Teach your child to interact with one familiar peer for short periods. Focus on conventional social skills like sharing, turn-taking, and following rules. If your child has learned these skills while building a positive relationship with you, it will be easier for them to apply the same skills when playing with peers.

However, playing with peers is different from playing with adults. Peers might not have the same patience and could get upset if your child struggles with sharing, taking turns, or following rules. Provide your child’s peers with strategies to use when your child forgets to respect social rules.

Help your child generalize social conventions like sharing, turn-taking, and following rules with different people, in various settings, and during different activities. Your child might not immediately understand that these skills apply in all situations.

Teach your child to handle social breakdowns that occur when they or their peers struggle with sharing, turn-taking, and following rules.

Teach your child the skills needed to build and deepen friendships.

Screen time can interfere with building social relationships as it grabs our attention away from others. To build social skills, it’s important to limit non-social screen time. If it’s challenging to reduce your child’s screen time, start by limiting your own and then teach your child to do the same.

Using screen time advantageously can help teach social skills. Show interest in your child’s screen activities and discuss what you see. For example, ask about their favorite game or video and discuss the social skills of characters. Use screen time to teach turn-taking and sharing, or for face-to-face socializing.

Real-time social situations are more challenging but essential for developing social skills. Spend time with your child observing and interacting with people in places like grocery stores, restaurants, or playgrounds to practice these skills.

Teach your child the terms “sharing,” as it applies to social situations. Remind your child how you worked together to set up the schedule at home. Take a moment to teach those earlier skills if they are not yet secure. Show your child how you collaborated with them, and how this helped you to work and play together. Then, show your child how this collaborative skill can help them with peers. When you teach your child about sharing, show them what it looks like to share play ideas and to share toys. You could start out by having a ‘planning meeting’ with your child and your child’s social partner. Help both children understand what toys are available, and ask them to share ideas about what they’d like to do. Once they know what some of their options are, you can help them further by setting up a mini-schedule. The mini-schedule helps the children decide whose toys or ideas will be used for the first 10 or 15 minutes, and whose toys or ideas will be used for the next 10 or 15 minutes, etc. Just providing the suggestions listed here might be all that you need to do. After that, you can leave the children on their own. Later, you can check and see if your child and your child’s peer are able to carry out the suggestions that you made. If your child struggles with sharing and turn-taking, you may need to do check-ins more often to assure that they are able to share and take turns successfully.

Next, help your child understand turn-taking. The mini-schedule that you set up during your ‘planning meeting’ is a set-up for taking turns successfully. The work you did with your child when you built the schedule together is another set-up for successful turn-taking. Remember that by now, you have already taught your child how to wait for privileges. The ability to wait for a privilege is the same, or similar, to the ability to wait turns. In both situations, the child needs to be able to defer gratification, or follow the “first-then” rule. The schedule taught your child ‘first work, then play.’ Your planning session with your child teaches ‘First it’s your partner’s turn, then it’s your turn,” Children with disabilities, especially those who have not yet developed impulse control, commonly struggle with turn-taking. They may understand what turn-taking means and why it’s important, but still not take turns consistently. When this happens, you will probably have to provide some supervision to make sure that turn-taking goes smoothly.

Sharing and turn-taking are important in all social interactions, no matter what the activity. Social breakdowns most often occur when sharing and turn-taking have not occurred. That said, your child and their peers need to agree about what they want to do together. They have to know how to do whatever they agreed to do. Your child may need information about conversational rules, information about the play theme, or information about the rules of the game.

Conversational conventions. Teach your child to use verbal scripts, such as introducing self by name (“My name is…”); asking the peer their name (“What’s your name?”); asking to join in play (“Do you want to play together?”). You can also teach your child to use scripts like: “What do you want to play?” and “Who will go first? Who will go second?” Please (“Please can i have a turn?” and thank you (“Thanks for letting me take a turn”) can be good scripts to teach also. Finally, it’s useful to end the social interaction successfully. “Thanks for playing with me” or “Thanks for sharing with me” and “Let’s play again some time” could be useful scripts to teach. There may be other conversational conventions or scripts that your child will find useful. Make up some examples as you do your teaching, and show your child how to use them whenever necessary.

