Literally. I am sitting here thinking about greeting the New Year and ways that our books and our website can reach and teach more children who struggle with social skills and help with the making and keeping of friends. Learning to enter a room or a place and greeting people is the first chapter of our book for kids, and with the advent of a new year and the self-made promise to use the blog to reach those kids, it seems like the right place to start.
So many times, an excited or seemingly unaware young friend will walk right by a peer or one of us, his or her brain focused on getting their snack or some other goal in mind. Other times, we may be working with a socially anxious young person who loses their words in a novel or social situation. As adults, it’s important to think about the fact that forcing anxious kids to say hello, please, thank you, etc. shines a social spotlight on the child. Just like stage fright, a child may freeze and we inadvertently push harder for fear of the child appearing to be rude. Go slow…we like to start with encouraging a wave hello or goodbye and have the child acknowledge us or their peers that way.
We talk about everyone’s need to “feel special” and that’s why we should greet them. We coach kids on the fact that we have invited them in to our Centers and that they should begin to practice this social expectation of being a good guest.
Any new skill takes a little courage, practice and repetition. If your child has trouble with greeting other people, practice it before you go somewhere. Teach children that the expected response to “how are you?” can be just a simple, “I’m fine, thank you.” When a child is leading with their goal or burning objective first (“Can I have my snack?), we will respond with something such as, “Sure, but first I need to feel special today, do you remember what you need to do?”
Most importantly, reinforce when a child has done it! Many times, children have learned to be successful greeters by being praised for remembering! When a child comes to us for a social program and seeks us out first to say hello before going off for snack or to play, we make a big deal out of how “that was the BEST greeting today – thank you!”
