This Special Life

Autism Advocacy & Support

For Parents

Practical Tips For Teaching Social Skills To Kids With Autism

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You know the song “Make new friends but keep the old.  One is silver and the other is gold?” Friends are a great treasure…especially during childhood.  For kids with autism friendship can be a real struggle.

A parent of one of my former clients shared with me that one of her biggest pain points in getting an ASD diagnosis is realizing her son would not have the carefreeness of friends.  You know, sharing secrets, getting messy, going on adventures, laughing, playing, and making memories. Does this strike a chord with you? 

Peer relationships may be difficult for kids with special needs but it doesn’t mean children are not capable of making friends.  With support, teaching and practice your youngster can have meaningful friendships with other kids.

Today I will share with you some practical tips for teaching social skills to kids with autism so that they can have a bff or two.

Why Are Social Skills Hard?

Before we get into the practical tips it’s good to understand social interactions from your kid’s perspective so we know how to best help them form friendships.

Dysfunction with social interactions and communication are some of the main characteristics for making an ASD diagnosis.  These include the following categories:

  • Sensory sensitivities and issues with self-regulation
  • Speech delays for verbal communication
  • Inability to pick up on non-verbal cues and understanding perspective
  • Being stuck on a routine or repetitive behavior

For a child with autism this can be illustrated with the following examples:

  • Child is sensitive to loud sounds or crowds and avoids kid friendly places 
  • Child does not have the verbal output to go up to a peer and say “can you play with me?”
  • When a child offers a toy to a kid with autism, the autistic kid doesn’t understand that to be a sharing gesture
  • Child only wants to line up cars in a line rather than play with them and is not open to other ideas

Not knowing what to say or how to say things along with not understanding how to behave or play can be overwhelming and stressful!  But there is help! Knowing where the struggles are is your starting point to teaching social skills.

Practical Tips

You might be feeling overwhelmed with knowing how to best help and teach your child social skills and how to interact with others.  Keeping things simple and practical is the best approach when it comes to working with your child. Here are other tips:

  • Social skills training is a journey and not a lesson to be grasped in one day  
  • Regular practice and repetition over time will be your best tool
  • What area(s) does your child struggle with most?  Start working in that area
  • What does your child do well?  Build up those strengths
  • Work on skills in a safe space, like home before venturing out in the community
  • Pick a time of day that is good for your child when s/he is not tired, hungry to practice skills

Teaching Social Skills

To keep things practical and simple when it comes to teaching social skills break down skills into bite size pieces.  It may be tempting to think “we’re going to do anything and everything to learn how to make friends!”  

Following the categories from above here are ideas to teach social skills in each area:

Self-Regulation

  • Work on skills that teach self-regulation so your child gets the sensory input s/he needs to interact with others
  • Practice social skills with regulation activities:  Take turns swinging in a swing, play gross motor games, role-play while jumping on a trampoline
  • Bring along self-regulation tools (like a calming kit) while out in social situations

Verbal Communication

  • If needed seek guidance from a Speech Therapist to work on speech delays
  • Write social stories about how to interact with peers
  • During pretend play set-up simple conversation scenarios, like how to greet a person, how to ask friends to play, how to ask for a turn
  • Write conversation cue cards about simple conversations to have with a friend like favorite sport, hobbies, school, 

Non-Verbal Cues

  • Work on learning and understanding emotions with feelings flashcards
  • Write social stories on how read facial expressions and feelings
  • Make faces with one another and talk about feeling that go with different faces

Routines And Repetitive Behavior

  • Model ways to expand repetitive play themes
  • Create a visual schedule on how to play with toys.  For example things to do with blocks: stack into a tower, make a wall, build up and knock down
  • Pretend to be a peer that interferes with routine and walk child through the stressors of changing routine and give them calming strategies

Additional Ideas

  • Point out social interactions while watching a favorite show or movie
  • Read stories about friendship and point out things in the pictures that show social skills
  • Play games to practice turn-taking, winning and losing
  • If siblings are around ask them to join 
  • Practice basic skills like greetings, initiating simple conversations, saying good-bye and respecting personal space

