Social Skills and Friendship

Games – Practice for Life

• Numbers • Categories• 3 truths and a lie• Others?

Behaviour

What behaviours have seen from children and young people that may prevent them from forming positive relationships?

Understanding…• Have you ever exhibited any of these

behaviours? How did you feel at the time? What had happened?

• Fight?• Flight?• Freeze?• Then what happened??

Toxic Stress (Kate Cairns – awesome!)

• Threat response• Unconscious / automatic responses• Made more difficult by insecure attachment• 3 important considerations:

– Safety– Relationship– Narrative

Toxic Stress (Kate Cairns – truly awesome!)

• Until they recover they may:– Struggle to self regulate– Learn / process effectively– Struggle to make and maintain relationships –

understand and be interested in the world of others

What can we do to support ???

• These types of behaviours makes life and indeed relationships difficult.

• If behaviour is a manifestation of unspoken feeling and subsequently expresses as a form of communication, then it becomes important for us to try to understand what the child is trying to communicate and help them interpret it.

What can we do to support ???

• A child will not develop a trusting relationship until they have had an experience of being held and feeling secure (SAFE).

• They will not develop positive relationships until they have experienced an unconditional positive relationship.

What can we do to support ???

• Neither will they truly learn to understand other people’s point of view until someone has repeatedly and consistently understood theirs.

(EMPATHY)• How can children control their feelings if the adults

around them don’t control theirs and how can they understand and contain them if no-one has contained theirs for them or helped them to understand what is happening.(CO-REGULATION, CONTAINMENT)

What can we do to support ???

• Children who attack and denigrate often feel small, worthless and very vulnerable…

• Children who are irritating are probably very fragile…

Children with behavioural difficulties…

…have difficulties managing their feelings. Such children probably have:

– Low self esteem– Distorted self concept– They may feel they never get it right, are awful

people and are always in the wrong (heightened sense of justice).

– They often think we have automatically assumed they are in the wrong. (Adult’s reactions to the behaviour can reinforce this.)

The Brain is a Social Organism…

it insanity i could be wrong!!

                                                                                       

it insanity i could be wrong!!

                                                                                       

Recovery from Toxic Stress

New connections formed in the brain:– Relationships:

1. Respond – adult emotionally available – co-regulation

2. Engage – all types of close proximity

3. Relax – use the adult to co-regulate

4. Play - Making sense of what is going on emotionally and socially – non verbal / sensory

5. Talk - Explaining, describing, asking, chatting, signing, (and singing!) and listening. Leads to narrative.– Repetition – safe / predictable

Beliefs / Thoughts That Cause Me Problems

1. People must like me or I will be miserable.2. I can’t control myself.3. I can’t stand the way others act.4. I should be better than others.5. I must never show I’m weak.6. I’m no good.7. People should do what they want.8. Adults should trust me.9. Nobody can tell me what to do.10. Everyone is against me.11. Noone likes me.12. I have to do what my friends tell me.

How I Feel Inside…