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Parent and Child Psychological Services PLLC 
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Making Friends: Early Childhood and Elementary School By Kirsten Ellingsen, PhD

2/24/2022

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Making friends and building positive relationships with peers is an important aspect of life. Some children have an easier time developing friendships. Others have more difficulty making friends and maintaining friendships. All children need foundational social skills to be successful.

Different reasons might account for difficulty making and sustaining friendships. When a child struggles with communication or understanding social cues, experiences social anxiety, has difficulty managing impulsivity or experiences problems regulating emotions it can be even more difficult to connect and establish healthy friendships. See also the Child Mind Institute for more information https://childmind.org/article/kids-who-need-a-little-help-to-make-friends/.

In addition, during the COVID-19 pandemic, many children were at home and had limited access to peers. They might need additional support connecting to peers and re-establishing friendships. Children might experience apprehension and anxiety about making friends after being home and only playing with siblings. Social skills such as regulating frustration, cooperating, and focusing
might have been impacted during the past two years (https://www.nationalgeographic.com/family/article/your-kids-might-now-be-socially-awkwardand-theyre-not-alone).

As one elementary age child stated after returning to school in person, “Well dad, you have to be around other people to make friends”. So true. For tips to help your child returning to school make friends see this article on the PBS website: https://www.pbs.org/parents/thrive/helping-your-child-make-friends-again.

While you as a parent might not be able to make a friend for your child, you can help build and enhance social skills and provide opportunities to encourage this process. Supporting the underlying social skills that can establish and maintain friendships is particularly important when children are young.

Understood.org (https://www.understood.org/articles/en/4-skills-for-making-friends) outlines 4 foundational skills for making friends as: 1) Starting Conversations 2) Interpreting Social Situations, 3) Interacting Positively and 4) Listening to Others.

According to an article by Dr. Candy Lawson, a clinical psychologist at the Center for Development and Learning, (https://gostrengths.com/social-skills-and-school/) children need to be able to initiate, maintain and end conversations. This includes knowing how to greet, start a conversation, understand the listener, take perspective or see the point of view of another person,
empathize, read verbal and understand non-verbal social cues, including tone. They also need to develop problem solving skills and be able to resolve peer conflict and appropriately apologize. 

Parents can directly teach and build social skills by modeling behavior, role-playing, and practicing skills. Ask your child “What is a friend?” and talk about shared values, interests, and choice. Help your child identify the values and traits that are most important to him or her. Encourage participation in safe activities. Help your child find shared interests. Join clubs. Play a sport. Take a class. Set up play-dates and opportunities to rehearse skills. More tips are below.

Tips for Parents of Young children:
  • Take turns practicing how to make an introduction (including rehearsing non-verbal communication such as appropriate eye contact and smiling).
  • Coach and role play how to initiate a conversation and join play. If a child needs more support, develop a social script and practice together.
  • Use a toy or object to approach another child and ask to do an activity together. Role play asking questions or saying, “can I play?” to enter a game, or “do you want to ___(go down the slide, play tag, build blocks) ” to start a new activity that they can do together.
  • Encourage and model sharing and taking turns.
  • Use books to talk about emotions and learn how to identify feelings in characters. For a list of 15 books on friendship see: https://www.pbs.org/parents/thrive/childrens-books-about-friendship
  • Act out different emotions and take turns guessing from facial cues and body language.
  • Discuss and teach how to handle peer conflict without aggression.

For very young children see: https://www.zerotothree.org/resources/227-tips-on-helping-your-child-build-relationships


Tips for Parents of Elementary School Age Children:
  • Encourage learning and practicing how to introduce yourself.
  • Talk about the goal of conversations with peers. Encourage children to ask questions to get to know the peer better, find out if they have shared or common interests. Help children understand that more you talk, the more you will get to know if someone might be a person that you want to be friends with.
  • Practice how to keep conversations going using open ended questions. Practice asking related follow-up questions.
  • Try to find something in common.
  • Point out and build awareness about non-verbal communication.
  • Demonstrate and act out different emotions to help teach identification of emotions and facial and body cues. Talk about how different body language might be interpreted by others. Practice in the mirror. 
  • Discuss and practice perspective taking. How would you feel if? How would you know if your friend was comfortable? Sad? 
  • It can help to approach another child who is alone rather than in a group. Offer to help someone. Offer an invitation to join in an activity. 
  • Focus on getting to know the new friend and take your time before rushing to be “best friends.”

Acknowledge that it takes courage to talk to someone new and make a new friend. Reflect and validate feelings and show confidence that your child or teen will be able to develop friendships. If your child is shy, this can be a challenge. If your child has an ASD or social anxiety, making friends might be even more difficult and require additional support and strategies.

It is important to understand your individual child and his or her needs and concerns about friendships. Some children are more introverted and like time alone. Other children want to make friends and have more challenges One or two good friends is all many children need. Check your expectations and what is reasonable and desired by your child.


