What Are Social Skills?

Social Skills: How to be more desirable than an Ipad?

He was there sitting and playing with his Ipad.

I was sure I was downright more attractive and interactive than what was in his hands. In my moment of jealousy (yes I was pitting myself against the Ipad), I sprung up on him and suavely said “Lets play!”
He looked at me indecisively, with glances darting from the Ipad to me and back to it. It was a moment of truth, was I more attractive than that black (or occasionally white) piece of equipment? “OK!” He said. I felt I won the match.

If only he could come to me.

To be honest, wouldn’t you hope for your child to come to you and initiate to play? Wouldn’t you hope he/she is able to sustain a meaningful conversation? Wouldn’t you hope he/she is able to navigate the social scene with deft and skill like Ben 10 or Dora the explorer? Well it all boil down to social skills. Now, the term “social skills” is what I called the coolest term to use but the least understood term. Most people or rather parents thought social skills are the antidote of autism. Well technically it is. But what are actually social skills and how do you teach social skills?

Concocting the “antidote”

Social skills are skills that we use to communicate with people, both verbal and non-verbally, through gestures, body language and facial expressions. In order for a child to communicate, first and foremost there must be the desire to interact. Hence, social skills are best taught under the conditions that the child finds you or a situation interesting and wants to engage you. For a lot of children with mid to severe autism, the interaction is often restricted to requesting. While teaching requesting is important to avoid tantrum, having joint attention and the desire to interact are perennial. So much so, I once came across a parent and she made a comment “I rather have a non-verbal child who is able to emotionally connect with me, than a verbal child who is just disinterested.” My reaction? I couldn’t agree more.

For teaching high-functioning children social skills, the aims go further with teaching the children how to detect subtle but significant verbal and non-verbal cues and responding appropriately to build a meaningful relationship. Essentially the children have to have the abilities to infer from the situation, read the other party’s emotion and use their deductive reasoning skills to propose a good reply. Well if you look at it, it is a bit like a detective work. While for most of us, these skills are intuitive, but it is a lot of work for our children.

Nurture Pods’ antidote.

Fortunately these skills can be learnt and with lots of practice our children can be as socially skilful as Ben 10 or Dora the explorer. In May 2015, Alex and I underwent training for Secret Society social skills program, organised by the Social Skills Training Institute (Australia). The program is drawn by Dr Renae Beaumont (PHD) who is an honourary research fellow at the Parenting and Support Centre, The University of Queensland. Dr Renae has over 10 years of clinical and research experience working with children with autism spectrum disorders and their families.
In order to ensure the efficacy of the program in local context, Alex and I will be fine tuning the program. What makes our social skills program different from other service providers are that on top of targeting broad skills like befriending, learning to play well and lose well etc, we are targeting fundamental skills like reading of emotions, detecting of verbal and non-verbal cues, inferring from situations, deductive reasoning, logical comprehension, appropriate communication and much more. Last but not least, we ensure the fun factor to drawn out our children’s desire to engage.

While Alex and I are formulating the “antidote”, for parents at home let’s not forget you have an even more important role to play: being more attractive and engaging than an Ipad!

Michelle Poh