5 Essential Social Skills for Children and How to Build Them
Being a functional adult with excellent mental well-being excessively depends on one's environment and learning as a child.
A child exposed to teachings about social skills will generally grow to thrive better in social situations than one that wasn't exposed.
Thus, it's essential to know how to build social skills for children if you want them to thrive socially in their adulthood.
In adulthood, one social skill that's inherently important is respecting other people's boundaries.
When people set boundaries around their bodies, beliefs, or work, entering the limits without permission may be met by instant rebuke or dislike.
Another essential social skill children should learn is how to cooperate.
Since no man is an island, everyone needs to cooperate with fellow humans at some point; to solve a problem or create something fantastic.
With the cooperation skill under the belt, your child will find it easy to work alongside other people.
Similarly, having patience will help your kid better control their emotions when upset.
It will also help them keep calm when things are not going their way, or people are being difficult.
Patience is a skill that everyone needs to deal with life's uncontrollable incidents.
Read on to learn some essential social skills for children and how to build them:
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Respecting Boundaries
When teaching social skills to children, respect for boundaries should be there because it will help them stay in the good books of other people.
It will also earn them respect since people tend to disrespect those constantly breaking boundaries.
You can teach them social skills by telling them to set a boundary for themselves.
Ensure that they make their boundary clear.
It may be a boundary concerning touching their body or eating their meal.
Whatever it is, emphasize the clarity.
Then, adhere to their boundary without complaining.
This will show them how amazing it is to tell people not to do something, and they follow through.
They will realize that when someone else sets a boundary, and they act accordingly, the person will feel satisfied.
Once they understand the feelings they get from their boundary getting respected, it's time to set your boundary.
Give them a clear-cut boundary and instruct them to respect it.
If they can respect your boundary, they can appreciate the boundaries of others.
Cooperation
A person that can't work with people will have people detesting them because there will surely be a time when they need to, and their failure will annoy others.
Therefore, it's one of the social skills for children to learn for good mental well-being.
You can help children build the skill by taking turns when doing something fun.
Generally, children never want to leave fun things and will fight to continue the fun until they are tired.
However, if you teach them to take turns so others can enjoy, they will learn the skill quickly.
Additionally, you should praise them whenever they take turns or cooperate in any venture.
Doing this will reinforce the positive behavior and make them more likely to repeat such in the future.
Remember that kids love praises and positive emotions from adults.
Also, to instill cooperation in them instead of followership, you should give them suggestions instead of commands.
This will enable them to seek cooperating teams rather than power-skewed teams with an inferiority complex.
Patience
As one of the practical social skills for children due to its ability to help people avoid getting stressed, patience is essential to build.
You can help them build the skill by being an excellent example of a patient person.
Kids imitate, and the better you are at being patient, the better your child will be.
You can also help your child develop the skill by using a clock to time them when waiting.
Showing them the time as it goes by will help them visualize how long they have spent and how much longer they can hold it.
With increasing lengths of time, their patience will grow.
However, you should understand that kids are kids who will have flighty attention spans.
Thus, your patience training may be sometimes disregarded for an exciting cartoon.
But, you should not get offended.
Instead, focus on increasing their patience level in little steps.
During the wait, you can teach children different strategies to keep their minds busy.
You may tell them to count numbers to infinity, visualize fantasy worlds in their heads, or read books, ensuring they don't waste their time.
Communicating Needs
You can teach one of the essential social skills to children by being a model.
The skill is the ability to communicate needs, and you can teach it by sharing your needs in the presence of your kids.
Furthermore, you can help them build this skill by ensuring you don't shut them up when they communicate.
Constantly telling them to stop talking can eventually make them silent since they believe you don't care about their needs.
Instead of stopping them, listen to them actively while they talk.
Do away with your devices or any other distracting objects.
They will understand that you value their talks, making them more open to you about things bothering them.
You can also help them by creating a structure to share their needs.
You can advise them to pick a time when the person they want to talk to feels alright.
Then, they should communicate their feelings in a structured form that doesn't insult the person.
Conflict Resolution
By learning conflict resolution, your kid will know how to deal with issues with friends, teachers, and other people in society.
Conflict resolution is one of the social skills for children that regularly get taught because of the need to make children grow into peace-loving adults.
Start your child on the teaching by telling them about empathy.
To correctly resolve a conflict, they must think from the other person's perspective.
They need to realize that the other person may not be all bad, and it was simply a misunderstanding.
Also, you should ensure you are a great role model in this regard.
Don't fight the cashier that gave you the wrong change or the person that hit your car.
Instead, resolve these issues calmly and watch your child learn fast from your actions.
Teach them to think about the solutions to an issue rather than getting fixated on the emotions around it.
They will benefit more from resolving the conflict to solve the problem than from escalating the situation.
Conclusion
To help a child build healthy mental well-being, they need to develop essential social skills for children so they will know how to function well in society.
These essential skills include respect for boundaries, cooperation, patience, communication of needs, and conflict resolution.
Resources
https://www.allprodad.com/5-tips-for-teaching-your-kids-about-boundaries/
https://www.zerotothree.org/resources/222-tips-on-helping-your-child-learn-to-cooperate
https://www.cadence-education.com/blog/parents-corner/skills-for-kids/amp/
https://positivepsychology.com/communication-activities-adults-students/
https://www.pbs.org/parents/thrive/5-strategies-to-help-kids-resolve-conflict
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