Teaching Your Child How to Be a Good Friend
We all know how important friendships are to life, but developing and maintaining friendships takes both work and practice. Some children are naturally outgoing and find it easy to make friends while others may struggle in this area, but all children need to learn the social skills necessary to be a good friend.
Interpersonal skills (see next section) are the name for social skills that children need to learn in order to get along with both adults and peers. While all of them are important in building and maintaining friendships, two stand out as being especially important:
Listening and Negotiation
Teaching Your Child How to Be a Good Friend
Listening- One of the greatest skills to learn for successful friendships, and life in general, is the art of listening. There are many ways to be a good listener that go beyond simply closing our mouths and opening our ears.
Our body language shows the speaker whether we are interested or distracted.
The questions and statements we make in response to the speaker shows how well we are paying attention.
Our follow-up, even days or weeks later, shows that we care.
Each of these facets of listening takes practice, but if done often enough they can become second nature.
Negotiation- Being a good friend means that we don’t always insist on getting our own way. Taking turns during a game, when choosing what to play, or in many other scenarios ensures that children learn to compromise and discover ways to help everyone be satisfied with the outcome.
This is often a difficult skill for young children to learn, but frequent practice will help them get the hang of it.
Listening
Seven Interpersonal Skills Your Child Needs to Know
Verbal Communication- Often when we think of interpersonal skills, this is the one that comes to mind. We wait eagerly for our child’s first word, love listening to his burgeoning vocabulary, and enjoy carrying on conversations with him when he starts stringing words together to form sentences and paragraphs. Of the seven, this skill is probably the most natural to learn because opportunities to observe and practice verbal communication abound in daily life.
Non-verbal Communication- From birth, children begin to pick up on the subtleties of non-verbal communication. A facial expression, the unspoken tension in a stressful moment, hand gestures: They all can be observed and interpreted. While words can sometimes be misinterpreted, non-verbal communications have an even higher chance of misinterpretation. It’s important therefore to not only teach children to ‘read’ these signals through a filter, but also to be careful with their own non-verbal communications.
Listening Skills- If one of the seven skills is most important, this one has a good chance of being the winner. In a world where we can voice our opinions in a comment section without even knowing the full story, listening has become a lost art and one that we sorely need. Teaching children to listen to others and really hear what they’re saying, whether they agree with them or not, is a skill that will serve them well through their entire lives.
Negotiation- Some would say that children are born with this ability and it does seem that some kids are naturally gifted in the art of negotiation. However, this skill becomes especially important in teaching children to deal with disagreements among their peers. For instance, if two children want to use the same toy, being able to negotiate will allow them to come to a solution with which they are both happy.
Problem Solving- Ask a handful of employers what they’re looking for in employees today and ‘problem solvers’ will be named as one of the most important attributes time and again. Unfortunately, children are given few opportunities to practice this skill, even though it’s more important than ever.
Decision Making- Giving children opportunities to make decisions in their day-to-day lives can be as easy as offering them two options for lunch. As they become adept at weighing the pros and cons of small choices, they can be presented with opportunities to make bigger decisions.
Assertiveness- Though the term assertive sometimes has negative connotations, at it’s essence assertiveness is simply the ability to communicate needs and wants.