Expanding Social Skills

There are many things you and your child can do to put social skills into practice.  When you believe your child is ready for playing with a friend you can try out:

  • Arrange a play-date with a familiar peer and facilitate play-time at with activities that your child likes.  Create a visual schedule and have an end-time. Keep play sesion short.
  • Set-up practice session with a peer model with a child who is older.  Older child can model desired behavior and interactions. Coach peer model on what to say or do ahead of time.
  • Have your child attend a social skills group that is facilitated by teachers or therapists.  Inquire at school or local therapy clinic. Many locations offer social skills groups that work on peer interactions in a small group setting.
  • Ask teachers to work on social skills with fellow classmates.

Your child is very capable of learning the social skills needed to make new friends  With your support and guidance you can help them find meaningful friendships. Follow these practical tips for teaching social skills will get you one step closer to meeting those BFF’s!

Star Charts Made Easy

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Does your young child with autism struggle to complete routines or follow instructions, even when you are right there to help them? Are you at your wit’s end of trying to figure out how to motivate them in the moment? Do you feel down when your child refuses to do things you are confident they CAN do…but for whatever reason, WON’T do sometimes?

Enter the star chart, also known as a token system, also known as a fixed schedule of reinforcement.

“Star charts” don’t have to use stars at all – any kind of symbol will do. A great way to visualize how a star chart works is to translate it from your own experience. For example, have you ever tried to create a habit of exercising, or meet a different type of goal that required you to do a specific activity one time per day? You may have used a basic wall calendar to track this, by marking off each day that you exercised on the corresponding date box on the calendar. Maybe you set a goal for yourself for a minimum number of days to have a mark by the end of the month to achieve some type of reward, like a special meal or a new item of clothing.

Star charts for children with autism work on a much shorter scale, but the overall idea is the same. Star charts are a way of tracking progress toward a large goal, or a series of basic actions, using tokens to signify each action which, when enough are collected, can be exchanged for a preferred item or activity (the “reinforcer”).

Now that you know what a star chart is, here is a simple method to follow when introducing star charts with your child – or reintroducing them after a long break:

Start With One Star

If you tried a star chart before and it didn’t work, chances are there was too much of a delay between earning enough stars to get a reward and actually getting that reward. If your child needs a lot of help here, refer to my post about “First-Then Schedules for Beginners.” First-then schedules are a great precursor to star charts. They address the same concepts, but the connection between following an instruction or doing a required task and obtaining reinforcement is more immediate than with a star chart. 

Another way you can start with one star is by filling in all the previous stars before beginning. For example, if you are introducing a star chart for a new difficult activity like cleaning up toys, sitting for a set period of time at the dinner table, or completing the toileting routine, you might have a chart with 5 to 10 stars. When filled in, they would result in a choice of a preferred item or activity. For this new difficult task, though, you could fill in all but the last star before starting. Then, you can help your child complete the required task, give them the last star, and then immediately provide the reinforcer or reward.

This is a good strategy to use if your child is new to star charts or out of practice, or anytime you introduce a new required task or set of tasks that they aren’t familiar with, or haven’t previously been successful with. 

Don’t Let Too Much Time Go By Between Stars

If your child is now used to the routine of earning stars and then cashing them in for a reward, that’s great news! You might even get into the habit of not giving them a star every time they do a task. Some of this drift is natural and expected, especially in the home routine where there is quite a bit of on-the-fly decision making associated with how to modify activities for the whole family to successfully move through each scheduled part of the day. This can even be a great way to start naturally “fading” reinforcement so that your child learns to do tasks when they are asked, whether or not reinforcement or tokens are awarded right away.

However, you do need to be careful here. When too much time goes by between awarding stars – and as a result, the final reward – the strength of the final reward could be diluted. If this happens too often, you may find that the token system is no longer working. When this happens, you’ll need to scale back and award stars more frequently for awhile. Sometimes, you may even need to scale all the way back to one star, or first-then, when this happens.