Helping your Child Maintain friendships

Help your child identify behaviors that can hinder or end friendships. Talk about DO and DON’T behaviors.

DO: Communicate and spend time together. Be kind. Celebrate accomplishments and good news. Be empathetic. Listen. Take turns sharing. Ask about your friend more than telling about yourself. Support when something is difficult.

DON’T: Talking behind someone’s back. Being Bossy. Breaking a promise. Asking another friend to take sides. Leaving someone out. Being competitive or jealous of your friend. Embarrassing your friend.

If your child needs additional support to build social skills and develop friendships it can be helpful to reach out to your school counselor or talk with a child therapist for targeted strategies.

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Diving into the “C” in CBT: Exploring Techniques for Changing Your or Your Child’s Thinking By Kate Gibson, PsyD, ABPP

2/17/2022

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CBT is a common form of therapy short for Cognitive Behavioral Therapy. CBT focuses on the interconnection between thoughts, emotions and behavior. People participating in CBT learn to identify the thoughts that trigger their feelings and reactions. Oftentimes the thinking can be flawed, meaning inaccurate or unhelpful. Thinking errors can lead to or exacerbate anxiety and depression. One goal of CBT is to improve happiness and overall functioning by helping people catch their problematic thinking and begin to think about things in a different way. Before diving in to using a strategy to change one's thinking first identify the thought. Once you have the thought in mind there are various cognitive strategies that can help adjust your thinking, a few of which are explained here. The differences can be subtle but as long as you are working to ensure that your thinking is not making things harder for you then you are on the right track. If you are a parent of a child with inaccurate or unhelpful thinking, you can use these strategies to help your child work through their thinking. You can always seek the support of a CBT therapist for yourself or your child as well. 

Cognitive Challenging
Cognitive challenging can often start with telling yourself that just because you’re having that thought does not automatically make it true. This technique involves testing the accuracy of your thought.  Ask yourself if it is true. If you think it is true can you be sure it is true? What is the evidence to support this thought? If the thought seems to be inaccurate or lack support then challenge it with a thought that is more accurate or a thought you know to be true. If you are supporting your child in challenging their thinking you could have them interview several people to see how accurate their thought is compared to other people’s experiences. For example, if the thought were “all dogs bite” they could find out about people’s experiences with dogs where no biting has occurred. The new thought that they would use to challenge the original thought might be “many dogs don’t bite.”

Cognitive Restructuring
Cognitive restructuring is also referred to as reframing. Cognitive restructuring begins much the same way as cognitive challenging. Reframing or restructuring one's thinking, however, involves generating a more balanced thought which may be more elaborate than purely directly challenging the thought. It involves coming up with a thought that more fully explains the situation by also looking at the situation through a different filter. We may be bringing a negative or worried filter to our thinking so we are trying to see things through a more optimistic or resilient filter instead. In the example of the “dogs bite” thought, reframing that thought might lead you to something like “though it is possible for any dog to bite, most dogs are friendly and safe to be around, and dogs that are not comfortable around you give you signs that they are not comfortable.” 

Cognitive Processing
Processing your thoughts involves looking for the meaning that you may be attaching to or that may be underlying your thoughts. Again first identify the thought causing you trouble. The type of thoughts that need to be “processed” are ones that are keeping you or your child stuck and holding you back. They have often become attached to negative beliefs about yourself. Processing is about asking yourself “what does it mean to me if that thought is true?” Processing is generally best done with the support of a CBT trained therapist.

Acceptance and Encouragement
Sometimes rather than changing your thoughts, accepting them can help you feel better. This means accepting the struggle you are having without feeling defeated by it. We can add on encouraging thoughts after our acceptance thought as well. If the thought was “this presentation is going to be so scary” the new thoughts could be “this presentation IS going to be scary AND I can do it.” Encouraging thoughts include thoughts such as “I can do it,” “I can handle it,” “I will get through it,” “I’ve got this.” Often adding the encouraging thought to the acceptance thought after the word “AND” helps you feel better able to handle the situation. These simple adjustments to how we are phrasing the words in our thoughts has the potential to make a huge difference. 

Leaving Room for Thoughts to Change 
Sometimes we can think in extremes that do not leave much room for the possibility of change. This approach is about tempering the thought with some key words. Maybe the thoughts are “this is always too hard” or “I can’t do it.” Adding words that make the thought less definitive can help leave room for the possibility of overcoming your struggles. You might add words like “yet” or “sometimes” so your thoughts become “sometimes this is so hard” or “I can’t do this YET.” This allows you or your child to believe in the possibility of success.


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Sarasota County Gifted Magnet Testing FAQs By Tara Motzenbecker, NCSP, LMHC

2/10/2022

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    Parent and Child Psychological Services is a private practice serving children and families in the Sarasota, Florida area. The practice is owned and operated by Dr. Gibson, a Licensed Psychologist who is Board Certified in Clinical Child and Adolescent Psychology. ​

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