Social skills
18 articles
Child Socialization in Daycare: What to Expect and How It Develops (US)
"They'll learn to play with other kids" is the most common reason parents give for choosing daycare. The truth is gentler and more interesting: 2-year...
Child Socialisation in Daycare: What to Expect and How It Develops (UK)
"They'll learn to play with other kids" is the most common reason parents give for choosing daycare. The truth is gentler and more interesting: 2-year...
Child Socialisation in Daycare: What to Expect and How It Develops (Global)
"They'll learn to play with other kids" is the most common reason parents give for choosing daycare. The truth is gentler and more interesting: 2-year...
Why Pretend Play Is Important for Development
In an era of structured learning activities and educational apps, pretend play can seem like a soft option — what children do when there isn't somethi...
Teaching Toddlers to Take Turns in Play
Two toddlers, one red truck. The grabbing, the screaming, the parent leaping in to peel them apart — this is one of the most exhausting and predictabl...
Building Social Skills Through Play
The honest truth about teaching social skills under 5: you mostly can't. You can model them, you can coach briefly, you can engineer the situations, b...
Cooperative Play: How It Develops
Two two-year-olds dumping the same bin of blocks side by side is not cooperating. They are doing parallel play, which is exactly what their brains are...
Teaching Children to Respect Others
There's a moment most parents have lived through: your three-year-old grabs a toy out of another child's hands, you say "give it back, that's not nice...
How Siblings Affect Each Other's Development
Watch a 2-year-old try to copy his 5-year-old sister tying her shoe. He won't get it — but he's tracking her hands with the focus most adults can't su...
Why Pretend Play Is Doing More Than It Looks Like
Your toddler hands you a plastic banana and tells you it's a phone. A 3-year-old narrates an elaborate scene where the stuffed bear is sick and needs...
Using Everyday Moments to Teach Social Skills
You don't need special lessons to teach social skills. Mealtimes, transitions, playtime, and sibling interactions are full of opportunities to practic...
How Children Learn Social Skills Within the Extended Family
A lot of social-skill development before age five gets attributed to peers and preschool, but the evidence is that some of the most formative learning...
Relationships With Cousins and Other Relatives
Cousins sit in a sweet spot that no other relationship quite occupies: they share your family history but aren't your siblings, they're peers but with...
Emotional Intelligence in Early Childhood
Emotional intelligence in adults predicts a lot — better relationships, better work performance, better mental health, sometimes more reliably than IQ...
How to Talk to Your Child About Conflicts at Daycare
Your child gets in the car at pickup and announces that someone bit her. Or the lead teacher pulls you aside to say your child pushed another kid off...
Teaching Toddlers to Share: What Works, What Doesn't, and What Is Developmentally Realistic
The request to "share that toy" from a parent or early years educator, followed by a toddler's emphatic refusal and sometimes a meltdown, is one of th...
Peer Pressure: How to Help Children Navigate It
Conversations about peer pressure tend to focus on resistance: teaching children to say no, to walk away, to choose better friends. This isn't wrong,...
Peer Conflict in Toddlers: Why Children Fight Over Toys and What Adults Should Do
Two toddlers and one attractive toy is a reliably predictable situation: one will take the toy, the other will object, escalation will follow. Adults...