Use a Variety of Reinforcers, and Changes Them Often

This is one of the hardest things to do, because it requires you to stay on top of your child’s preferences and likes, and plan ahead to make them available as rewards for cashed-in stars. One way to make this process a bit easier is to design your reinforcers around a few themes. For example, if your child really loves Daniel Tiger, you could get a variety of Daniel Tiger books, action figures, party supplies, and other small items to make available as reward choices. You could also expand this theme into adjacent themes, such as tigers or animals that talk. You could also take an activity that is shown on the show, like baking a cake or having a picnic, and do an experience-based reinforcer. In this type of scenario your child would be allowed to cash in their stars for a special baking session with your or a scheduled picnic with a loved one.

If you’re finding that the token system approach stops working for your child after a period of time, and you’ve already tried adjusting the number of stars down, that could mean that the rewards you are offering are no longer functional. Here are some additional ideas for reinforcers that can last across multiple star chart completions:

  • Advent calendars: who says these are just for the month of December? Advent calendars are available year-round on Amazon, and today the options go far beyond chocolate. For example, LEGO, Hot Wheels, and Funko all make advent calendars annually and the overstock can be purchased after the holidays are over. Advent calendars provide you with 24 miniature rewards – and the fun of opening them – to use as available cash-in prizes for your child’s star chart. You also have the added fun of getting to skip around and choose numbers out of order.
  • Figure set toys: again, figure set toys are available in a range of themes and characters, from a range of manufacturers and sellers – online or in-store. Figure sets contain anywhere from six to twenty figures in one set, which you can award your child one at a time each time they complete a star chart, until they’ve earned the complete set.
  • Science experiment kits: science experiment kits are a popular gift, but they’re often over all too quickly. Once the box has been open and the goo has been made or the volcano has exploded, what then? These kits are a bit hard to maximize bang for buck when used in the traditional fashion. But when used as part of a reinforcement system, you can make the anticipation part of the fun. Offer your child the option to earn one piece of the kit for each star chart they cash in. Then, when they’ve earned each kit component, you can do the experiment together, and it will be that much more memorable.

Sensory Strategies To Share With Your Child’s Teacher

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Teachers have a tough job.  They have the heart to help children learn and grow.  They spend countless hours creating lesson plans and spend money they don’t have to make learning meaningful and fun.  Teachers manage classrooms, challenging behaviors, parents, and requirements set by school districts.

I admire those in the teaching profession.  They are superheroes! At the same time they shouldn’t have to be, meaning teachers shouldn’t be expected to carry the weight of the world on their shoulders as make-believe heroes do.

Did you know you have special powers you can use to help lighten the load for the teachers in your life?

Teachers have been around autism and know general information about teaching strategies.  When they hit a brick wall though I’ve been summoned to share autism-specific teaching strategies so their classroom can run smoother and their students can succeed.

You too are your child’s expert and can share strategies with your kid’s teacher!  Today I will give you ideas to share with teachers if they are having a tough time in the classroom.

One of the top challenges I hear from teachers is handling the sensory needs of kids with autism in the classroom.  Sensory integration is a huge component of kids with ASD. We will focus our attention on sensory strategies.

Share Your Child’s Sensory Needs

The first step to successful sensory management is knowing the student’s sensory needs.  Every child is different and varies in their self-regulation. What works for one child doesn’t work for others.

Teachers I’ve worked with incorporate sensory breaks into the routine but usually use popular activities like jumping, swinging, or blowing bubbles and assume everyone in the classroom will be regulated.  What often gets overlooked is that not every kid is a jumper or bubble blower.

Educating your child’s teacher on who your child can make a world of difference.  You know what makes your youngster tick. Share the following with teachers:

  • Over-sensitivity to certain senses
  • Under-sensitivity to certain senses
  • Preferred senses child seeks input 
  • Sensory input child avoids

When I informed teachers what kid’s needs are it helps them determine what sensory activities to include.  If a child responds better to a weighted vest over jumping on a trampoline time won’t be wasted on a jumping break.

