Your children start facing problems in this materialistic world as soon as they open their eyes. Developing problem-solving and social skills will be a critical part of their happiness and success – even crucial than their academic performance.
Here are five ways that you can use to improve your child’s problem solving and social skills:
Encourage your Children to Eye-Contact
While talking to someone, encourage your child to look into their eyes. It will help them in communicating effectively and build their confidence. You may need to let your children practice it daily as it will help them in mastering this art.
Play games like string contest (whoever stare for long without blinking wins), ask your children to talk to their toys and tell you stories looking at your eyes.
Make Your Children Communicate
Your children should know how to respond to social stimulus, express their feelings, and learn to interact with others – whether verbal or non-verbal. Teach your children the appropriate responses and greetings. You can teach these things while playing with them.
Kids need guidance to interact with others, to overcome their shyness, to manage their response, and express their true feelings. Ensure your children that they are free to ask questions and communicate their needs and desires, and beliefs and ideas.
As a parent, talk to them daily and use words like let’s, thank you, and please.
Provide Them With The Environment
Children in a restricted environment may have difficulty in interacting with the world. Give your children a good company, proper exposure, and chances to interact with different types of people.
Children who don’t have good social skills may have difficulty in reading expressions and interacting with society, so it is vital to begin socialization from a young age. One way you can do this is by taking them to a toddler school in Germantown, MD, or one nearer to you, where they will learn to interact with other children before they start school.
Therefore, try activities that make them comfortable in any such situation. Hobby classes, playgrounds, and sports activities are some of the examples of activities that will give them a chance to socialise.
Teach Your Children Basic Problem-Solving Steps
To help your children live a better life, teach them the necessary skills of problem-solving. For example, tell them:
- First to identify the problem (for instance, I always miss my school bus)
- Look out for at least 5 possible solutions (sleep early, wake up early, finish breakfast quickly, get things ready at night etc.)
- Identify the pros and cons of each solution
- Pick the best solution
- Test it out
Tell your kids to try the solution and see what happens next. If the selected solution doesn’t work, they can try the other answer.
Get Your Kids To Help
To give your kids confidence, you need to tell them that you respect their capacity of solving problems. Ask them to answer your little problems every day such as “I don’t know how we are going to afford a big Christmas tree this year. Do you know what to do?”
Their creative solutions will surprise you, and you will be evidently proud of your children.
Never expect your child to become what you teach them – instead, practice what you preach. The above tips will help you in developing positive and life-long skills in problem solving and socialisation.