How to work on social skills in adolescents

Fact Checked

Under review

Social skills are a fundamental aspect of creating and maintaining relationships. Therefore, they are a key element that adolescents must develop.

Social skills are defined as our ability to apply a certain number of social rules that facilitate interactions with others.

Therefore, Acquiring social skills in adolescence increases adaptive potential in adult life. In fact, it makes the difference between discomfort and psychological well-being in many situations.

Now, at present, Most adolescents have not had much of the direct social experience that other generations have had. Screens and also a pandemic have made it difficult to develop these types of skills, which results in disconnection from others and the belief on the part of many adults that young people do not have respect or education.

Teaching these skills is essential to making others feel good. There is nothing more wrong than considering kindness or respect “out of fashion.” After all, everyone likes to be treated well and the sooner you learn, the happier you will be and others will be.

Therefore, below we will take a look at the most important social skills to work with adolescents.

The current social context has various barriers that distance adolescents from live and continuous social contact.

1. Develop emotional self-awareness

Emotional self-awareness is the basic ability to understand our own internal processes and to relate appropriately with others. In this context, emotional awareness is the ability to recognize our own feelings and is the basis of emotional intelligence and social skills.

To work with adolescents, you can do an activity in which they are put in contact with eight emotions, creating awareness of how a particular emotion manifests and how it affects your life. This exercise is based on the principles of art therapy and is performed individually. However, it can also be practiced in a group. You need white paper and colored markers.

Read Also: Reuven Feuerstein's instrumental enrichment program: what does it consist of?

Instruction

Ask a teenager to draw a circle and divide it into eight slices of a pie. Then he has to dedicate each one to an emotion, giving them a color or image that matches his idea of what the emotion means to him.

If a teenager has trouble thinking about eight emotions, you can help him, but never choose instead of him. Don’t push if you can’t get to eight. Work with what he can present.

After the teenager has finished drawing, You have to start a dialogue with him. What does each image mean to you? What made you choose those particular colors? At what point in your life do you experience this emotion? What emotion is dominant for you today? What emotion is the most difficult to manage? And so.

In the event that the adolescent has problems relating to his emotions, he can use Plutchik’s wheel of emotions as support to begin to relate in a different way to his emotional sphere.

2. Make eye contact

Making eye contact with others is one of the most important social skills, but many teenagers often avoid it. Telephone distractions, shyness, indifference, low self-esteem or perhaps some complex… There are many reasons that can cause teenagers not to look others in the eyes.

The objective is to make them establish a pleasant contact – even if it is brief. One rule is 50/70: Try to maintain eye contact 50% of the time when speaking and 70% of the time when listening.

3. Practice what interests you

Enjoying others will be more natural when a teenager is doing something that genuinely interests them. Whether it’s participating in your favorite sport, playing an instrument you like, or being part of a club you like, this is the first step in building social skills.

4. Learn to listen

Most teenagers are not good listeners, since most likely no one has taught them. What they have learned is that listening is basically passively paying attention long enough until they can return to the conversation or their phone.

Activity to reflect on listening

If you are an educator or teacher, you can do this activity:

Ask all participants to sit in a circle. The first person starts telling a story (whatever they want). After 3 to 5 sentences, say “stop.” and randomly choose another participant to continue. This person now has to repeat the last sentence said and then continue making up the story.

If you cannot correctly repeat the last sentence after five seconds, you are disqualified. The game continues with the same rules and the winner is the last person remaining after everyone else has been disqualified.

Then, Asks participants to reflect on the game. When and how was your attention distracted? What helped you focus and remember the previous sentence?

Listening is one of the most important social skills, since it influences the entire communication universe.

5. Practice assertiveness

Assertiveness is characterized by the ability to directly and confidently express our opinion, our feelings or our genuine attitudes, in a way that respects the rights of others and social circumstances.

Perhaps the most important point is to reassure teens that it is okay to claim their rights and ask for, initiate, and express their opinions and feelings. That it is okay to say NO to other people in a respectful way.

Activities

To work on it, you can create a list of social challenges taking into account the age or social needs of the adolescent. Challenges can be written/printed on separate cards and practiced once a week or on an agreed schedule.

Some examples of social challenges are the following:

Give someone an honest compliment. Learn two new things about someone in class. Share with a friend what you’ve been thinking lately. Call customer service at a favorite store and ask for information about a product. Tell a better friend what you like about him.Ask a teacher (or coach) to clarify a task that was not fully understood.

After completing the task, it is important to discuss with the teen how the particular challenge made him or her feel. Did you find it easy, difficult, uncomfortable, or something else? What could be alternative ways of asking, of expressing? How did the others react?

As we have seen, it is possible to work on social skills with adolescents in different ways. The important thing is to do it and not leave it forgotten, especially at this time when the development of identity and social ties are of great relevance.