It’s report card time, but are we grading all of the important categories? Yes, we’ve got a section for Chumash, Math, Navi, Science, Reading, and many more subjects. So, what are we missing? I’ve written about this before: research has continually proven that social skills are integrally linked to academic success.
First: what are social skills? And can we really put them on a report card? According to author and clinical psychologist Dr. Eileen Kennedy-Moore, social skills are “the abilities necessary to get along with others and to create and maintain satisfying relationships.” In my book Q&A with Rifka Schonfeld: The Answers You Need for a Happier and More Productive Life, I write about the link between social skills and academics:
When children develop low self-esteem [because of failure in academics or otherwise], they are less likely to attempt to make friends. They believe that no one would be interested in being their friends and therefore think that they will be rejected by their peers.
The same is true in the reverse. Children who struggle with social skills are less likely to participate in class, less likely to ask important questions when they don’t understand something, and more likely to fall between the cracks.
What would a social skills report card look like? Like most report cards, it would be divided into multiple categories. Some of those categories might include:
Executive Function. In their book, Executive Skills in Children and Adolescents, Peg Dawson and Richard Guare explain: “Executive skills allow us to organize our behavior over time and override immediate demands in favor of longer-term goals. Through the use of these skills we can plan and organize activities, sustain attention, and persist to complete a task.”
Nonverbal Communication. Non-verbal communication such as proper eye contact and tone of voice often are extremely important in creating life-long relationships and friendships because they are an integral part of conflict resolution.
Resilience and grit. Psychotherapist Linda Graham in her book Resilience: Powerful Practices for Bouncing Back from Disappointment, Difficulty, and Even Disaster, explains: “Resilience – the capacity to bend with the wind, go with the flow, bounce back from adversity [is] essential to the survival and thriving of human beings and human societies.”
Manners. When children speak kindly, politely, and respectfully, they are treated kindly, politely, and respectfully in return.
Personal hygiene. Personal hygiene is an essential social skill. If children do not wash and keep up with the social norms, their peers will likely reject them. Proper hygiene is an easy rule to follow even for a concrete- minded child.
While many children develop social skills naturally, there are children who need to be explicitly taught. Creating a curriculum (and a report card) around these essential skills can help all students succeed. Another way to explicitly teach younger children is through workbooks and picture books written for this very purpose. That’s why I wrote Social Skills Around the Clock, a colorful comic style book that helps children understand the different skills needed at different times and situations throughout the day. There are also great workbooks for older children available so that they can explicitly practice these social skills.
This year at report card time, it might help to think about the intangibles that are missing from the report card.