Share Your Successful Sensory Strategies

Sharing the sensory strategies you use at home is a great tool to give teachers.  Carrying over interventions used at home into school also strengthens the support students feel from teachers.  It’s familiar and less overwhelming.

Things to share with teachers include:

  • Similar layouts for visual schedules
  • Use same sensory toys at home and school
  • Sensory diets
  • Timing of sensory activities (like take a jumping break after a long period of sitting)
  • List of activities that are calming and a list of activities that boost energy
  • Familiar phrases or terminology you say that teachers can use with students
  • Reinforcers or reward system used at home to use in school

One thing to note about sharing strategies with teachers. It is important that teachers feel they can maintain their autonomy and are respected as educators.  To avoid insulting their intelligence and not sounding like micromanager go into these conversations with a team-oriented approach. Your child’s success is your common ground, let that be your guide when working with teachers.

These easy sensory strategies to share with your teacher will greatly help your child.  Teachers will be better equipped to help your child succeed and they will feel supported in the process.

Understanding Accommodations and Modifications

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As a special educator, part of my job is to ensure children with autism can access school activities and lessons in a way that is meaningful for them. This is different than creating individualized instructional plans and programs, because it involves taking something that already exists and adjusting it in some way – rather than creating something brand new. And, this way of specialized teaching applies to social-emotional learning, too.

There are two main ways of altering educational material and methods to accomplish this goal: accommodations and modifications. The line between these two things often becomes blurry for parents, and the truth is that it can be blurry in practice for educators and other school professionals as well. But it is important to understand the distinction between the two, as well as what they each entail, in order to ask for and utilize them successfully.

In this article, we’ll define accommodations and modifications in a way that is easy to understand and remember. We’ll also give some common examples of accommodations and modifications in an educational setting, and discuss ways to advocate for them appropriately.

Why Do Accommodations and Modifications Matter?

To understand why accommodations and modifications matter, it’s first important to understand the context in which they are typically used. In K-12 educational settings, a tiered or circular approach is often used to gradually increase supports and individualization for students who need extra or specialized support at school. This may be referred to as Response to Intervention (RTI) or Multi-Tiered Systems of Support (MTSS).

This means that all students are provided with a robust, high quality educational environment – including the physical space, the curriculum, and the teaching staff – as their foundation for learning. That’s the first tier. Then, at the second tier, students who need some extra support for specific academic or social and behavioral needs can access that as naturalistically as possible in their classroom or in small groups. This is where accommodations and modifications are applied most frequently. But, that doesn’t mean they aren’t useful and even critical in the third tier as well. The third tier is highly supported, individualized education services tailored to the intensive needs of the child.

What Are Modifications?

It will be easier to understand what accommodations are if we first explain modifications. Modifications are what they sound like: changes to an existing lesson, in order to make it more accessible. For example, a modification for a sheet of math problems could be to shorten the amount of problems assigned, or highlight only the ones relevant to the facts the student currently knows by heart. Text could be modified by making the font larger or increasing the space between words. Visual guides might help the student to focus on what they are reading, such as a ruler used under each line of text as it is read to ease efforts to visually track and block out excess visual stimulation or distractions on the page.

Modifications can be relatively easy to implement “on the fly.” This means that a teacher might notice a student is struggling with an assignment in the moment, and make an adjustment right then – even if they didn’t pre-plan to modify the assignment. In this type of situation the teacher is looking to ensure the student accesses the content without having to complete every single practice opportunity, or to assess their mastery of a concept without completing every test item. The teacher will use their educational judgment to note whether the student can move on at pace with the rest of the class with continuing modifications, or if they will need additional time with the material to master it.

Remember, modifications take what is already there and adjust it based on the student’s unique needs or tolerance and endurance – but the content itself remains the same.

What Are Accommodations?

