Joao Lourenco, clinical psychologist and child specialist based in Dubai, provides some tips on how parents can help their children develop emotional and social skills.
• Model social skills. Children learn from seeing how you treat your friends or behave.
• Prompt your child to ask for help, take turns, share something or give a compliment.
• Participate in pretend play.
• Prompt your child with a suggestion of the appropriate words to use.
• Talk with children about how to be with others.
• If a child is aggressive, respond to their feeling but tell them that you don’t like their behaviour.
• Prompt your child to notice their friends’ activities or moods.
• Teach your child to smile and greet other people.
• Teach skills like relating and listening to others, being friendly and responding and showing interest in what others have to say.
Asha Susan Mani, an autism and behavioural consultant based in Sharjah, provides tips to parents with autistic children.
• Teach them to play interactively with variety of peers.
• Teach them to share, return the greetings and respond appropriately to the instruction of peers.
• Teach them to sit appropriately in a group and attend to the teacher and other students and follow the instructions.
• Help them follow classroom routines, like behaving appropriately during transitions, doing the class work independently, waiting for their turn to do activities, getting in line on request, completing tasks and bringing their work to the teacher.
