Département psycho-médical
Mrs Petra Abi Farah – School Counselor
The importance of social skills
“I told my son: You don’t need to be the top 3 in your class. Being in the middle is fine, as long as your grades aren’t too bad. Only this kind of person has enough free time to learn other skills”-Jack Ma (Founder of Alibaba).
Here we go again, closing another chapter of an academic year at CSP. This year I choose to talk about the importance of teaching our children social skills. Life is not a popularity competition, but your children will require reasonable social skills to get along in families, schools and in the workplace. However parents should be taking the major responsibility for teaching those skills to their kids, teachers will inevitably be involved in leading social skills in classrooms and school halls. Other adults, peers and the media also dramatically affect children in their social interactions. Here are some suggestions for teaching your children social skills. Sharing is probably one of the most difficult ones to learn since young children are so egoistical. By age two the word “mine” becomes important in their thinking, actions and vocabulary. Children have to learn to share attention, time, talk and toys. Young children also need to learn appropriate insistence skills. During their school years, parents need to guide their kids by using the 4 R’s because children are very concrete in their thinking:
- Repetition- repeating the required action more than once, and asking your child for the same action over and over again.
- Rewards- Who doesn’t like to be given the approval, or rewarded for a certain behavior? Kids love to be given any compliment in assurance to their action “I am proud of you!” “Thank you!”
- Role-plays: believe it or not, yes you have to be an actor somehow. Role-playing with your child has been proven to have a great impact on their positive behavior. You have to reach their level every now and then, they love it! Don’t forget the magical words “ Please” and “Thank you”
- Reading: buying a book that talks about sharing, and social skills will give your child something to refer to. Take the character as his/her role modal!
Be creative with your child, and allow your child to be creative too!
I will leave you there! Wishing you all a marvelous summer vacation!
Stay safe and see you all in September 2017.
Petra Abi-Farah
School Counselor & Coordinator of the English Department