Developing Young Children’s Social Skills While Socially Distanced
The work of young children is to build language and social skills, much of which happen through family relationships, play and social interaction with peers. With kids spending so much more time at home and online, it’s important to create lots of opportunities for our young children to practice these skills in other ways. We sat down with Shirit Megiddo, Speech & Language Pathologist at CHC, to learn how to support your young child’s development, often using existing routines and items you already have around the house! Read more ›
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For many children across the United States, the pandemic is the first time they’ve had to deal with a disruption of this scale, and some are faring better than others. As a school counselor, I know that parents of struggling kids feel powerless and worry about long-term emotional fallout. Although caregivers can’t always alter children’s circumstances or shield them from discomfort, they can offer a more enduring gift: tools to manage adversity. 
This year, schools may be offering social-emotional skills training to students with disabilities, such as autism, in separate virtual groups. However, if staff are spread thin, or students need additional opportunities to generalize skills, it may be useful to find ways to integrate social-emotional learning into other virtual encounters during the day. 
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2020 was — to borrow a phrase from a popular kid’s book — a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad year. And for parents, one of the year’s hardest jobs was trying to explain current events to young kids. 
Whether it’s wall-to-wall coverage of a global pandemic, the latest natural disaster, a horrific mass shooting, a suicide broadcast on social media, or a violent political rally, it’s nearly impossible to keep the news at bay until you’re able to figure out what to say. The bottom line is that elementary school-aged kids and some middle schoolers have trouble fully understanding news events. 
For most people, conflict is a source of stress, and especially so if you are someone who avoids confrontations.
Self-worth is not the same as self-esteem. Our self-esteem is derived from our abilities, accomplishments, social positions and things we believe and we can achieve. We can bolster our self-esteem by improving our skills or performance, and our self-esteem goes up and down depending on how we’re doing in various aspects of our lives.
