The Importance of Social Skills

            Edgar is already 21 years old and fresh out of college.  For most of his life, he had focused almost exclusively on his school work.  He did rather well, if grades were the only measure of success.  Edgar never made friends and mostly kept to himself.  All his hobbies were solitary activities, mostly involving the computer.  Even his conversations with the most important people in his life, his family, were limited to the day-to-day practical essentials.  He never really needed to connect with anyone.   As Edgar was growing up, his parents never really paid too much attention on his apparently lagging social skills.  They simply thought he would outgrow it.  After all, he appears reasonably intelligent anyway.  

            As Edgar enters the world of work, he finds himself in situations where he cannot avoid interacting with other people.  Some projects are even done in teams.  To cut the long story short, his ineptness in dealing with people quickly surface and he finds himself overwhelmed.  He does not quite understand what is going on when others interact with him.  Apart from the literal meaning of the words used, he does not quite understand much else.  And so, he finds himself being the brunt of other people’s impatience.  He then finds his social environment unpleasant.  Not long after, he quits work. 

            Social skills are among the most complex set of skills that everyone needs to learn, and basic intelligence (school smarts) is not enough to understand the complexities of even everyday human social interaction.  And so, parents really need to be watchful if their child is not behaving as expected in various social situations.  Of course, not everyone will be bubbly lives- of- the-party types, but everyone needs at least one friend with whom they can interact and connect.  In social situations, we like our children to behave appropriately. 

            Effectively interacting with people entails many sets of skills.  The most basic social skills entail understanding the usual conventions in social interaction.  This includes the following:  establishing and maintaining eye contact, using proper greetings, introducing oneself when necessary, using polite words, at least two strategies in starting and ending conversations, etc.  More sophisticated social skills entail more flexibility with the rules and adjusting to the nuances of situations.  These skills usually include the following:  understanding and responding to both verbal and nonverbal cues from other people, the use of humor, empathy and ensuring that others feel good about themselves in the interaction, etc. 

            Many people learn the nuances of social skills without them ever being taught these skills formally.  We pick them up in actual circumstances, sometimes from the example of others and other times when we reflect about our own behavior in a given situation.  Although many might think that social skills are learned in time and will naturally occur, not all children will learn social skills in this way.  There are some children who will only learn social skills adequately if they are taught these skills directly.  This is particularly true of people who are not very much attracted to being with people and interacting with others. 

            Children need to learn social skills very early.  In fact, as soon as they are three years old, interactions with peers become a good source for learning appropriate social skills.  This is the primary reason preschool is so important.  As the child gets older, social skills are further enhanced. 

            As for Edgar, learning social skills as an adult would be more difficult; not impossible, but difficult.  He will need a lot of perseverance and tolerance for making mistakes.  He also needs to be open in changing old habits and reaching out to others a bit more.  These are huge challenges as his habits and preferences become more set. 

On the morning of March 5, 2011 (Saturday), PsychConsult, Inc. will be sponsoring a FREE back-to-back talks.  I will be giving a talk on strategies in dealing with school bullying and my colleague Ms. Berny Go will be discussing teaching children social skills.  I will be explaining the systemic approach to addressing this phenomenon of bullying.  If you or anyone you know are interested to participate, please call PsychConsult, Inc. at (02)4212469 for reservations.  Do call as there are limited seats for this event. 

The Role of the Bystander in School Bullying

            Whenever my colleagues and I get invited to schools or other venues to talk to parents, one of the most common questions we get would be something related to bullies.  How can I stop a classmate from bullying my child?  How do I talk to parents so they can discipline their child to stop bulling my child?  We are thinking of pulling out our child from school because he/she is being bullied?  Where is the best place to put my child so that he/she is not victim to bullying?  Interestingly, we seldom get questions where parents admit that their child is a bully and what kind of help their child needs.  

            I must admit that bullying is one of the most difficult problems to deal with.  There are no easy answers.  If we are going to have any success in minimizing it, we have to get everyone involved.  Yes, I suggest a systemic approach, as bullying is not a problem of an individual; it is a problem of an entire environment where it is happening.  The problem is not the bully per se, the problem is the environment that allows bullying to happen. 

