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Building Your Toddler's Social Skills By Alexandria Powell
As your child enters the toddler years, you'll start to see a lot of social activity. However, the framework for this social development began long before when you cuddled your newborn, sang to your 4-month-old or carried your 9-month-old to the park, providing them with their first positive social experiences.
"Parents are their baby's first and most important teachers," says Dr. Debbie Glasser, a licensed clinical psychologist and founder of NewsForParents.org. "Parents have a critical role in helping their baby build and develop social skills."
How can you continue building these skills at 12 months and beyond?
According to Paula Goff, an instructor at the Early Intervention Institute at Louisiana State University Health Sciences Center, this is the age where your child may reach out to pat another child who is crying or burst into happy laughter when he sees other children laughing. He's not quite able to understand the causes of the laughter (a joke) or crying (the other child fell and scraped his knee), but he can understand that someone is hurt or that something funny has happened. "It really is a rudimentary understanding of emotion," says Goff.
Develop knowledge of others' feelings by helping your child put a label on emotions. Dr. Glasser advises parents to start building a "feelings" vocabulary very early on, even before children begin to speak. "When you see your child smiling because she's enjoying the slide in the playground, you can say, 'You're smiling. You must be happy to be here!'" she says.
In addition, talk to your toddler about how others feel. "Characters on television and in books can be helpful," says Dr. Glasser. Point out that "Elmo is happy about seeing his friends" or that "Calliou is crying. He must really be sad about something!"
At first, says Goff, your child won't understand everything you're saying to them, and it will be a few years before they are fully able to take on the perspective of another person. But by helping children pair what they see with what someone else feels, and by giving them the language to describe those feelings, you're laying a good foundation for the development of empathy.