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.

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

Imagine an infant crying in her crib — a shrill, piercing, unrelenting cry. You pick her up, she cries. You snuggle, you rock, you coo, she cries. You lay her down again, she cries. You search madly for the pacifier; surely, that will do the trick! But a tiny tongue, dripping with mucus and saliva, propels it in your face! The wailing sirens on and on. Is she hungry? No, she whips her head side to side fighting your attempt to feed. You check the diaper, she’s dry. You check her temp, it’s normal. Perhaps it’s fright — or pain! Did a spider bite her, the cat, the older sibling? Why, oh, why can’t babies talk?!

Feeling anxious? I am. Just writing about it knots my stomach, tightens my neck, clenches my jaw. My palms are even sweaty. In these situations parents can go down one of two paths. Neither is easy, but one is a horror.

When soothing words flop, parents continue talking — to themselves! “I can do this. Things WILL get better. This, too, shall pass. Dr. Know-It-All says it’s a stage all babies go through. He did say that, didn’t he?!”

Two parents makes coping with the stress easier. When one runs thin on patience, the other can step in. But tag-teaming only works when both parents are willing, and both are at home. Single parents must be resourceful. Some call a relative or friend for support. Or they muffle the crying by waiting in another room until the little one tires herself to sleep. Most parents, and children, survive the tough times. Of course, the chances are greater if kids are of easy temperament; they don’t test parents as often!One path is to hang tough, to ride out the crying jag without shaking, tossing, or hitting the child — come hell or high water. And most parents can do it. They cling tenaciously to patience. Some do it by talking — first to the baby: “There, there, Sweetie. What’s wrong? Don’t worry, mama’s here. What do you need, angel?”

But there’s another path that can lure parents. When children are perplexing, exasperating, and infuriating, parents can succumb to anger and violence. Feeling abused themselves, parents retaliate, matching a child’s wrath, decibel for decibel, flail for flail. Sometimes it works. Abuse scares kids into compliance. But that doesn’t make it justifiable or right. In time, abuse backfires, setting the stage for a frightening ballet. Parents withdraw, then explode, withdraw, then explode. Sometimes leading, sometimes following, children join the dance, taking their cues from the parent’s mood. Ultimately kids carry the dance into our child cares, schools and businesses.

The macabre choreography provides jobs for social workers, psychologists, police, lawyers, and judges. It robs kids of the sabbatical known as childhood — a fragile time of growth that’s a necessary prelude, not a luxury, for a stable adulthood. It’s hard to fathom why, once indulged, the dance continues. Obviously hurting a child vents intense emotion, but surely one twirl would shock (scare!) a parent into restraint. Yet often it doesn’t. So (I shiver to wonder), does inflicting pain provide a momentary euphoria? Is abuse satisfying, to the point of becoming habitual?

We don’t like to say adults “chose” to abuse. We call it impulse, as if abuse is a residual, primitive behavior that over-rides thinking, takes control, and makes us lose our minds. But abuse isn’t dirty laundry handed down from our evolutionary past.To say instinct drives abuse, rather than free-will decisionmaking, infers humans are innately evil, that we’re at the mercy of genetics. I don’t believe a chromosomal stew destines one to hurt children.

Abusing children, especially repetitive abuse, is a behavioral choice, not an accident. Through mind-searing experiences, abuse is taught, often looping from one generation to the next. The cycle is highly resistant to change. Conditions setting the stage for abuse can be cited and examined, but they don’t absolve the abuser of his or her actions.

I don’t think abuse is merely impulse, but I also don’t think it’s usually premeditated. It’s a wits end, knee-jerk decision, a misfire triggered by anger. In an imperceptible split-second, parents decide to fly off the handle, to use belittling language, to toss, throw, kick, bang, or pound. When parents are pushed against the wall of their limits, abuse must seem a rational choice. It’s not of course. But at the moment, it must seem so.

Whether due to panic, fear, selfishness, or even shame, abusers typically choose to protect themselves first, and their children second — if at all. They keep evidence of their offenses, their children’s scarlet marks, covered from public view until bruises and wounds heal. Though hard to imagine, kids are rehearsed, taught to fib about injuries.