            Let me begin by saying that violence and hurtful behavior is not inherent in any child.  It is absolutely learned from one’s environment.  A child learns to hurt another child.  Sometimes, this happens in the home—when a child is discipline using corporal punishment, for instance.  Other times, they see it on television or from other children around them.  And so, interventions must not only focus on the victim of bullying, but the bully him/herself as well. 

            School bullying often happens in the presence of peers, and quite invisible to the adults.  As such, the bystander—often peers—must be taught to identify when bullying happens and what they can do.  In this systemic approach, the bystander plays the most crucial role.  They need to be empowered to give a voice to the victim and to step in so the bullying stops.  In all actions, the bystander must take a stand against bullying.  Here are some behaviors that the bystander can do: 

·         Say something to stop the bully, such as, “Pick someone your own size!”

·         Tell the victim that what he is doing is not nice, and identify what he/she is doing as “bullying.” 

·         Take the victim away from the bullying situation. 

·         Protect the victim from being bullied some more. 

·         Ask someone to run and get adult assistance. 

·         Run and get adult assistance. 

In the morning of March 5, 2011 (Saturday), PsychConsult, Inc. will be sponsoring FREE back-to-back talks.  I will be giving a talk on strategies in dealing with school bullying and my colleague Ms. Berny Go will be discussing teaching children social skills.  I will be explaining the systemic approach to addressing this phenomenon of bullying.  If you or anyone you know are interested to participate, please call PsychConsult, Inc. at (02)4212469 for reservations.  Do call as there are limited seats for this event. 

Continuing Bonds

            In one of my previous entries in this blog, I discussed grief and the various stages that people usually go through in loss.  As we grieve over a loss, we often let go of how things were, realizing that the past will never come back as it was.  We then get to a point when we accept the reality of our new situation and get on with our lives. 

            This process is easier said than done.  A colleague of mine, Ms. Angelica Ang, recently did her thesis on what she called “continuing bonds.”  What she tried to capture in her study was how people, particularly widows, grieved over the loss of a loved one (in this case, their husbands).  But instead of totally letting go, many among these women actually thought that their relationship with their husbands merely transformed from a more physical to a spiritual one.

            She found out from some studies done in the west how about 40% of widows actually communicate with their deceased spouse.  They also felt that they were watched over.  Slightly more women (44%) even went to the extent of admitting that they sense their deceased spouse’s presence; they felt the touch, heard the voice, or even see the image of their spouse after their passing.  For many others, their memories of their spouses kept them alive somehow.  Many still keep their spouse’s belongings, and regularly perform rituals of remembrance. 

            As Ms. Ang studied how these continuing bonds were observed among the widows she surveyed and interviewed, she noted 10 manifestations of this phenomenon.  They are as follows: 

1)      Hopeless hope – when they think of their loved one, hoping that someone would knock on the door and they would open to see that person

2)      Visiting the grave – the frequency of visits to the grave as a way of perpetuating a memory

3)      Care – the consciousness that the other (deceased) person can still witness what one does on a day to day basis; behaviors are patterned after what the other person would have wished 

4)      Loyalty – continuing to nurture one’s affection towards the other person, even after death  

5)      Taking on husband’s role – taking up the source of livelihood of the family; doing the things that the deceased person used to do for the family

6)      Preserving his possessions – holding on to what the deceased possessed in life, and not wanting to let go of them; appreciating the “sentimental value” of these things

7)      Deceased as standard – idealizing the contributions of the diseased and using that as the standard for any possible future relationships, sometimes even for one’s children

8)      Legacy – thinking in terms of what the deceased left for the rest of the family, whether these are material things or intangibles (such as values or principles)

9)      Relationships with relatives – continuing to attend family affairs and being involved with  the relatives on the side of the deceased 

10)  Reminiscence – honoring the memory of the deceased (e.g., celebrating special occasions as if he were still alive)

Continuing bonds was studied in the context of widows who lost their husbands.  I suspect that the same phenomenon can be observed with other significant losses, such as, a parent losing a child or a child losing a parent.  At any rate, it is some kind of a spin to the traditional notion of grief that I wrote about months ago. 

Basic Feelings

Have you ever listened to yourself talk to others when you are relating a certain experience that affected you?  In narrating your story, do you hear what kind of feeling words you use?  In many of our conversations, feelings are an implicit part of our message, meaning that we don’t necessarily say our feeling but only imply it by means of our tone of voice and nonverbal expressions (e.g., facial expressions, gestures, etc.).  Whereas most of the people we talk to will be able to pick up on the emotional tone of our message, many of us do not explicitly state how we feel or felt. 