Accommodations, on the other hand, take what is already there and tackle it in a different way. The assignment is replaced with a different assignment altogether. Accommodations are particularly useful when the student is working within the same learning environment as their peers, and with the same subject matter to a certain extent, but have a different learning style. For example, a nonverbal student learning about community helpers alongside their peers who are doing an activity to verbally identify pictures of police officers, firefighters, and other community helpers during a class meeting might do a picture-to-picture or word-to-picture matching activity instead of verbally saying the answers.

Accommodations could also adjust the subject matter within an overall scope and sequence, to a certain extent. For example, a student who is working on single digit addition while the majority of the class is working on double digit addition could receive a worksheet with single digit addition problems during class work time, while still participating in the mathematics lesson at large with the rest of the class. The teacher could even plan ahead to include some single digit practice in the lecture or group practice section of the lesson, utilizing those as review for students who have already mastered the skill but as group instruction opportunities for the student who is currently working on that skill.

In my experience, accommodations are a lot harder to do “on the fly” than modifications. This is because they require some type of preplanning to identify what content the student is working on and what type of accommodation they will benefit from, as well as how to integrate it with what the class as a whole is doing on a daily basis in their lessons. Because of this, accommodations might be best applied when identified in advance and planned for unit by unit, instead of day by day. Then, the teacher can monitor the student’s response in the moment and make further adjustments from there as needed.

How to Ask for Accommodations and Modifications

If you think your child would benefit from more or different accommodations and modifications than what they are currently receiving in their educational environment, it’s still a good idea to start with inventorying their current menu. This is because when accommodations and modifications are being done well, they often blend into the background of what is happening on a daily basis at school.

A good way to start the conversation is to ask your child’s teacher something along the lines of: can you share with me what accommodations and modifications my child is currently benefiting from, both academically for each subject area, and also socially and behaviorally?

Once you’ve got an outline of what’s happening and what your child is responding to most successfully, you can craft your requests accordingly. For example, if your child’s teacher shares with you that during reading time your child gets more frequent breaks between work tasks so they can engage successfully with the material and not get too tired or bored, you might ask for a similar modification during less structured times of the day when they are struggling to maintain positive interactions with peers for the entirety of lunch, or the entirety of recess. Or, if you have concerns about your child’s ability to understand more abstract concepts like the structure of the U.S. government, you might ask for accommodated material addressing other beginning civics concepts like creating rules, reaching consensus, and following rules.

Finally, if your child has an IEP (Individualized Education Plan), there is a specific section in which accommodations and modifications will be listed. However, these are often listed in boilerplate language, so they will need to be interpreted and applied with specific attention to your child’s needs and their learning contexts at school.

The Right Way To Handle Perseverative Behavior In Autism

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One of the classic behaviors in autism is perseveration.  It’s where a person likes to talk about something, perform a task or do an activity over and over.  Some people call it an obsession others call it a fixation. Most people see it as a negative thing

Do you have a child that likes to repeat things a lot?  It is enough to make you want to run away because it gets tiring!  

During my time as a therapist I’ve spent a lot of time trying to correct this behavior in my clients.  And by correcting I mean stopping. Anytime a perseveration came up I would find ways to redirect, distract, or ignore the repetition.  It’s a common practice in autism therapy.

Most times these strategies were met with resistance and the situation quickly spiraled downward.

It got me thinking, does perseveration have to be a bad thing? Is it something that needs to be snuffed out? 

No it doesn’t! 

Changing our perspective on repetitive behavior and seeing it as a tool rather than a hindrance will give us the right way to handle perseverative behavior in autism.  

Here’s how….

Special Interest Not A Fixation

When a kid loves to play with trains all day long or listen to a song on repeat instead of seeing it as a fixation look at it as a special interest.

A special interest is something that is special and meaningful to a person with autism.  A passion if you will.

Repeatedly lining up trains may not be something kids get stuck on, it may be something they are trying to figure out how something works.  Hearing the same song over and over may be a form of self regulation not a fixation.

Typical kids can play Minecraft or perfect their baseball batting skills for hours on end.  We see this as a hobby not an obsession. Why should it be any different for kids with autism?

