Strengthening Social Skills - Strengthen Social Skills with Personal Goals

Strengthening Social Skills - Strengthening Social Skills Helps Kids Achieve

Strengthening Social Skills - The stress of dealing with a learning disability can take a toll on your child's self esteem and confidence. Developing personal goals is one way to help children with and without learning disabilities strengthen their self confidence. Tips for helping your child develop personal goals:

• Develop your own goals as a parent, and share some of them with your child. Allow your child to see you working toward goals. For younger children, simply modeling your plan to get housework done is a concrete example they can understand. Older children can observe you working toward furthering education, saving for a major purchase, or completing a project for work.
• Talk with your child about what she likes to do and what she would like to accomplish. Help younger children think about goals by talking about their every day tasks in terms of goals. When straightening their rooms, for example, talk about making the bed, placing toys in bins, and picking up clothes from the floor as being goals to accomplish. Hmmmm....that can work for teens too, can't it?
• Consider having regular family meetings where family members talk about their goals and what they've accomplished in working toward those goals.
• Use this goal development sheet to help you and your children think about goals they want to achieve. The sheet uses familiar terms, such as activities and ideas, to help children understand what goals are and uses open-ended questions to help them get started.