What Are Social Skills?
Social skills are the skills we use to communicate and interact with each other and includes verbal (e.g. speech) and non-verbal (e.g. gesture body language) communication. They are vital in enabling an individual to have and maintain positive interactions with others.
A child with strong social skills is happy, confident and easy to get along with. Good social skills also enable a child to actively participate in many activities in daily living.
Some children require explicit teaching to develop strategies to communicate and interact with others
How Do I Know If My Child Has Difficulties with Social Skills?
Some children struggle more than their peer when it comes to developing appropriate social skills to have and maintain positive interactions with others.
Children with a neurodevelopmental challenge such as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), Asperger Syndrome, Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) and Non-verbal Learning Difficulty (NVLD) can have significant difficulties with social skills.
How Can We Help?
We offer social skills training with the main goal of helping your child master social interactions with others
Depending on the needs of your child, we offer both social skills groups as well as individuals social skills intervention sessions using approaches such as:
- Social learning based on Michelle Garcia Winner’s Social Thinking®️ curriculum
- The secret agent society
Difficulties can include:
- Feeling eye contact
- Lack of joint attention & social referencing
- Unable to take turns when talking of participating in games with peers
- Frequently interrupts with others
- Ask inappropriate questions
- Talk “at you” on the topic of own interest and cannot engage in a 2-way conversation “with” you
- Cannot read facial cues
- Talk with unusual intonation, pitch rate or tone of voice
- Very literal in understanding
