
Understanding Social Language Skills
Social language skills, also known as pragmatic language skills, refer to the unspoken verbal and nonverbal rules governing our interactions.
These rules vary according to whom you are speaking with, where you are, and typically vary across different cultures. Someone with good social language skills will respond appropriately and flexibly to an ever changing social landscape.
While social skills are second nature to many of us, everyday social situations can be challenging for some.
A person with weak language, attention or memory skills may be unable to inhibit the impulse to talk, forget what was said, or have trouble keeping up with the pace of the conversation.
Someone with a social skills disorder might struggle to make eye contact, initiate or extend a conversation, misunderstand humour and facial expressions, and will likely make inaccurate guesses about what others are thinking and feeling.
A common characteristic of a social skills disorder, is impaired Perspective Taking. A complex process, perspective taking allows for interpretation of what is really going on by considering the thoughts, beliefs, desires and intentions of others.
The ability to consider and think about other people’s perspectives improves our social competencies, and strengthens our personal relationships. After all, social success is influenced and measured by how well we relate to and interact with others.
In Reclaiming Conversation (2015), Sherry Turkle describes how giving our attention to our children is the bread and butter of relationship building.
“Children learn how to regulate strong emotions, how to respond to other people’s social cues, and how to have conversations, largely as a result of the time parents spend listening to them, responding to them, helping them problem solve and understand themselves.”
A child’s social experiences rest on the foundation of the parent – child relationship. It is our responsibility, as parents, to be generous with our attention, and make ourselves available to our children in order to support their social skills learning.
Tips to support your child’s perspective taking:
- Ask your child to describe the situation.
- Break situations into small concrete parts.
- Offer a feeling word to label how you perceive your child is feeling.
- Explain what lead you to that belief about his feelings. Help him see your perspective because, personal problem solving relies on perspective taking.
- Encourage him to think about how he feels and how the other person might feel.
- Suggest how the other person might be feeling.
- Describe the facial expression and body language you might expect from a person who feels that way.
- Praise your child for her attempt to maneuver through a difficult social situation.
- Think about others. Specifically what others would like to do, not like to do, what they might have tried, or what they would never consider trying.
- Reflect on your own preferences and interests.
- Store personal information about others in “memory files”, and then access the stored information.
- Formulate and ask personal questions with how, would and have.