Developing Social Skills through Individual and Family Therapy

Many children and adolescents who present for mental health services experience difficulties in their peer relationships. They may encounter problems making and keeping friends, have trouble noticing social cues, or have a hard time expressing themselves. Both individual and family therapy can assist children and teens to gain skills for navigating their interpersonal environments. Therapists may help kids to develop their social skills via a number of methods:

–By helping them recognize positive and negative social influences

Therapists may work with children to sketch drawings or diagrams that map out their social worlds, and identify how they feel about certain people or groups of people.

–By developing plans with them to maximize positive social influences Therapists might make concrete plans with children about what they could do to improve their social environment, such as “call Steve”, “join the boy scouts” or “avoid Sarah”.

–By helping them identify and manage their feelings about interpersonal events

Therapists can help kids identify their feelings about social situations, and also help them cope with these feelings. For example, a child may express that he or she feels hurt or angry that another child has teased him, and a therapist may help a child to express his feelings through words, art, or play.

—By helping kids identify courses of action they might take in response to negative events

In the instance of teasing, a therapist might help a child to decide to limit contact or speak up to the bully, or if physically threatened, to go to a responsible adult for assistance.

–By helping children develop general techniques for making friends, getting along with others, and getting their needs met Therapists might use role-plays, drawings, fantasy play, or specially designed therapeutic board games to help children develop various social skills. The skills that therapists might help children to develop might include: making requests, registering complaints, asking for help, resisting peer pressure, making and accepting compliments, and entering a group of children who are already playing or talking together.

Reducing family stress around life changes, big and small

We often think about how children have difficulty with changes around these times.  But transitions are difficult for parents too, as well as for families as a whole.  It is often hard work for everyone to move from the lazy days of summer vacation to the frenetic activity that autumn brings.

The good news is that transitions – big and small — are also opportunities for positive learning if we are able to manage them successfully.

Putting the following three tips into practice can help:

1. Maintain consistent routines.  Most families have routines and rituals around daily activities such as getting ready to leave the house and going to bed at night.  During a time of change, continuing these routines can provide helpful structure.  (If your family hasn’t established such routines, this would be a good time to do so!)  It can be especially difficult to maintain routines as children stressed by change often test their parents’ capacity to stick with limits, for example, by resisting going to bed at the usual time and declining to do homework when reminded.  This testing behavior, though frustrating and at times exhausting, is actually a child’s way of wondering just how much in their lives is going to change. By maintaining consistent routines and familiar rituals, parents let their children know that there is a limit to the amount of change that is occurring and that they, the parents, are still in charge.  Parents also benefit from the household running as smoothly as possible amid changes.  At the same time, it is important not to be too rigid; allowing some flexibility within the structure of the routine is necessary in order to give children the feeling that they can begin to have some of their own power within the family.

2. Prepare for upcoming changes. For example, helping a child picture what will unfold the first day of dance class and even driving by the studio ahead of time will provide a degree of comfort about starting something new.  For a parent, these sorts of discussions provide an important window into what is going on inside of the child’s mind at a time of great change. Preparation can also help on a very “micro” level.  For example, giving a child who is resisting getting ready to leave the house a five-minute warning before having to put shoes on may avoid 15 minutes of conflict.

3. Allow for a wide range of emotional reactions. Changes can cause an array of mixed feelings, and children need to feel that this mix of feelings is ok. Rather than trying to immediately assuage a child’s sadness about missing her old house by saying “But your new room is so much bigger!” a parent might first say to the child, “Your old room was very special.”  This type of mirroring can let children know that it’s ok to be sad, angry, and excited about the changes in their lives.  It is important for parents to support each other as well, to help reduce the stress they are likely to experience from managing their own mixed feelings about the changes that are occurring as well as their responses to limits being tested. Having support will improve parents’ ability to recognize and make room for their children’s feelings about transitions.

Fostering Resilience in Children

Resilience refers to the ability to recover from adversity and to function successfully despite difficult situations, stress, or trauma.  As parents, we sometimes wish that our children will never have to deal with anything bad or hard, but we also hope that our children will be resilient if they need to be.

Here are a few things parents can do to foster resilience in their children:

1. Teach problem-solving. Rather than throwing hands up in the face of adversity, a resilient person will look to see what problems can be addressed and then proceed to tackle them.  Parents can offer very young children limited choices and teach older ones to problem-solve.

