Social-emotional development is gaining time in the spotlight as studies highlight its crucial role in overall learning. Being able to manage emotions, experience empathy, and forge relationships with others are important building blocks. For kids with developmental challenges, especially autism spectrum disorder, these skills can be especially challenging.
Understanding Challenges
We found this excellent article explaining the ways children with autism spectrum disorder often struggle with the following skills:
- Understanding, showing and managing emotions
- Interacting with others (seeing another person’s perspective, participating in back-and-forth conversation, collaborating)
- Reading and using facial expressions and body language
The article is a great resource with simple suggestions you can use with any child who has trouble in these areas.
Supporting Your Child’s Social-Emotional Learning through Friendship
Social-emotional learning begins at home, with you. But as your child grows, it is within the context of friendship that he or she practices and continues to learn these skills. As a parent you are in a unique position to help your child learn how to play with other children. Here is a detailed article from our archives with advice about how to do this.
Speech-Language and Occupational Therapy Emphasizing Social-Emotional Development
At ICT, social and emotional development is weaved into every intervention we offer. In fact, we started our practice in order to emphasize these skills! When looking for speech-language and occupational therapy for your child, look for practitioners who use DIR/Floortime or are heavily play-based. You can read more about why we love DIR/Floortime here. Group interventions can also be highly-effective at helping kids learn how to interact (play!) with others. You can read about our group interventions here.
For more information or answers to questions about this important topic, feel free to give us a call.
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