The whole world has felt the weight of social distancing. Adults are mostly consumed by work to get by each day, but children especially the really young ones have been having a tricky time at home. The age where one runs to the parks and plays, making new friends, socializing, sharing food while connecting to the world. That time is now being spent inside with the family and in front of a screen distant learning. With the social life of your young children coming down just to family interactions, we have some interesting ways to make it more fun and interesting for them while building their social skills that they would be building in a pandemic-free world.
- Play, Learn & Communicate: In the growth years it’s important to develop your child’s language skills. Earlier they used to go out communicate with other children and learn language and much needed communication skills. With that not being possible at the moment, you can be their playmate. Play games that initiate conversations and induce thinking. Weave in positive thoughts in your day-to-day activities. This will impact your kid greatly and help them overcome the sense of seclusion from the outside world.
- Connect to Friends: Keep your kids connected with their friends on a regular basis, initiate fun activities, collaborate with other parents and give your kids the connection they need, even if it’s virtual at the moment the good thing about this is they won’t lose touch with their friends.
- Importance of Eye Contact: Kids are curious and always observing what you do. It’s important how you behave with them and people around you because they are watching and learning. Take this as an opportunity to teach your kid the importance of making eye contact while speaking.
When you are having a conversation with your kid, sit down at their eye level and make eye contact while conversing. Firstly, it makes them feel important and second, they listen better. This improves their listening as well as their confidence. When your kid will return to normalcy, they will be confident enough to speak to others while having eye contact which is a important social skill.
- Read books: Read to them, know what kind of books they are interested in or start with a new topic, something that they have been curious about lately. Read to them and if they have learnt to read, let them read for you at times. Sit back listen to them, create a bond, give them the attention.
Discuss about the topic or the characters, teach some early life lessons like sharing, caring, empathy. Learn how your child talks about the character, learn how they understand things, look for shortcomings if any, overcome them slowly and gently.
- Cook with them: Let your kid help you with cooking, especially when it’s something they enjoy eating. Let them help you with the little aspects making them feel like they contributed to the cooking. This will be an interesting addition to fun activities in between their and your otherwise mundane day. This will increase their participation and increase their curiosity to try out new things.
Finally, we would like to end by saying that, this is the most precious time to build a strong bond with your kid which would have been a little difficult otherwise. Try and indulge in as much as fun activities to give your child the growth and development they need. Try the above-mentioned ways to improve your kids’ social skills in lockdown. A Pandemic shouldn’t limit your child from learning social skills.