Fostering Social Thinking & Social Skills | Thriving with ADHD

 

Social Skills

 

Social skills are the verbal and non-verbal skills individuals rely on to understand, interact, communicate and collaborate with others. 

Everyone can benefit from having well developed social skills as they enable individuals to interact positively and effectively with others, and to develop and maintain close personal relationships.

The development of social awareness and the ability to interpret the intentions of others (the first social skills building blocks) start to develop in neurotypical children from birth. By the time they reach 5 or 6 years-of-age they are able to successfully modify their behaviour in order to meet societal expectations.

As neurotypical children mature they continue to hone this ability, whilst also developing the ability to communicate and connect with others by commenting, questioning and engaging in complex imaginary play.

Next they develop the ability to critically examine their own opinion, whilst remaining flexible enough to consider the opinion of others (which is termed perspective taking).

By high school it is expected that neurotypical children will also be able to self-advocate, problem solve and work effectively in a group. They will also have well established social networks (Garcia Winner, 2011; Giler, 2011).

 

ADHD & social skills

Many children with ADHD struggle to manage themselves effectively in social situations and therefore may experience social rejection and isolation. This rejection causes immense psychological pain and can contribute to adverse outcomes like depression and drug and alcohol use later in life. 

Parents can help their children with ADHD develop the knowledge and skills they require to better negotiate social situations by supporting their:

  • Knowledge & Skills Difficulties 
    Many children with ADHD have poor social thinking (or social cognition) as their ADHD symptoms prevented them from developing this knowledge in line with their neurotypical peers. As a result, they may lack awareness around the unspoken social rules, be unable to consider the perspective of another person, fail to recognise and understand emotions and be inflexible in their thinking. They may also have poorly developed verbal and non-verbal communication knowledge and skills. For example, they may not understand the importance of maintaining eye contact or how one’s body language influences message interpretation, use an inappropriate tone of voice when speaking to someone or practice full body listen in order to accurately receive the message being communicated to them by another person.
  • Performance Difficulties
    Executive function challenges can also result in children with ADHD failing to pick up non-verbal social clues (i.e., facial expression, body gestures, posture, etc.). They may also fail to pick up on other persons feelings/emotions (which are communicated via tone of voice, volume and intensity of speech). Therefore, they are unable to use this information to govern their behaviour.     Additionally, executive function challenges can result in poor:

    • self-control due to difficulties regulating and inhibiting behaviour. This can contribute to children with ADHD interrupting or offending others, participating in perseveration (talking about a subject of immense interest to them for a great length of time, without any concern about the reaction of the listener), invading another person’s personal space, etc.
    • problem solving and flexible thinking skills which may result in them misinterpreting comments that were intended to be humorous, struggling to negotiate situations or resolve conflict, etc.
    • frustration tolerance and emotional regulation, which makes them prone to emotional outbursts (i.e., anger, aggression, over excitement)
    • self-awareness around personal performance.

 

Developing social thinking

To address any knowledge and skill difficulties children with ADHD may have, it can be very helpful to develop their social thinking. ‘Social thinking’ according to Garcia Winner (2008) is what you DO before you ACT. It basically involves:

  • taking the perspective of others by thinking about what other people are thinking and feeling. For example: their thoughts, emotions, motives and intention; their expectations in regard to the words and behaviour of others; and their personality including their beliefs, interests, likes/dislikes
  • comparing this to what one is thinking and feeling 
  • using this information to govern one’s actions in a given social situation.

For example, to build awareness around social thinking children with ADHD can be explicitly taught and coached to:

  • understand unspoken social rules and social thinking concepts
  • identify their feelings/emotions and the feelings/emotions of others
  • differentiate between expected and unexpected behaviour
  • consider the perspective of others
  • listen with their whole body, and to use what they hear with their ears and see with their eyes to understand the message someone is sending them
  • engage in verbal and non-verbal conversation more effectively
  • recognise unhelpful thinking traps and develop flexible thinking strategies
  • use emotional self-regulation strategies i.e. calming techniques, sensory supports and thinking strategies.

 

Supporting performance challenges

Most performance challenges experienced by children with ADHD result from executive function challenges, which impede the ability to stop and think, and use knowledge and skills in the moment. Combined ADHD medication and appropriate support  can increase prosocial, socially skilled behaviour in children with ADHD. Early data also indicates training parents as friendship coaches for kids with ADHD may result in favourable outcomes.

 

References

Barkley, R.A. (2015). Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder: A Handbook for Diagnosis and Treatment, 4th ed. New York: Guilford Publications. 

Giler, J. Z. (2011). Socially ADDept: Teaching Social Skills to Children with ADHD, LD, and Asperger’s, Revised Ed. San Francisco: Jossy-Bass.

Garcia Winner, M. (2007). Thinking About You, Thinking About Me: Teaching Perspective Taking and Social Thinking to Persons with Social Cognitive Learning Challenges, 2nd Ed. Think Social Publishing: Santa Clara.

Garcia Winner, M. (2011). Social Thinking Thinksheets for Tweens and Teens: Learning to Read in Between the Social Lines. Think Social Publishing: Santa Clara.