For many of us , conversations are effortless. These skills have developed over the years through engaging with society. However, for many adults and children dealing with psychological concerns , social interaction can be difficult and frustrating.
Children with certain psychological and behavioural concerns are often observed to have difficulties initiating and maintaining conversations. This hinders a child’s opportunity to develop meaningful relationships around him/her, in turn hindering their social development and performance in school.
However, this reluctance to engage socially is often misread. It could be possible that some children would want to engage socially,but their insufficient communication skills stop them from doing so. This entire scenario is often looked at as a child’s lack of interest in engaging with others, which might not be true in every case. Here, observing a child’s intentions for not engaging socially and differences between each remain crucial for professionals and parents to dissect. Realising that the ability to communicate does not develop naturally in some children, we can use various strategies to improve their ability to initiate and maintain any kinds of social interaction.
MODELING
Behaviour modeling involves a learner observing and imitating specific behaviours demonstrated by a model. Behaviour modeling generates many benefits in terms of social interaction. A model would demonstrate initiating a conversation, asking basic questions to friends or peers, with an intention that the learner would observe and do it himself/herself one day. Modeling involves many approaches like in vivo, visual and audio modeling. Visual modeling has proven to be beneficial for children having difficulty interacting. For example, children watch cartoons and adapt a lot of phrases and sentences from their favourite characters. This encourages us to make structured visual aids to improve social interaction. For example, a cartoon episode involving a child’s daily interactions in school.
TICK OFF CHARTS
We have seen tick off charts in terms of behaviour charts for children. These charts work wonders for children with specific expected behaviours, ticking it off or putting a star or a zero when the behaviour occurs. In terms of improving social interaction, these charts can have phrases that a child is expected to use at least once in a day, which would then get ticked off once done. This list can always add, subtract phrases and even evolve with the child and the child’s current social involvement.
ENGAGING IN PLAY ACTIVITIES
Play methods provide an excellent approach to an unstructured way of improving a child’s social interaction with peers. Play activities foster role-playing games and other social games that are beneficial for communication. Games also allow a child to engage in turn taking behaviours, foster empathy with winning and losing and put a child in a situation where he/she will communicate to be a part of the group. Certain games also encourage cohesive problem solving, further enabling a child to communicate with peers. Examples of these play activities include dodgeball, treasure hunt or even sit down games like Uno, Charades, etc.
POSITIVE REINFORCEMENT
Positive reinforcement is the process of increasing the future probability of some behavior by following that behavior with a pleasant or desirable consequence (Scott et al, 2017). Positive reinforcement has been found to be a useful tool for improving multiple maladaptive behaviours in children as well as for improving communication skills. In simpler terms, positive reinforcement involves rewarding the child when they engage in desired behaviours.
For example, a verbal praise given to a child for maintaining eye contact while greeting the class teacher. It could also be in the form of tangible rewards, for example a candy given to a child for participating in a group activity at school. Similarly, other rewards can also be used like collecting stickers each time they spoke to a classmate and initiating conversation. A collection of these stickers can then warrant a bigger tangible reward, or rewards like doing his favourite activity.
PET INTERACTION AS A SOCIAL TOOL
Using pet interaction as a social tool can be considered a very non-traditional approach to improve social communication. This idea works on the premise that pets provide a safe, unconditional and non-judgemental environment for a child to socialize. Pets encourage both verbal and non verbal communication. They also help foster empathy, an important feeling every child must develop.
Wood, Corti and Bulsara (2005) found that pets are positively associated with some forms of social contact. An example found in one of the studies tells us about a girl in primary grade, afraid of reading out loud in the classroom. She was then encouraged to read little by little everyday to her pet. The child started reading to her dog everyday and eventually gained confidence to read out loud in front of her peers.
The findings of a study implied that canine-assisted reading aloud programs had potential to increase the reading fluency and relaxation level of children with lower performance when reading to a dog (Fung, 2019).
In conclusion, improving social communication skills for children requires a holistic and blended approach. Various evidence-based approaches as well as non-traditional approaches can be adopted to facilitate and ensure that a child develops socially, thus aiding other areas of life. Each child may benefit from a different approach, hence it is important to keep in mind to use an individualised and catered approach would work wonders for a child to develop socially.
References :
Fung, S.C, (2019). Effect of a Canine-Assisted Read Aloud Intervention on Reading Ability and Physiological Response: A Pilot Study. Animals (Basel). 24;9(8):474. doi: 10.3390/ani9080474.