What is Critical to do when you are Teaching Social Skills to a Child/Teenager? GET the PARENTS on BOARD!!

The process of teaching social skills is a long, but inevitably successful one for children and teenagers with ADHD. This process involves helping children and teenagers with ADHD to realize that their socially inappropriate behavior may oftentimes be the reason why they have difficulty making and keeping friends.

What are some of these socially inappropriate behaviors? For example, they do not maintain eye contact; they do not know how how to join in when others are playing; they constantly interrupt, among other socially inappropriate behaviors.

If they do not know and understand why they need to learn those social skills, they will not internalize them. Let us remember that unfortunately, children/teenagers with ADHD’s socially inappropriate behavior has resulted in their receiving negative attention, which tends to increase that inappropriate behavior rather than diminishing it. This negative attention is similar to the response that the class clown received, who we all remember from our school days.

As much as it is imperative to get the child on board, it is also vital to get the parents on board, as well. This is not always so easy. Why? The child/teenager’s parents have been interacting with their child in a certain way for many years. Even though they know that their child needs help, they somehow arguably have adjusted their behavior in order to accommodate their child’s behavior. All of us who have children with ADHD are all too familiar with giving in to a certain behavior as a trade off for a few minutes of peace…seriously!

It is therefore vital to get the parents on board. The parents must be willing to interact in the same way that the person who is teaching social skills to their child is interacting. It is difficult enough to teach the child to modify his/her behavior, nonetheless to have the parents revise their own behavior.

During this process, it is critical that the parents only express positive comments to their child concerning the social skills that the expert is teaching their child. Most children and teenagers with ADHD need to learn how to respect others, which is one of the most important of the social skills. If the parents disrespect the teacher to their child, by being critical of them, for example, then the child will in turn, disrespect the teacher, as well.

 If the parents do not adhere to the teaching methods that the social skills expert is facilitating, the child will learn positive social skills in the environment in which they are taught, but will not generalize those new skills to other settings, such as the home.

Each child with whom I work comes to me with years of exhibiting behavior that is inappropriate. The only way that children and teenagers with ADHD can succeed at learning new and positive social skills, is to be taught those new skills in one setting, and then to be taught to use those new skills in as many settings as possible.