Parents who abuse can choose to seek help, but they often don’t until forced to by child protection laws. Family members can fail to demand an abuser seek help, hoping to keep the abuse a secret — even though they know child abuse is illegal, and more damning, inhumane. Denying reality becomes an unsavory family conspiracy of silence. And so kids lie to neighbors, caregivers, teachers, social workers, and even ministers. Stymied in silence, they fear revealing parents’ flaws, fear sending parents to prison, fear landing in foster care. But mostly, kids remain silent or lie because they’re afraid of losing their parents’ undying love. Surprise you? It shouldn’t. Our society gives greater permission to keep secrets than to seek help. We perpetuate self-defeat. And we condemn kids to years of torment. We’re fools to pretend that even the strongest of kids can endure such stress and still end up contented, stable adults, unscathed and undamaged.

From what I’ve seen, adults can get by with abuse for years. No one wants to point a finger. We believe parents are well intentioned,we give them benefit of the doubt,we preserve a false sense of normalcy instead of facing reality. But we wear our optimistic blinders too long, as we allow children to suffer. Their suffering is guilt we must bear. To stop abuse we all, especially family members, must be realistic as well as optimistic. There’s much we can do to reduce the violence. We must identify abuse early, when it’s most treatable. We can reinforce kids’ rights to hold offenders, even parents, accountable for their actions. It will earn children’s trust.

We must openly discuss abuse and then reach out to help kids be resilient. We can counteract abuse by teaching kids to manage anger constructively and to problem solve cooperatively. We can model self-respect and civil treatment. We must support young parents by lending a sympathetic ear, an empathetic wink, a bit of advice. In doing all that,we’ll earn the right to be optimistic about making life safer for kids.

I’m convinced we can keep abuse from eating away at family trees like a crippling fungus. But it will take you, and me, and all who love your children to exert the will to do it.

Children’s anger presents challenges to teachers committed to constructive, ethical, and effective child guidance. This Digest explores what we know about the components of children’s anger, factors contributing to understanding and managing anger, and the ways teachers can guide children’s expressions of anger.

Three Components of Anger

Anger is believed to have three components (Lewis & Michalson, 1983):

The Emotional State of Anger. The first component is the emotion itself, defined as an affective or arousal state, or a feeling experienced when a goal is blocked or needs are frustrated. Fabes and Eisenberg (1992) describe several types of stress-producing anger provocations that young children face daily in classroom interactions:

• Conflict over possessions, which involves someone taking children’s property or invading their space.
• Physical assault, which involves one child doing something to another child, such as pushing or hitting.
• Verbal conflict, for example, a tease or a taunt.
• Rejection, which involves a child being ignored or not allowed to play with peers.
• Issues of compliance, which often involve asking or insisting that children do something that they do not want to do–for instance, wash their hands.

Expression of Anger. The second component of anger is its expression. Some children vent or express anger through facial expressions, crying, sulking, or talking, but do little to try to solve a problem or confront the provocateur. Others actively resist by physically or verbally defending their positions, self-esteem, or possessions in nonaggressive ways. Still other children express anger with aggressive revenge by physically or verbally retaliating against the provocateur. Some children express dislike by telling the offender that he or she cannot play or is not liked. Other children express anger through avoidance or attempts to escape from or evade the provocateur. And some children use adult seeking, looking for comfort or solutions from a teacher, or telling the teacher about an incident.

Teachers can use child guidance strategies to help children express angry feelings in socially constructive ways. Children develop ideas about how to express emotions (Michalson & Lewis, 1985; Russel, 1989) primarily through social interaction in their families and later by watching television or movies, playing video games, and reading books (Honig & Wittmer, 1992). Some children have learned a negative, aggressive approach to expressing anger (Cummings, 1987; Hennessy et al., 1994) and, when confronted with everyday anger conflicts, resort to using aggression in the classroom (Huesmann, 1988). A major challenge for early childhood teachers is to encourage children to acknowledge angry feelings and to help them learn to express anger in positive and effective ways.

An Understanding of Anger. The third component of the anger experience is understanding–interpreting and evaluating–the emotion. Because the ability to regulate the expression of anger is linked to an understanding of the emotion (Zeman & Shipman, 1996), and because children’s ability to reflect on their anger is somewhat limited, children need guidance from teachers and parents in understanding and managing their feelings of anger.

Understanding and Managing Anger

The development of basic cognitive processes undergirds children’s gradual development of the understanding of anger (Lewis & Saarni, 1985).

Memory. Memory improves substantially during early childhood (Perlmutter, 1986), enabling young children to better remember aspects of anger-arousing interactions. Children who have developed unhelpful ideas of how to express anger (Miller & Sperry, 1987) may retrieve the early unhelpful strategy even after teachers help them gain a more helpful perspective. This finding implies that teachers may have to remind some children, sometimes more than once or twice, about the less aggressive ways of expressing anger.

