12 Friendship Skills Every Child Needs

Kids can be picky about who they play and mix with.

Popularity should not be confused with sociability. A number of studies in recent decades have shown that appearance, personality type and ability impact on a child’s popularity at school.

Good-looking, easy-going, talented kids usually win peer popularity polls but that doesn’t necessarily guarantee they will have friends.

Those children and young people who develop strong friendships have a definite set of skills that help make them easy to like, easy to relate to and easy to play with.

Here are twelve essential skills that children have identified as being important for making and keeping friends:

1.  Ability to share possessions and space
2.  Keeping confidences and secrets
3.  Offering to help
4.  Accepting other’s mistakes
5.  Being positive and enthusiastic
6.  Starting a conversation
7.  Winning and losing well
8.  Listening to others
9.  Starting and maintaining a conversation
10. Ignoring someone who is annoying you
11. Cooperating with others
12.  Giving and receiving compliments

Friendships skills are generally developmental. That is, kids grow into these skills given exposure to different situations and with adult help.

In past generations ‘exposure to different situations’ meant opportunities to play with each other, with siblings and with older and younger friends.

They were reminded by parents about how they should act around others. They were also ‘taught’ from a very young age.

Arrested development

The NEW CHILD grows up with fewer siblings, fewer opportunities for unstructured play and less freedom to explore friendships than children of even ten years ago.

A parenting style that promotes a high sense of individual entitlement rather than the notion of fitting in appears to be popular at the moment.

These factors can lead to delayed or arrested development in these essential friendship skills, resulting in very unhappy, self-centred children.

Here are some ideas if you think your child experiences developmental delay in any of these essential skills or just needs some help to acquire them:

(1)  Encourage or insist that kids play and work with each other: Allowing kids the freedom to be kids is part of the message here but parents have to be cunning with the NEW CHILD and construct situations where kids have to get on with each other. For some kids “Go outside and play” is a good place to start!!

(2)  Play with your kids: Interact with your kids through games and other means so you can help kids learn directly from you how to get on with others.

(3)  Talk about these skills: If you notice your kids need to develop some of these skills then talk about them, point out when they show them and give them some implementation ideas.

Kids are quite ego-centric and need to develop a sense of ‘other’ so they can successfully negotiate the many social situations that they find themselves in.

As parents we often focus on the development of children’s academic skills and can quite easily neglect the development of these vitally important social skills, which contribute so much to children’s happiness and well-being.

1. Will my parents stay together?
2. What if my parents die or get in an accident?
3. How can I keep my mom or dad from getting angry with me?
4. Will people at school like me?
5. Will I be able to do well at school?
6. What if my friends don’t want to be my friends anymore?
7. Will my parents be able to pay all our bills?
8. Will I be safe today?
9. Do I look okay?
10. What if I get embarassed?
11. What if someone hurts me or my family?
12. What does the future hold for me?

I want to take this opportunity to wish each of you a Happy New Year!  2009 has been a great year for Small Blessing.  I have enjoyed working with each family.

2010 promises to be a great year with lots of opportunities for learning and growing.  Please mark your  calendar now for our Annual Child Health and Safety Fair Saturday, March 6, 2010 10:00 – 1:00.  We are in the process of contacting vendors.  If you know of a health and safety vendor, that would be a great addition to our fair, please let me know.  I would love to hear!

December is always a busy time of the year with lots of hustle and bustle, Christmas shopping and Christmas parties.  Many times we move right from the business of the holidays right into the New Year.  Please take time for yourself.  Resting, relaxing and playing are great ways to stay healthy and reduce stress.  Make a New Year’s resolution that you will take time to care for yourself so you can care for your children.

Please remember that I am here to serve you and your family. If you ever have a Health and Safety concern or question, I would like to hear.

Ms. LeDena
Health Specialist

Looking for something fun to do today?

Make a collage out of pictures from old magazines together and talk about what you are making. 

Looking for something to do today?

Stay in your pajamas and watch an old movie (maybe a western) together.

In this month of Thanksgiving, it seems only fitting that we remind ourselves of the power of gratitude. If you haven’t been in the habit of mentally and verbally giving thanks for the wonderful things you already have, now’s a good time to begin.

Why would anyone want to spend time thanking the universe for what he or she has? First, the act of being grateful brings more good things your way, in a very practical sense. Giving thanks for what you already have (even though you may not have everything you want) will put in motion additional energy to attract more positive things and events to you.

When you are thankful for the people and abundance in your life, it adds to your feelings of optimism and joy. When you are at peace with your life, events tend to flow more easily and you draw beneficial circumstances to you because of your good cheer.

Imagine a person who goes through his day grumbling and criticizing everything he sees (I think we all know at least one person like that!) He’s oblivious to the great things he already has, and sees no real reason to give thanks for anything at all. With his attitude, do you think he would be a person who would attract wonderful new opportunities or special gifts from the universe? Probably not - because he has neglected to open his heart and let gratitude in.