Instead use special interests and….

  • Offer opportunities for kids to explore their special interests.  What else can they do with it? What are they learning? How can they share this?
  • Use the special interest as a reward after completing a task  
  • Schedule special interest time into the day 

Doing this you will see…

  • Lower anxiety  
  • More relaxed demeanor 
  • Decrease in fixation 
  • Less need for control from child

Perseverations Communicate Thoughts

Kids with autism are very visual.  They understand and make sense of things better with pictures.  They also communicate their thoughts visually. Sometimes these thoughts are communicated through special interests.

My former colleague, Judy Endow, who is also autistic describes it best. 

“My thinking is comprised of pictures, colors, shapes along with their sound and movement. If I have no way of storing or retrieving information I will need to hold onto that picture until it happens.  As a child, the way I would hold onto a picture – a thought that was important that I didn’t want to forget – would be to talk about it over and over until the event happened.”

This totally makes sense!  Kids that verbalize their perseveration are usually trying to tell us something. 

Next time a child talks about the same topic repeatedly look for…

  • Emotional state of the child. What is their mood like as they are retelling the story?
  • Look for hidden meanings behind what they are saying
  • Breakdown what they are saying into smaller increments 
  • Translate/paraphrase what they are saying back to them 

Need an example?  I had a client that often talked about tree grinders and jumped up and down.  At first it may appear he loves tree grinders. Interestingly though he would bring the topic up when he was anxious, getting upset, or didn’t like an activity.  

Was he just sharing his love of tree grinders? No, he was recalling a time he got agitated when a tree grinder chopped up trees  near his house. The sound was upsetting. He didn’t have the words to tell me he was upset about something at the moment. Rather he had a way of retelling a time he got upset to let me know he was feeling angry now.

As soon as I was able to figure out what he was saying he would calm down when he felt understood.

Doing this you will see…

  • Child feels understood
  • Better to attend to their needs
  • Decrease in repetitive stories
  • Teach skills in identifying feelings and learn new words to express themselves

The right way to handle perseverative behavior in autism is to see it has a positive not a negative.  Repetitive behaviors are like a window into our kids minds. It helps us their preferences, hear their stories, and understand their feelings.  

Teaching Social Emotional Awareness To Young Children With Autism

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All kids need help to learn critical social emotional skills. That’s how they form a foundation to successfully interact with others, accomplish collaborative projects, and participate on a team. Children begin practicing early social emotional skills as infants. Crying to get a need met, accepting comfort after getting hurt, and imitating a sound or action are all beginning skills on the way to more complex social emotional understanding and behaviors later in life.

Once babies progress beyond these early methods of communicating their emotions and exploring social relationships, they become children who need a lot of help to figure out social emotional expectations and act accordingly. They experience feelings and emotions that are as intense as you or I do, but they don’t yet have a way to think about and express them with nearly the same sophistication.

The first step on the road to a vibrant repertoire of social emotional behaviors and skills is to learn and practice social emotional awareness. Social emotional awareness is the ability to identify one’s thoughts and feelings, as well as identify indicators of feelings and emotions in others. When social emotional awareness is established, children can then begin learning how to manage their own emotions and interact successfully with others in a range of social situations, from playdates to group projects in school.

Children with autism may need extra guidance and teaching to successfully acquire and generalize social emotional awareness. They might need more opportunities to practice naming and expressing feelings and emotions. This is something that you can do at home, in your community, and when visiting or traveling to new environments. 

Here’s how to teach social emotional awareness to your child with autism.

Start With Them

Your child’s own emotions are a great starting point for teaching awareness, as they are intimately familiar with them. For example, your child may do things like jump up and down or nod their head when they are happy. Or, they could fall to the floor or stomp their feet when they are sad or mad. These nonverbal indicators of emotions give you an opportunity to talk about emotions as they are experienced. This provides context for your child to learn how to tell the difference between what they feel across different experiences. 

