Improved Social Skills
The only problem with the explosion of exercise games is the
horrible terms that have been coined by researchers to describe them. I mean,
exergaming, and exertainment? Seriously?
Despite the icky-ness of these terms, games like Wii Fit have made
it semi-feasible to become fit and healthy without having to venture outside.
This is a huge benefit to gamers who stereotypically fear the things that exist
in the outside world like sunlight, human interaction and those confusing but
intriguing individuals we know as “females”.
natural environment, are encouraging.
How to Improve Children's Social Skills
The basics of social behavior come from the brain’s emotional
system, which is an important contributor to empathy and morality from infancy
through adulthood. Babies often cry when they hear another baby crying, because
knowing that another person is unhappy makes them feel bad. Even rats will work
to help
another rat who seems to be in distress. So some precursors of social
skills are probably built into the brain, but experience also influences how
well children understand and respond to the needs of other people.
Initiating joint attention to an object is one of the earliest
indications of social skills. Babies who frequently point out interesting
things to other people at nine or ten months are more likely to be rated as
socially competent at two and a half years. By their first birthday, babies
already like
characters who help others better than those who hinder. True empathy,
the ability to appreciate and talk about other people’s feelings, develops by
age five.
During that same preschool period, children show great gains in
self-control. Individual children who have better self-control also show more
empathy and a more developed conscience. Similarly, children who are better at
inhibiting an automatic behavioral response (for example, by saying “day” when
shown a picture of the moon, instead of “night”) tend
to have a more sophisticated theory of mind—the ability to imagine what
other people are thinking and feeling—once age, intelligence, and working
memory are taken into account.
The earliest precursor of conscience is the child’s desire to
please the parents, which tends to be stable across situations. Before age two,
children begin to show individual differences in their likelihood of feeling
guilty when they’ve done something wrong, which is linked to their ability to
follow rules when no one is watching. Receptiveness to parental guidance
predicts individual differences in conscience at later ages, including older
children’s ability to reason about moral situations.
The child’s individual characteristics also influence the development
of conscience. Children with strong self-control show more mature moral
abilities than impulsive children of the same age. Temperamentally fearful
children are prone to guilt, which leads to more compliant behavior but also to
anxiety disorders. For them, warm and sensitive parenting is the most effective
path to conscience. For less fearful children, formation of a secure attachment
to a parent is the best predictor of later conscience.
One way that parents and teachers can improve children’s
self-control and social skills is through emotion coaching. This process
involves helping children to label their emotions and learn to think through
the possible consequences of various reactions in advance, rather than
following their first impulse. For example, an angry five-year-old might
benefit from a parent’s suggestion to try running around the house a few times
rather than punching the friend who stole his toy. In oneanalysis of
multiple studies, involving over 270,000 students from kindergarten to high
school, schools programs aimed at improving social and emotional skills
increased academic performance by 11 percentile points—as much as interventions
targeted specifically to academic subjects.
The more often a parent talks to a child about motivations and
mental states, the sooner the child begins to demonstrate an explicit ability
to speak in terms of the beliefs of others. An even stronger influence is
growing up with older siblings. Having an older (but not younger) sibling leads
to earlier
development of theory-of-mind capacity in three- to five-year-old
children. The size of the difference is equivalent to an average of four to six
months of advance per older sibling, for up to three siblings. By age six,
nearly all children have acquired the same level of understanding, but there
may be lasting social advantages to developing this capability earlier.
Psychologist Glenn Schellenberg unexpectedly found another way to
improve social skills in a study aimed
at finding out whether musical training increases intelligence. He compared
six-year-old children who received 36 weeks of music lessons or drama lessons
with those who were placed on a waiting list. Though he had intended to use
acting lessons as an active control for musical training, children who took the
drama class also showed a large benefit: marked improvement in adaptability and
other social skills. The effect was moderately large, with the average child
receiving drama lessons scoring higher than 72 percent of children in the other
groups. Researchers aren’t certain why taking drama lessons improves social
skills, but one possibility is that deliberate practice at inhabiting the
character of another person strengthens the function of brain areas involved in
daily social interactions.
The evidence is clear that self-control and social skills are
related areas of child development where experience matters a great deal. By
using the suggestions in this series to help improve these skills, parents can
increase the chances that their children will become successful and happy
adults—and the rest of us will appreciate their empathy and conscience.
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