Being able to express our feelings and giving them specific names can have several benefits.  For one, naming our reaction to a particular experience or event enables us to put meaning into this part of our lives.  This meaning often results to a greater understanding of ourselves and the way we see ourselves reacting to external circumstances.  For another, being able to identify an emotional reaction can lead us to specify a detail in our experience that held particular significance for us.  This makes us gain an understanding of when and what really made us react the way we did.  Finally, admitting our reaction can help us decide how we are going to react to the specific circumstances that we are experiencing.  This step is often the difference between merely reacting to one’s situation and purposively expressing one’s emotions. 

In order for us to be able to express our feelings adequately, we need to build our vocabulary for feeling words.  Researchers studying emotions believe that there are only a handful of basic feelings that are universally experienced.  This means that the feelings that people experience anywhere in the world are only made up of a few basic elements.  Other emotional reactions are said to be combinations of these basic feelings.  Much of what we know in this area is a product of research done by psychologists Paul Eckman, Nico Frijda, and their colleagues.  Some of the basic feelings that have been included in these lists are as follows:  happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise, shame and desire. 

For most of us Filipinos who are bilingual, we need to understand the various feeling words that different languages we know are able to convey.  Many of us will be convinced that that certain words in a particular language can better convey our meaning and experience.  We also need to be sensitive to these personal preferences. 

We can thus begin our journey of better emotional awareness by familiarizing ourselves with these fundamental emotional experiences.  We can ask ourselves how and when do we have these reactions?  To what extent are we able to anticipate and manage them?  What is easiest for us to identify and what are the most difficult to manage?  We can then observe ourselves incorporate these words the next time we are talking about our experiences to others. 

Parenting Styles

After last week’s post, I thought it relevant to talk about a basic model that helps us understand the different parenting styles.  I would like to discuss the 4 parenting styles of Maccoby and Martin (1983).  

This is a relatively simple model that combines 2 levels of 2 factors.  The first factor is the extent that parenting is child-oriented, and the second is how demanding the parent is.  The combination of two levels of these factors result to the 4 styles of parenting, which are as follows:

a)      Authoritative – Authoritative parents expect much from their children.  They challenge their children to do their best.  They are also child-centered and are more democratic in negotiating rules and expected behaviors.  Ultimately, decisions may be made by parents, but children are often consulted and their sentiments are considered in decision making.   

b)      Authoritarian – Parents who adapt the authoritarian style also have high demands on their children.  However, they believe that they know best, and that children have no role in making decisions in terms of rules and expectations.  As such, parents often dictate on their children and expect them to follow. 

c)      Indulgent – Indulgent parents tend to be very child-oriented.  They give in to the wants and desires of their children without making a lot of demands on them.  These parents see their roles as being nurturing and allowing children to be children. 

d)     Negligent – Parents who do not make any demands on children and who are busy minding their own with little regard for the children are called negligent.  They are often too absorbed with their own affairs that the children are pushed to the background of their lives. 

According to research done in the United States, Authoritative parenting generally bring up children who  are happy, capable, and successful.  Authoritarian parents are generally obedient and diligent in what they do, but are not always very happy.  They are also not very good in interpersonal relationships and their self-esteem is not always positive.  Children of indulgent parents are said to be less happy and tend to have problems with authority figures.  Finally, children of negligent parents tend to lack self control and have more negative self-esteem. 

When I did my thesis for my master’s degree, I actually used this model of parenting to understand how parents change their style of parenting when their children are identified to have some emotional problems.  Basically, what I found was that the more child-centered the parents were, the more they tended to pay more attention to the child.  They nurtured the child and also increased their demand for the child to help themselves.  In so doing, parents tended to move towards the preferred parenting style in such a situation.  Parents who tended to be less child-centered did not make much changes in their parenting style.  Some of them even started to be concerned about being identified as having some difficulties, fearing the stigma of such identification and shying away from potential help. 

This is just one study done in the Philippines using a western model, and might shed light on the virtues of being child-centered and yet challenging children to work harder and be self-motivated.  What style do you see yourself adapting and how do you think that is working for you and your child?