We tend to see exactly what we believe, for better or worse. If you can give thanks for your bowl of soup and crust of bread while others are dining on a meal of turkey with all the trimmings, you have the right idea about gratitude.

Circumstances can change overnight for the better. The practice of being grateful actually can help you to improve your situation in a dramatic fashion. The key is to be grateful for the small things, and to believe in your own abundant destiny.

Did you know that reading good quality children’s literature with your newborn or your infant child every single day builds their emergent literacy skills? Many parents fail to realize the impact that book sharing has on the brain development of their precious baby. But research shows time and again that reading for short bits of time every day with your baby gives them a tremendous developmental advantage!

Of course, this leads us to a very good question. What makes for a good baby book? Well, babies need bright pictures, thick sturdy covers that they can hold or chew, simple geometric shapes, few words and lots of rhymes. When looking at a potential purchase or library checkout for your baby, try to find a book that has many or all of these qualities. A great example that I use with my own baby, Allison, and toddler, Ella, is board book version of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle. Penguin Books publishes a very sturdy and small version of this book just for babies and young toddlers. They’ll delight when you read to them about the dining adventures of the little caterpillar as he grows and grows. Point to the pictures and talk about the shapes and colors and things you see there, even though you may feel silly doing so with your newborn or older baby. This helps them to develop both their receptive and expressive language and stimulates their love for learning. You are your child’s first and greatest teacher!

Just a few weeks ago we began a new Lunch and Learn training series from the American Library Association called “Every Child Ready To Read.” It equips teachers from the Infants, Toddlers, Twos and multi-age preschool program with resources and ideas for equipping even our youngest infants with the Six Skills to Get Ready To Read.

There are many things you can do as a parent to help equip your child. You are their greatest teacher! Today, I would like to talk about the first of those Six Skills to Get Ready to Read. It’s called Print Motivation. Print Motivation is a child’s interest in and enjoyment of books. This is a gateway skill. Enjoying and valuing reading books opens children up to a more successful acquisition of the other five reading skills.

I believe that no one left to his own nature, is born disliking books and book sharing. They are “taught” to dislike reading and sharing books by poor modeling and negative experiences with books as children. That’s why it is so important to avoid expecting or asking children to “sit still and listen” when sharing a book with them. It’s crucial to make book sharing fun for both parent and child so that your child is more responsive and attentive and develops a lifelong love of reading.

What else can you do to help develop Print Motivation in your child? Read often and make it fun. Make sure that you and your child are in good moods, so the experience is enjoyable. Stop reading when your child becomes tired or loses interest so that reading does not become tedious or punitive for your child. Choose a book you like and read it in an enthusiastic manner!

Our next book will be about the Second Skill to Get Ready to Read: Vocabulary! We’ll have some more good tips for building this with your child.

For more information please visit www.ala.org/everychild

Why is it difficult for us to understand the value of play?

• Parents perspectives on play vary and are largely based on their own educational experience
• Skeptical of educational innovations that appear trendy or lacking in substance.
  • School is for work; and if you work hard, it can help you get ahead
  • School, in this value system is not for playing around it isn’t viewed as part of the learning process
• In an increasing hostile nations, parents are suspicious of anything that may reduce their child’s competitiveness in the job market.
• Parents have difficulty trusting a teacher from a different background (that they may not have their child’s best interest at heart.

Play contributes to advances in:

• Verbalization
• Vocabulary
• Language comprehension
• Attention span
• Imagination
• Concentration
• Impulse control
• Curiosity
• Problem-solving strategies, cooperation, empathy
• Group participation
• Recent research provides additional evidence of the strong connections between quality of play in preschool years and children’s readiness for school instruction (bowman, Donovan, & Burns, 2000; Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, 2002; Shonkoff & Phillips, 2000).
• Research directly links play to children’s ability to master such academic content as literacy and numeracy. Fore example children’s engagement in pretend pay was found to be positively and significantly correlated with such competencies as text comprehension an understanding of the purpose of reading and writing (Roskos & Christie, 2000)

How Play Evolves

1. initially, children are more focused on the actual objects
2. then they focus on the people who use the objects
3. then they develop more complex play with multiple roles and symbolic use of props

Characteristics of mature play

• Imaginary situations
• Multiple role plays
• Clearly defined rules
• Flexible themes
• Language development
• Length of play

If children live with criticism, they learn to condemn.

If children live with hostility, they learn to fight.

If children live with ridicule, they learn to be shy.

If children live with shame, they learn to be guilty.

If children live with encouragement, they learn confidence.

If children live with tolerance, they learn to be patient.

If children live with praise, they learn to appreciate.

If children live with acceptance, they learn to love.

If children live with approval, they learn to like themselves.

If children live with honesty, they learn truthfulness.

If children live with security, they learn to have faith in themselves and others.

If children live with friendliness, they learn the world is a nice place in which to live.

By Dorothy Law Nolte - Author of Children Learn What They Live