Play themes and conventions. You may need to familiarize your child with play conventions, in case your child’s playmates do not share the same interests or knowledge. Many play themes are learned when children watch adults and other family members perform the routines of the day. Some of play themes are acquired from movies, television, or videos. Children learn about what superheroes usually do, or what special events look like. Conventional play themes do not necessarily have strict rules, but they do have common patterns with a beginning, middle, and end. Themes might include playing house, pretending to go on an outing such as grocery shopping or going to the zoo, or pretending to be super heroes, pirates, or princesses. Make sure both children know which play theme they have chosen and have the props needed to carry out the play theme. Make sure your child knows what the play theme is. As part of teaching your child sharing and turn-taking, you may need to help your child follow the play theme of their friend before they get to choose the play theme that they wanted to follow with their friend

Rules of the game. As children age out of the early childhood years, they start to play more and more games with rules. Your child may need some teaching or instruction about the rules of board games, card games, or sports activities. If the children are making up their own rules, make sure that your child knows what the rules are. Just as before, help your child take turns in choosing the game they will play with their friends.

It can be useful to set up a mini-schedule or a sequence as a teaching strategy. Information about the sequence of the play date or the social event helps set up both children to share and take turns. It also helps the child to understand how the play interaction is supposed to go, introduces the concept of rules, and reduces confusion. So, even though it might seem odd to create a schedule for the play date between two children, some children need the support of a schedule for the play date in order to play successfully. They will use the schedule much more successfully if you have already shown them out schedules work for your daily routines.

Your child may need information about the beginning, middle and end of the game of the imaginary play activity. They may need to be told how long the play date will last, how often they need to switch activities, or how often they need to take turns. You can use a mini-schedule for a few play dates, to support your child’s learning and to assure success. Then, after a while, you can fade the support by asking your child to tell you what the sequence will be, or by supervising your child less frequently as they play with their friends. Allow your child to go off schedule, and see if the social interaction still goes well. The section below (“How do I speak with my child about social skills?”) provides additional examples of how to teach your child these important skills.

Strong executive skills and self-regulation skills are needed for successful social skills. These skills emerge in the preschool and early school age years in most children. Many children with neurodiversity need extra years to master these skills. Read the information below for some key points:

Impulse control. Be able to stop and think before acting. Taking turns requires impulse control. For some children, it’s too exciting to take their turn first. It’s too hard to wait for others while they take their turn. Impulse control helps manage this level of excitement.

Working memory. Be able to stop, think, and remember what you’re supposed to do. Working memory is needed to remember the rules. the rules might be rules of the game, or conventions in imaginary play, or just remember what your social partner was just talking about. Working memory helps children to respond approrpiately. Impulse control is needed to make sure that your child follows up on what they remember.

Planning. Planning means that you can stop, think, and remember what you’re supposed to do. It also means that you can plan the steps that you’re going to take. Most children understand the general idea of plans. They know what’s the beginning, middle, and end of an activity. But children with disabilities do not always understand plans unless the plan is very familiar. They can have difficulty following the plan of their peers unless someone explains the plan to them. Rigid children who try to force their peers to play their way are usually hiding the fact that they get confused when the plan is not theirs. Teaching about plans is a good skill to teach peers, so that they can then teach your child. When your child’s peers can explain the plan to your child, your child will perform better. It’s usually not that natural for children to explain to their peers how to play. They think that your child is ‘just supposed to do it.’ But your child might not kinow how. If your child’s peers can take a minute to explain the plan to your child, your child is more likely to perform well. Try teaching your child’s peers. You can do this more easily when your child’s peers are familiar to you.

Self-regulation. In child development and in special education, ‘self-regulation’ usually refers to managing intense emotions. Self-regulation is actually a much bigger skill. It refers to showing the right behaviors for the situation, not just managing your emotions. But, managing intense emotions is a good starting point. Make sure that your child has some skills in place for managing intense emotions. Intense emotions can et in the way of social situations quickly if they’re not addressed. Your child’s peers will get upset if your child is emotionally too intense. One way to take care of this situation is to teach your child’s peers how to coach your child. You can teach them to say something like: “I think we need a time out” or “Let’s take a break.” A simple phrase like this can prompt your child to regulate or adjust their intense emotions, even when you are not around to help them.