Language. Talking about emotions helps young children understand their feelings (Brown & Dunn, 1996). The understanding of emotion in preschool children is predicted by overall language ability (Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, 1994). Teachers can expect individual differences in the ability to identify and label angry feelings because children’s families model a variety of approaches in talking about emotions.

Self-Referential and Self-Regulatory Behaviors.Self-referential behaviors include viewing the self as separate from others and as an active, independent, causal agent. Self-regulation refers to controlling impulses, tolerating frustration, and postponing immediate gratification. Initial self-regulation in young children provides a base for early childhood teachers who can develop strategies to nurture children’s emerging ability to regulate the expression of anger.

Guiding Children’s Expressions of Anger

Teachers can help children deal with anger by guiding their understanding and management of this emotion. The practices described here can help children understand and manage angry feelings in a direct and nonaggressive way.

Create a Safe Emotional Climate. A healthy early childhood setting permits children to acknowledge all feelings, pleasant and unpleasant, and does not shame anger. Healthy classroom systems have clear, firm, and flexible boundaries.

Model Responsible Anger Management. Children have an impaired ability to understand emotion when adults show a lot of anger (Denham, Zoller, & Couchoud, 1994). Adults who are most effective in helping children manage anger model responsible management by acknowledging, accepting, and taking responsibility for their own angry feelings and by expressing anger in direct and nonaggressive ways.

Help Children Develop Self-Regulatory Skills. Teachers of infants and toddlers do a lot of self-regulation “work,” realizing that the children in their care have a very limited ability to regulate their own emotions. As children get older, adults can gradually transfer control of the self to children, so that they can develop self-regulatory skills.

Encourage Children to Label Feelings of Anger. Teachers and parents can help young children produce a label for their anger by teaching them that they are having a feeling and that they can use a word to describe their angry feeling. A permanent record (a book or chart) can be made of lists of labels for anger (e.g., mad, irritated, annoyed), and the class can refer to it when discussing angry feelings.

Encourage Children to Talk About Anger-Arousing Interactions. Preschool children better understand anger and other emotions when adults explain emotions (Denham, Zoller, &Couchoud, 1994). When children are embroiled in an anger-arousing interaction, teachers can help by listening without judging,evaluating, or ordering them to feel differently.

Use Books and Stories about Anger to Help Children Understand and Manage Anger. Well-presented stories about anger and other emotions validate children’s feelings and give information about anger (Jalongo, 1986; Marion, 1995). It is important to preview all books about anger because some stories teach irresponsible anger management.

Communicate with Parents. Some of the same strategies employed to talk with parents about other areas of the curriculum can be used to enlist their assistance in helping children learn to express emotions. For example, articles about learning to use words to label anger can be included in a newsletter to parents.

Children guided toward responsible anger management are more likely to understand and manage angry feelings directly and non aggressively and to avoid the stress often accompanying poor anger management (Eisenberg et al., 1991). Teachers can take some of the bumps out of understanding and managing anger by adopting positive guidance strategies.

Condensed by permission from Marian Marion, “Guiding Young Children’s Understanding and Management of Anger,” Young Children 52(7), 62-67. Copyright 1997 by the National Association for the Education of Young Children.

• Hold hands during mealtime prayers.
• Walk one-on-one with each child.  Swing hands and talk.  Tell jokes.  Sing.
• Bad day?  Sigh dramatically and say, “I sure could use a great big hug from someone special.”
• Wonderful day?  Shout, “Hey, everybody!  Come hug me!  I had the best day!”
• Make Hug Sandwiches.  With your spouse, gently surprise unsuspecting children–no matter what age!
• Declare a 100 Hugs Day among your family.  Count them as you go.
• Do four-direction kisses: north (foreheads), south (chins), east/west (cheeks).
• Wrap your arms around your children during church and while waiting together or watching TV.
• APply the Pat Principle: “When in doubt, pat.” God made lots of patting places–heads, cheeks, knees, hands, shoulders, backs.

–By Lorri Cardwell-Casey, From HomeLife Magazine

The week of March 1 is the annual Read Across America celebration. Many families feel a vast amount of pressure to prepare their young children for school. The market reflects our fear that our children will not be able to compete at- or above-level, with products like Your Baby Can Read and Baby Einstein grossing big dollars from concerned and well-intentioned parents.

