Teaching Social and Emotional Skills

Most people who know me know that I often get an internal eye roll going on when I hear the phrase “We teach social and emotional skills.” I know it is done with the kindness of people's hearts and a genuine desire to help children move through and past their difficulties. But I do have a real issue with the word ‘teaching’ in that context.

Not because I am anti-teaching and education - because I am not. I am in total favour and celebration of it. Let us have more of it and soak up the beauty of education! However, social and emotional skills are not taught through worksheets and curricula. These are learnt.

Yes, the active verb here lies in learning, not in teaching. It lies in experiencing, not in being told how to deal with any given situation or how to respond to any given emotion that runs through us.

Experiencing Over Telling

We all learn our social and emotional skills through experiencing them and being kindly supported through them while being in the midst of a real-life situation. And, if we need that little bit of extra support from professionals, we find it through role play, play in general, exaggerated expression or scenarios, clowning, art, and drama - not by practising from a sterile piece of paper, learning social scripts, or being stuck in uninspiring rooms.

In our work in child development and crisis support, our main focus is connection, play, creativity, and a sense of joy and inspiration. We take children’s interests and then flow with humour and the sense of what spontaneously pops up in the session, working with that. We completely avoid the cognitive part. (Don’t worry, it still gets fed while we work through the other areas, but it can stretch gently and slowly, with stability and long-lasting strength.)

We don’t address the cognitive part directly because that part is often offline due to the experienced stresses the kids have had to face already.

We all learn better when we play and experience a little joy. Let's keep having that in our lives and let it flow into the lives of our kids, even in our professional paths. Can we even extend it to allowing in a sense of wonder and awe? Experiencing the activation of the inner understanding, in the gut - the area of wisdom, the deep within.

Learning the Hard Way

Oh yes, I have made the mistake of using worksheets. Even though I knew better (but sometimes I need to learn the hard way it seems) on children who weren’t able to receive the cognitive load.

One of those sessions ended up with a room that got completely trashed - tables overturned, the door barricaded, displays ripped off and apart, and a general sense of fear, horror, and depletion.

Who should be disciplined here? Who should suffer through some consequences? Who should have known better?

Well, the answer is ‘me’. Because I did know better, but I was still swayed by the part in my mind that thought, if I don’t use a worksheet, then what am I even doing? What do you have to show for?

I had a lot to show for, but not on the sheet - I am not even sure it still existed after that session. From the depth of my understanding, I can confidently say that this child was not at fault. He was protecting himself from something that would have been way too much. I made the mistake of going all cognitive. I knew better but did not do better. I did do better after that experience, though (that was my own personal social and emotional learning!).

The Language of Joy

From then on, we went to play pool - his language of joy. Through this shared activity, we explored themes of respect, etiquette, and how to deal with frustrations, while also increasing his sense of self-worth and frustration tolerance. We did all that through doing something he loved, and with that, we managed to reduce the constant and severe episodes of dysregulation that co-occurred with extreme discharge behaviours.

It worked.

We do this regularly in our practice now. We use what the child is interested in, speak their language of joy, and stretch their window of tolerance. We practise social skills and model how we deal with the more challenging waves of emotions that run through us.

This is the exact same approach we take with the autistic kids in our care. Through experiencing reciprocity, by first entering their world, we can then carefully stretch their understanding of social and emotional skills. It sends a shiver across my spine thinking about how we ‘teach’ autistic kids social skills without the softness of play, or the joy of entering their world first.

Honestly, see how just a little effort, genuine curiosity, and general openness takes you a long way. Cherish that progress that seemingly comes out of nowhere while your heart flutters with admiration for these kinds of possibilities. And guess what? The kids’ hearts will flutter too. Beautiful.

Moving Toward Connection

So, what do we take from this? Let’s move away from the ‘teaching’ of social and emotional learning and go to experiencing it through connection.

Let’s join the kids who struggle the most on the playground, narrate those experiences, and guide them through to successful friendships so they can learn by meaningful interactions. We can exaggerate those facial expressions so that they can learn through the obvious signs, and with some practice, they can eventually get to the point of being able to read the subtler signs and with time can even become proficient.

Meeting Them Where They Are

In Greenspan’s and Wieder’s book “Engaging Autism”, in the chapter on ‘Developing Social Skills’, they highlight six developmental stages:

• Attention

• Engagement

• Communication

• Shared Problem-solving

• Using Ideas Creatively and Spontaneously

• Using Ideas Logically and Higher Level of Thinking

  
  

Each one of these requires a completely different kind of support, and they act as foundational building blocks. If a child hasn't yet mastered steady Attention or felt the safety of true Engagement, we cannot expect them to jump ahead to Shared Problem-solving or Logical Thinking.

And this is exactly where the worksheet model falls apart completely. A piece of paper demands high-level cognitive processing from a brain that might still be working incredibly hard just to find safety in shared attention.

In our practice, we use these stages not as a rigid checklist to be taught, but as a roadmap for where to meet the child. If a child is at the Engagement stage, we don't bring a lesson plan; we bring ourselves. We sit on the floor, we enter their play, we mirror their joy, and we build that secure relational bridge.

When we respect these foundational layers through the softness of play and the safety of relationship, we aren't forcing a child to perform social scripts. Instead, we are giving them the emotional ground underneath their feet to naturally stretch into the next stage of growth.

Let's meet them exactly where they are, speak their language of joy, and let the real learning begin.