Chanie was celebrating her eighth birthday with a group of classmates. They had finished eating and were getting restless so Chanie’s mother suggested she open the presents. Anticipation mounted as she lifted the first present from the pile and began to tear off the wrapping paper.
A beautiful sticker and stationery album peeked through the torn paper. Her classmates murmured appreciatively. But Chanie frowned. “I already have one of these,” she said plaintively. “Chanie!” her mother chided her, glancing at the name on the birthday card. “Say thank you to Rachel!”
“Thank you,” the birthday girl said tonelessly as she opened another gift. This one was a gameboy. A gasp of envy and approval went up from the crowd of eight year olds encircling her.
“But this isn’t the one I wanted.”
As if someone had thrown a pail of cold water over the young guests, the excitement and congeniality in the room swiftly died. A few of the girls turned away stiffly, hurt and chagrined by Chanie’s rudeness – perhaps wondering if they were next in line to be humiliated.
Chanie’s mother tried to salvage the situation by calling her daughter to the side and whispering a few succinct reproaches in her ear. “You are behaving terribly,” she hissed. “If you don’t show appreciation for the presents, everyone will be very upset with you and never again want to come here to play with you, do you understand?”
Chanie hung her head but the damage was done. Her mother tried to pull things back on course by introducing a new game. The girls’ feeble response, however, signaled the party was all but over.
Chanie ended up by herself in a corner, feeling morose and disgraced, as one by one, the girls recited perfunctory thank-yous and good-byes and drifted away.
“It was a disaster,” Chanie’s mother told me later, describing the incident. “What do I do with her?”
If I hadn’t known Chanie’s mother well, I might have wondered if her daughter’s rude behavior was the result of poor upbringing and improper role-modeling at home. But I knew that to be far from the case. Both of Chanie’s parents were gracious people who took parenthood seriously.
Chanie herself was actually a bright and well-meaning child, although she grappled with learning difficulties in reading and listening skills. As is often the case with children in this category, she was socially inept and lacked “friendship skills.”
“Clever but clueless,” her mother sighed.
Lacking Friendship Skills
The ability to get along with others and make friends is one of the most important set of skills that children can acquire as they grow. Acquiring these skills can be difficult for any child, but is invariably so for those with attention deficit or other learning disabilities.
Kids with learning problems often develop low self-esteem. If, at the same time they are socially inept, the tendency toward low self-worth is greatly magnified. They may become shunned or rejected by their peers. Helping them become socially competent can go a long way toward bolstering their self-confidence. It may help them avoid negative and destructive experiences that can scar for life.
How can you judge whether your child is socially inept and requires assistance in building friendship skills? If he or she does fit this profile, most of the criteria below, adapted from the writings of childhood-development expert Dr. John Brentar, will apply.
- The child complains that he has no friends and is not invited to birthday parties and social events with classmates or neighborhood children. He tends to be withdrawn and spends a lot of time by himself (while actually preferring to be with peers).
- He has difficulty participating in team sports or group activities.
- She shows poor sportsmanship and overreacts when her team loses.
- Her teacher reports social difficulties in the classroom as well. She complains that classmates won’t include her in recess activities, tease or bully her, or simply ignore her.
- He resents or won’t listen to your suggestions, and refuses to acknowledge that his own behavior plays a key role in alienating his classmates. His self-awareness is extremely limited.
- He often behaves in markedly immature ways. He cannot sustain social interaction, often wandering off in the middle or a conversation or game. He does not pick up the cues in other’s behavior to know that it is time to stop joking, teasing or roughhousing. As a result, what begins as pleasant interaction degenerates into a quarrel or fistfight.
Create A Support System
If you realize your child’s learning difficulty is hampering his social interactions, there are many ways you can guide him toward better social skills. Try practicing the three R’s: Provide social skills instruction that is relevant, deals with real life, and delivered in real time.
That means watching for teachable moments to coach your child in his interactions with others and doing so right away (or soon after). Focus on specific behaviors. Offer prompts before your child acts, and praise him for positive interactions.
“Encourage all members of the family to assist in the creation of a support system for the child,” suggests noted educational specialist Richard Lavoie. “Siblings play a particularly important role in such a system. Create a non-competitive home (and school!!) environment where the child learns to celebrate his own small victories. The child must learn to view his progress within the context of his own previous performance, not the performance of others.”
Encourage role-playing. Help your child rehearse his behavior in “pretend” situations. You may need to play several, even all of, the roles until your child feels comfortable participating. Using puppets can help.
Choose roles. Act out the scene. Start with role-playing your own child’s behavior by saying, “If you don’t let me play this game, I’m going to steal the ball and not give it back!” Let the role-play continue with the child posing as an adult and saying, “What’s going on here? Why are you two fighting?” or whatever he or she deems appropriate in moving the drama forward.
Afterwards, ask questions about what happened. Praise the child if he recognizes actions and words in the role-play that were appropriate, or that helped resolve a problem or conflict.
If he cannot initiate a response, ask a question to help him figure things out. For example: “Do you think that running away with the ball will help the child get invited into her classmates’ game?”
Sometimes you’ll have to spell out why the socially inept child’s tactics are doomed to fail in securing the result he or she so desperately craves.
For example, Chanie’s mother took her daughter aside after the party and talked about the great disappointment Chanie’s friends felt when she expressed disdain toward their presents. She role-played one of the friends recounting to her mother, with tears in her eyes, how her gift was scorned. Chanie’s eyes opened wide with awareness at this revelation, and they too filled with tears – tears of empathy.
Pairing Off The Reject With The Socially Skilled
Cooperative education activities in which teachers pair off students can be particularly effective in the effort to include the rejected child in the classroom. These activities enable the child to use his academic strengths while simultaneously developing his social skills.
For example, students can work together to complete experiments, bulletin boards and “peer-tutoring.” In setting up these arrangements, the teacher should take pains to assign the socially inept child to work together with a “high-status” socially skilled child who will be accepting and supportive of the rejected child.
The teacher must constantly search for opportunities to encourage appropriate social interactions for the socially inept child, even going so far as to invent situations to throw students together for the benefit of the socially handicapped child.
For example, “Leah, would you please go over to Shonnie’s desk and tell her that I would like her to bring me her composition notebook?” Or, “Chaim, I would like you and Moshe to return all the Level One readers to the book closet down the hall.”
Easing The Pain Of Rejection
Rejection is one of the painful experiences one can suffer in life. The student with social skill deficits invariably experiences rejection in any activity that requires students to select their classmates for teams or groups. This selection process generally finds the rejected child in the painful position of being the “last one picked.”
“A teacher should prevent these humiliating ordeals by pre-selecting the teams or drawing names from a hat,” suggests Lavoie. Or one can intervene at the point when six or eight students have still not been chosen. Assign half of the students to one team and the remaining students to another. This prevents any one student from being shamed as the “last one picked.”
“Most important, the teacher must clearly demonstrate acceptance of and affection for the isolated or rejected child,” stresses Lavoie in The Teacher’s Role In Fostering Social Skills. “This conveys the constant message that the child is worthy of attention. The teacher should use her status as a leader to elevate the status of the child.”
We all face social situations around the clock – at home, school, and in other settings. Every one, at one time, or another has “put their foot in their mouth,” committed an embarrassing faux pas, or put himself on the wrong side of others. Teachers and parents should draw on these personal experiences to put themselves in touch with the pain felt by the child who constantly feels rejected or out of sync with his peers.
That empathy will help them to ease a child through social challenges and acquire the friendship skills that bring sunshine into our lives.