The elements of effective problem-solving are:

1) Identify the problem in objective terms.

2) Brainstorm a number of possible solutions.

3) Select a reasonable one and try it.

4) Come back and evaluate its effectiveness, and if necessary problem-solve again for another solution.

2. Teach life skills. When a child acquires competency in a life skill, he doesn’t depend on others to rescue or take care of him. A boy who can cook a meal knows that he will be able to feed himself. Being proficient in some areas leads to general feelings of competence, a characteristic of resilience.

3. Listen to your child. Listening to your child will help him process his experience and generate solutions as well as feeling heard and understood. Sometimes listening is all that is needed. After that you can ask your child if she wants advice or help, but don’t rush in to rescue. With older children and teens it is particularly important that parents get permission before helping.

4. Don’t over-parent. Body-builders don’t get stronger if mom or dad insists, “Let me lift that weight for you, honey. It’s too heavy and you might strain yourself.” Not over-parenting means not doing for our children on a regular basis what they can do for themselves. For example, parents should not regularly put the clothes on a preschooler who has been taught to dress herself and demonstrates that she can do it. Not over-parenting also means letting a child experience the negative consequences of his actions. When a child leaves lego pieces all over the house and loses the special ones for the lego space station, he will have to make do with what pieces are left, rather than having dad rush out to buy a replacement set.

5. Practice limit setting. When parents set consistent and reasonable limits, children learn to handle the discomfort of not getting immediate and complete gratification. Being resilient includes handling such uncomfortable moments. A teen who comes home after curfew may have to deal with the disappointment and frustration of being grounded the next weekend.

6. Use realistic thinking. We call upon resilience when undesirable things happen. Don’t minimize reality; white-washing something doesn’t make it go away. Also don’t “awfulize” it or make it out to be worse than it is. Keep things in perspective. Help your child have an accurate, age-appropriate understanding of the situation.

BENEFITS OF PLAYING

We all know that play is fun, but aren’t kids just wasting time when they’re rough-housing around instead of practicing spelling words, piano, or taekwondo moves? Well, actually not. If you think about it, the human species evolved without formal education or traveling sports teams. On a survival of the fittest planet, play was where children acquired the functioning and skills that enabled them to problem-solve, cooperate, build human relationships, make sense of the world, and in other ways become “fit.” These skills have not gone out of style simply because we have more sophisticated tools (computers instead of spears) at our disposal.

Using those sophisticated tools, considerable scientific research has been done on play. Some of the benefits that have been identified are:

Physical – Play burns up calories and builds both a strong mind and a strong body. In the large muscle/ gross motor arena, child at play may crawl, walk, run, reach, climb, jump, bend, throw, catch, balance, rotate, and so on. In terms of dexterity and fine motor skills, play often involves handling and manipulating objects and tools.

Social – Most play is highly social and both teaches and requires that children learn to cooperate, negotiate, take turns, share, play by the rules, and follow directions.

Cognitive – Neurological studies have shown that play stimulates brain development, increases exploratory learning, and strengthens memory. Play is an excellent laboratory for problem solving, decision-making, learning about cause and effect, about “what if’s”, about spatial relationships, and more. We all learn much more readily when the process is fun.

Emotional – Children learn about feelings, including how to process them, how to manage and express them, how to understanding the feelings of others, and how to feel and show empathy.

Language – Play is rarely silent for any length of time. Children are testing out sounds and words. A child alone may be narrating his own activities. Children together are learning about and practicing speaking, listening, and conversation skills.

Executive Function – Children at play are highly motivated to learn perseverance, resist impulses, work on self-regulation of emotions and behaviors, and exert self-control and self-discipline in order to accomplish the tasks they set for themselves and to successfully engage with the other players. They are practicing their EF skills on their own initiative without even realizing it.

Creativity and Imagination – An essential element of play is the creative brain, as seen in pretend play and fantasy. We don’t have to teach a child at play to “think outside the box,” they are already doing that instinctively. Daydreams and a rich inner life are often the seeds for goals and passions later in life. The challenge is keeping the creativity vibrant through adulthood.

Resilience – Play helps children use their imagination to handle adversities such as stress, loss, or illness. The child can mentally be somewhere else when things are too big to handle, they can envision and practice real ways to address tough problems, and they can keep important memories alive—all through play.