Helping Anxious Children – Part 3

Anxiety is one of the most common mental health concerns for adults and children today. At times I am overwhelmed by the many anxious children who I connect with in my school on a daily basis. I recently read an incredibly practical and powerful book called ‘Helping Your Anxious Child’. The book is a step by step guide for parents to help their children overcome anxiety. Before reading this book I often felt I was fumbling in the dark when working with anxious children. This three part blog series is a summary of the very practical and powerful strategies I gained from the book. In Part 1 I addressed types of anxiety and detective thinking. In Part 2 I explored stepladders as a strategy for managing anxiety. This is my final post in the series. Today I will unpack strategies to develop successful social skills in anxious children.

To be successful in a broad spectrum of social situations, children need a wide range of skills such as asking to join a game, inviting other children to play and initiating or sustaining a conversation. Research conducted by the authors of ‘Helping Your Anxious Child’ revealed that there are significant benefits to teaching social skills to children with anxiety.

Social Skills

There are five key categories of social skills which have been summarised below. These tend to be hierarchical. Observe the anxious child carefully and evaluate their performance in these different areas. A child does not need to be perfect in all five domains. But make a note of any skill that is causing issues or barriers in relationships for the child. It is important to compare the social skills of the child with same aged peers, rather than children younger or older.

Body Language

• Eye contact: looking into the eyes of others, actively paying attention without excessive staring
• Posture: sitting or standing appropriate to the situation
• Facial expression: often mirroring the other person in conversation and appropriate to the situation

Voice Quality

• Tone and pitch: friendly, expressive and pleasant to listen to rather than aggressive or whining
• Volume: speaking up to be heard but not shouting and appropriate for the situation
• Rate: not too quickly and not too fast, able to comprehend what is being said
• Clarity: easy to understand and follow

Conversation Skills

• Greetings and introductions: saying ‘hello’ when greeting others
• Starting conversations: asking simple questions or making simple statements
• Holding conversations: answering questions, asking questions and taking turns
• Choosing a topic of conversation: engage the listener and appropriate for the situation
• Using polite conversation: using ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ as appropriate

Friendship Skills

• Offering to help or offering items: helping children or adults or lending items when appropriate
• Offering invitations: to join an activity or come and play at his or her house
• Asking to join in: approaching another child and asking to join the activity
• Expressing affection: either through speech or physical gestures
• Giving compliments: to adults and children when appropriate, showing an interest in others and making them feel good
• Showing caring when others are hurt or upset: being sensitive to others and caring when they are in need

Assertiveness

• Sticking up for one’s rights: balance between assertive and aggressive, communicating a clear message
• Asking for help or information or expressing needs: asking for clarification or support, not remaining silent
• Saying no: refusing unreasonable requests
• Dealing with teasing: putting a stop to teasing and not being hurt by it
• Dealing with bullying: attempting to stop bullying through personal strategies or asking for help

There are a number of ways to teach social skills. Incidental teaching involves finding opportunities that occur in everyday life to demonstrate and teach a particular skill. Alternatively, intensive teaching requires explicit guidelines and instructions that are reinforced over a period of time. Social skills are like building blocks, start with a small skill and then gradually build to an overall performance. Humour can be a useful tool to diffuse anxiety and making the practice enjoyable. For intensive instruction firstly model the skill and then practice with the child using role play. Once the child is confident using the skills at home, they must then practise in real-life scenarios. Using a stepladder approach, the child should start with a smaller task that focuses on a particular social skill. Some practice activities may include:

• Saying hello to a teacher
• Asking a child what their favourite book is
• Asking a question in class
• Maintaining eye contact when talking to a neighbour
• Ordering a takeaway meal with a confident voice tone

Dealing With Teasing and Bullying

Teasing and bullying can be unfortunate realities of childhood. Whilst schools must be very proactive to prevent teasing and bullying, there are many contexts where children may be a victim to this type of unkind behaviour. Therefore, it is important for children to learn skills to deal with teasing and bullying. If a child reports teasing or bullying it is important to validate their feelings to help reduce the shame or anxiety. If a child cannot stop teasing or bullying then the school must step in to support. Below are six strategies to deal with teasing and bullying:

1. Joke: Joking about a tease it can take the power out of the words so that it doesn’t hurt any more
2. Detective Thinking: Establish if the tease is true or not. If it is true, what can be done to fix the situation? If it is not true, remember that the tease is not correct and brush it aside.
3. Buddy Up: have the child stay close to a sympathetic or supportive friend who will stand up to teasing
4. Question: Get the attention of others by saying ‘Sorry I didn’t hear you, can you say it louder?’. This will either embarrass the child or make them speak up so others hear and can report the behaviour.
5. Do Something Different: Try to avoid typical reactions of sadness, fear or anger. Think creatively about different reactions such as ignoring, laughing, humming or making an unrelated comment.
6. Clever Comebacks: think of clever comebacks that are not nasty or rude but diffuse the situation.

Question for you: What social skills do you think are important to teach and how would you scaffold these skills for children?