Stimulating social skills at home

Published: 19 Feb 2021 Tagged: Critical Corerole playrole playing gamesocial skillsstorytelling

Neurodiversity can impact children’s lives in many ways. Some of these ways are easily measurable such as school performance or medical diagnoses, but some ways are just too subjective, which includes behavioural traits and social skills. No one can be truly happy if not feeling connected to other people, loving and being loved. Because of this, stimulation of social skills is essential to help children interact with their families, classmates, teachers and people from the community.

While there are specific therapies to stimulate social skills towards children experiencing neurodiversity, parents, siblings and other close people can do some activities which help develop children’s social skills. We have listed some of the most effective and easiest ones for you to perform with your children:

• Perspective discussion. This activity can be performed anytime you are watching a movie, animation, series or even animated sequences in a videogame. You can pause a specific moment and ask questions such as "Why is that character crying?", "What do you think this person is feeling now", and similar questions to stimulate imagination and reasoning from the child.
• Interaction through toys. By using puppets, action figures and dolls, the child can play and make interactions related to daily situations. It could be the preparation for a birthday party, the break time at school, the visit to grandparents’ house, going to a restaurant with parents etc. These simulations can stimulate the use of prompts such as "What to say to someone who is celebrating birthday?", "How to order some food to the waiter?", "What should you do after annoying someone unintentionally?". Even the electronic game The Sims could be used for such stimulation, with discussions regarding how the characters should behave, what they should do and so on. It is especially interesting to use The Sims to analyse characters’ Needs (such as hunger, fun, social etc.) and discuss about these Needs and how to satisfy them.
• Character role play. A very useful strategy to stimulate social skills and awareness of other people’s emotions is the use of role-playing activities. In a very similar way of the interaction through toys above, but this time the child, parents, friends and other participants will assume different roles. After the play, a quick talk about things that happened would be interesting. If the child is not so young, there is the opportunity of using TRPGs (tabletop role playing games) developed especially for the stimulation of social skills. The most recent and famous is Critical Core.
• Virtual play. Solutions such as FaceTime or other virtual playdates apps can help children feel closer to their friends and relatives, virtually playing and interacting in ways that they can feel stimulated to demonstrate social skills, such as asking things with clarity, acknowledging what the friend or relative might be felling and so forth.
• Telling short stories. It is always interesting to comprehend children’s mindset and worldview through their imagination when telling stories or telling stories to them. By questioning characters’ attitudes and feelings, children are stimulated to recognise behavioural patterns and how to react to them.

The five activities above are just a few examples of activities that stimulate a child’s social skills and awareness of their own emotions and others’. How about you, how do you help develop your child’s social skills?