Use Easy Words

Starting with simple emotion words like happy, sad, mad, and excited makes it easier for your child to make the connection between a range of experiences that all produce a similar emotion. For example, you could use the word “excited” to describe your child’s emotions when they get to have their favorite cereal at breakfast, when you get home from work, and when their favorite book is picked for the bedtime story. Of course, you want to use many emotion words over time to increase your child’s social emotional literacy, and help them know what to do across a wide range of situations that produce complex emotions. To do this, you could pick one or two new emotion words to introduce each week, in addition to the basic, universal words you use all the time. 

Teach Expression

Part of social emotional awareness is learning how to communicate emotions. This communication doesn’t have to be verbal. You can start teaching nonverbal expression of emotions early. A good starting place is the “If You’re Happy And You Know It” song. A good rule of thumb is to make sure that the expressions you choose are age appropriate in a range of situations. For example, stomping one’s feet when mad is OK for a toddler or very small child, but squeezing a stuffed animal or pillow may be more appropriate for preschoolers and kindergarteners. You can also teach expressions that involve a social component, to lay the foundation for social skill development later. For example, teach giving a high five as an expression of feeling proud. 

Say Complicated Things For Them

Your child will often feel big emotions that are too complex for them to articulate, especially in the moment. This could happen when they are feeling happy and excited – or overstimulated – as well as when they feel frustrated or disappointed. During these situations, it is a good idea to get down on your child’s level and explain what you see happening. For example, you could say: “I saw that you got skipped over for the circle time activity. It’s so disappointing when you don’t get a turn. Sometimes we don’t have control over what happens to our turn in a large group. That would make me feel sad, too.”

Paying attention to complex social situations and their impact on your child, and then giving them the words to describe the situation and feelings is a good way to help them build awareness. You don’t have to fix the problem in the moment, if it can’t be fixed – the teachable moment can be about noticing and describing feelings and emotions that environmental factors produce. Also, this lets your child know they’re not isolated in their feelings. 

Use Books

Today, there are many books for children specifically designed to teach social emotional awareness. These books help families learn about and begin to practice emotion regulation skills, in addition to showing common scenarios that produce emotions your child is likely to feel. These books also plant the seeds for learning social skills, like conflict resolution through demonstrating sharing. If you type “social emotional learning” into your Amazon search box, and filter for Children’s Books, you’ll find lots of books like this.

You can also use books that are not specifically designed to teach social emotional awareness and skills. For example, the Elephant and Piggie series by Mo Willems provides lots of opportunities to pause and name feelings and emotions the characters are having during the course of the book. As your child gets older, you can talk about what the characters did to identify and express their emotions, as well as solve problems when they occurred. Talk about other solutions they could have used, as well.

Let Unhappy Emotions Be OK

As a parent, you naturally want to solve problems for your child, and make them feel better when they are frustrated or sad. You could place all of your effort into trying to eliminate the cause of their disappointment. However, it’s important to be intentional in letting your child feel their emotions and letting them know that’s OK, too. Sometimes it will not be possible to make the source of unhappy emotions go away. By allowing room for these feelings and validating them, you’ll help your child build resilience so they can stay calm and regulate intense emotions as they get older.

Talk About Your Own Emotions

Parents often screen what they say and do around their child, and this is positive to a certain extent. You want your child to trust that you can help them navigate situations that are uncertain or uncomfortable for them. You also want to be thoughtful in what emotions you demonstrate in front of your child and what social situations you will talk about with them, being mindful of what is age appropriate.

However, don’t eliminate discussion of your own social experiences and emotions from your vocabulary around your child entirely. It’s important that they see and hear you experiencing a range of emotions so that they can learn from your model. For example, if you knock over a cup of milk before you have a chance to give it to them at breakfast, you could take a breath, then say calmly, “this is so frustrating! I was all ready to give this to you, and it surprised me when I knocked it over. Now I have more work to do. And I’m worried we will be late. But I am going to take a deep breath, clean this up, and get you some more milk. I know within a few hours, this won’t bother me at all anymore.”