But what about the tremendous value inherent in sharing good quality children’s books every day? Our hectic schedules and extra-curricular overload of activities and organizations often prevent us from stopping in our tracks, grabbing a good book and reading with our child sitting in our lap or by our side.

Reading with your child enables measurable leaps in their cognitive and language development. It develops a love for reading, an enthusiasm for learning and it hones the pre-reading skills they will need in their scholastic and personal life. The neurological connections young children develop during shared reading do much to prepare them for later academic performance and skill mastery. And the social-emotional foundation you’re already building with your child is vastly strengthened and supported by shared time with you enjoying a good book together.

I know that sounds too simple. In our fear, we expect to find out that we need DVD trainings, special worksheets and community experts to “hardwire” our children. We hope, in a bit of desperation, that sitting the toddler in front of a video or providing our preschooler with a “point and click” computer game will offer us a quick fix and deliver us (on time and under budget) a child who is reading fluently, doing long division and on the fast track to the Nobel prize.

Unfortunately, it is a longer track to the Nobel and the way is paved with good books and shared experiences. No DVD video can do what you accomplish when you visit your local public library and select some fun and varied books with your child to share over the coming week. You convey to them how truly important, and fun, reading is when you share a commitment to read to them for about 15-20 minutes every single day.

Once you’ve made the decision to read to your child every day, you may be wondering what books to choose and what kinds of purposeful things you can do to teach pre-reading skills as you go. For a start, there are literally hundreds of good books for each developmental age and stage. The most helpful advice is to visit your local library and speak with the children’s librarian about your child, their age and interests. Let the librarian guide you to great selections that are age appropriate.

As for good tips on sharing the books, most importantly, always share books you have enjoy. If you’re not enthused, they may not be, either. Try to read with voice inflections, emphasis on important words and passion. Point left to right at the words across the page as you read the story to help children learn reading orientation. Spend a lot of time with your child, just looking at the pictures. Ask them, when age appropriate, what they think is happening in the story, what they think might happen next and how the characters might feel. Also, talk about the setting of the story and the action of the plot. This helps introduce them to story elements.

Above all else, enjoy this time with your child. Soccer, boy- and girl-scouts and all other extracurricular activities are fun and important to social and emotional development. But nothing is more important than the relationship you build with and education you provide to your child by sharing books and reading together.

1. You don’t have to wait for your baby to get to a certain age to begin reading to him.  Start now!
2. Continue reading aloud to your child until he is at least 10 years old.  Children continue to benefit from listening to others read long after they themselves have learned to read.
3. For young children, books with rhythm, and repetition are excellent.
4. Be consistent about reading aloud to your child.  Do it daily and, if possible, about the same time.  Reading right before bedtime often works well.
5. If you have several small children, you can read to them together.  Picture books work well for this situation.
6. Don’t be surprised if your children want to hear a favorite book again and again.  That’s fine.  As they get to really know the story well, have them fill in words for you.
7. Make sure you select books that are at the child’s interest level.
8. Some children love reading about the same characters.  If that’s what your child likes, choose several books in a series.
9. Vary the subject matter of what you read as well as the type.  In addition to fiction, you might also read poetry, magazine articles, and non-fiction.
10. As your child gets older and gains in reading ability, occasionally pick a book right at his reading level and take turns reading to one another.

Tips:

When reading a chapter of a book each night, always review what happened in the previous night’s chapter before starting a new chapter.

When you begin reading aloud to a baby, you will only be able to keep your baby’s attention to a few minutes.  This is to be expected.

As children mature, so do their attention spans.

Common Sense Media is dedicated to improving the media and entertainment lives of kids and families.  Among other things this organization provides handouts for parents on the impact of the media on children that can be downloaded for free. In the handout:

• 61% of babies under 2 years old spend time in front of a screen (and 14% of babies are in front of a television or computer for two or more hours a day).
• 19% of children 1 year or younger have a TV in the bedroom.
• Each hour of viewing baby DVDs/videos is associated with lower vocabulary development for infants.

The handout’s introduction points out:

“The program ming is adorable. The packaging conjures up famous thinkers and composers.  All of this baby media is part of a multimillion-dollar business — a good thing to think about when tempted to buy or use them.   After all, you are your baby’s best teacher.  So when it comes to trying new ways to help your child think, you may want to start by putting that baby program on pause.