Helping Students Develop Friendships

September 1st, 2012  

Parents and professionals often struggle with helping children learn to be good friends or to understand the complexities of social interactions. Below are a number of strategies that can help children develop friendships.

1. Get Involved – Participate in community sports teams, art programs, and special events. These are wonderful opportunities for children to engage in structured activities with peers. Ask professionals and support groups for information on these programs or check your community newspapers, centers, and websites.

2. Leverage the Child’s Interests – If the goal of enrolling a child in a program is to provide opportunities for making friends, look for activities the child enjoys. If a child is particularly shy, look for activities that initially have less direct contact. Tumbling and swimming are examples of individual sports while soccer and basketball involve more contact with peers.

3. Role Play Difficult Skills – Practicing social skills is a way to work on specific aspects of social interactions. For example, if you notice your child stands too close to peers or repeatedly asks the same questions, help them learn about personal space or conversational skills through role play.

4. Provide Examples – While reading books or watching television, explain social situations to children. Point out how helping others, using kind words, and listening when friends talk are ways to be a good friend. When characters are being hurtful or invading someone’s personal space, point these actions out and ask the child what the character could do differently to be a better friend.

5. Model Being Good to Others – Part of being well liked and being a good friend is being kind. Demonstrate kindness by saying nice things about and to others. Point out when a co-worker does something thoughtful and how this makes you feel about them. If your child is sympathetic or says something complimentary, tell them their actions made you happy.

6. Do Not Force Friendships – Just like adults, children get along better with some peers than others. Teaching children to be kind and to include everyone in activities is important, but they do not have to be best friends with everyone.

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Related Services Corner – Counseling

May 1st, 2012  

Counseling is determined to be a related service when students’ social/ behavioral deficits adversely impact their school performance and relationships. Counseling may include direct assistance to students and/ or consultation to those working with them. In order for some students with disabilities to access and receive benefit from their educational setting comparable to their nondisabled peers (i.e. FAPE) and make adequate progress, their skill and knowledge deficits in the social/ behavioral/ school expectations arena must be remediated. In such cases, teams should enlist the help of their school psychologist in assessing the deficits, designing interventions,  consulting with others, or directly delivering remediation.

There are many options for delivering counseling services under an IEP. It may strictly involve the school psychologist in a one-on-one weekly counseling session. However, most of the time, it will be a mixture of instructional/ counseling contacts either in an individual or group format along with regular consultation with the student’s teacher(s) and/ or administrator to arrange practice or generalization to the broader school environment.

To accomplish goals for counseling, most school psychologists adopt an approach to remediation based on a “learning” model with a skills focus. Since students come to school expecting to learn new skills/ knowledge, learning models of counseling are often more instructional, more palatable to the student in the school environment, and easier to generalize to other school settings like the classroom. Learning-based approaches are also preferred by school psychologists because there is far more research supporting their efficacy. While learning theory is the foundation for conceptualizing many social/ behavioral deficits that require counseling, a problem-solving model is the preferred vehicle for identifying, establishing the scope, designing interventions, and monitoring changes in the behaviors that are the target of counseling as a related service.

 

Talk to your school psychologist for more information or if you have a student whose social skills deficits or maladpative behaviors are interfering in their school success.