Learning And Teaching Social Skills: A Relationship-Based Approach

An excellent working alliance is a critical foundation for learning most things, including how to relate to others.This is because gaining social competence is more than conceptually grasping ?skills,? it also involves relaxing enough to take risks ? trying new things with uncertain outcomes.

From Skills to AwarenessPerhaps we need to remember that for the brain and mind to integrate new ideas, a fertile ground of receptivity must first be prepared. That receptivity often springs from an effective, trusting, working alliance. For many children, this means engaging in therapeutic and relational activities that are not purely didactic, because such structured activities are often associated with domains where they lack success.

In other words, you can make it fun ? play is the work of children.While I would never want to give up my use of behavioral charts and records, or surrender my collection of therapeutic games designed to teach things like communication pragmatics and listening skills, I have come to believe that those exercises are somewhat empty without a solid alliance between my clients and myself.The alliance gives children and teens the capacity to be receptive.

Sometimes, people may not even be aware of their own resistance to learning new skills. For children with learning disabilities, these walls often come down slowly, but they do come down with tools like patience, commitment, and belief in the desire of children to connect with others.Anything that might help a child connect the development of social awareness with a positive outcome should be considered a potential tool. Still, we should remember that what we are building with these tools is a mind, and a mind is not a machine ? it is the very essence of being a person. We simply can?t program a mind according to standards of efficiency without regard for the individual within whom that mind lives.

This article originally appeared in the 2004 monograph of the Learning Disabilities Association of Pennsylvania. Portions of this article were adapted from Boys of Few Words: Raising Our Sons to Communicate and Connect, Guilford Press, 2006.