How do social skills develop?

As infants and toddlers, children learn social skills primarily through interactions with the people in their lives. These skills are acquired through various forms of learning, such as imitation, reinforcement and instruction, and through contact with skilled models such as parents, siblings, relatives, peers and others. We also expose our children to a wide range of opportunities to practise these skills.

As soon as a child is born, there are factors that will influence that child’s development of social skills: their home environment, culture and family situation. As a child starts to develop his or her communication skills, they need models to instruct them and to reinforce appropriate behaviour and discourage inappropriate behaviour.

The first models available to an infant are parents, and there is therefore an obvious link between the social competence of parents and their children. Brothers and sisters are also an important part of a child’s learning environment, in particular in terms of modelling but this will be affected by the child’s position in the family, the age gap between siblings, and their sex. In later childhood and adolescence, peers become more important. Studies have also shown that children’s groups have norms of their own to which children learn to conform, and that children use social techniques such as imitation to gain admission to groups.

As children develop, they begin to be able to assess situations for themselves. They are more sensitive to situations and other people and are able to choose an appropriate course of action. They are then able to review their course of action and assess how effective they were. This is when children learn to use their knowledge of what other people think and feel to help them alter their behaviour accordingly.

However, normal development of social skills can be adversely affected by several factors.

Attitudes to the environment

Studies have shown that people who are socially unskilled are less likely to be able to control and manage the situations they are in.

Feelings of powerlessness to control the environment, and experience of situations in which the individual has been unskilled, have been found to be significant factors in some socially unskilled people. The implications for people with specific difficulties or disabilities are obvious. They are often treated as people with ‘needs’ as opposed to ‘strengths’, leading them to a belief that they are possibly ‘incompetent’; they are often not given the opportunity to control their own environments, leading them to a possible state of ‘learned helplessness’. All of these will have a negative impact on their ability to learn effective social skills.

Effects of deprivation

Deprivation or poverty of stimulation, such as that found in child-care institutions' can have negative consequences for cognitive development, and deprivation involving family relationships seems to have negative consequences for emotional and behavioural adjustment.

Significant factors are the lack of opportunities to develop attachments to other adults and the length of separations. Children who experience this kind of deprivation will often be less socially skilled than their peers and will be slower to develop effective use of social skills.

The development of theory of mind

The development of a child’s social skills is closely related to the child’s development of theory of mind. Theory of mind covers two separate concepts: gaining the understanding that other people also have minds, with different and separate beliefs, desires, mental states, and intentions; and being able to form theories as to what those beliefs, desires, mental states and intentions are. In brief, Baron-Cohen (2000) describes it as being able ‘to reflect on the content of one’s own and other’s minds’.

It is also often characterized as being able to ‘put yourself into another’s shoes’. Poor conversational skills or social skills can be interpreted as stemming from a lack of understanding that other people have access to different information or knowledge, and that communication occurs through the exchange of information. Hale et al (2005) says that this lack of understanding, or theory of mind deficit, will result in difficulty engaging in reciprocal social discourse.

The link between a child’s development of theory of mind is therefore closely related to their social skills development, and assessment and intervention will need to take account of this.

The development of social skills is therefore not automatic for some children and can be adversely affected by their diagnosis, environment, and social background. And as we discussed in the first issue, social competence has been repeatedly demonstrated to be a critical variable in predicting both success in future life and a good quality of life. So these children who present with social skills difficulties desperately need immediate and effective intervention.

But where should we start?

In the next issue, we will look at assessing social skills. How should we assess and how should we use the assessment to plan our intervention?

Alex Kelly
Speech & language therapist and social skills consultant

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References:

Baron-Cohen S (2000) Understanding Other Minds. Oxford University Press

Hale CM and Tager-Flusberg (2005) Social communication in children with autism. Autism, 9 (2) 157-178