you explain to them, and you’ll probably find that it does them wonders to know about it early on. It can also be a genuinely useful self protection skill, one that is probably going to be incredibly important for you to consider.

Those are some of the things that you are going to want to think about if you are keen on helping your child to develop their social skills.