By Nadine Briggs and Donna Shea

Recess is a time for children to run around, have fun and socialize. For some kids, recess is more stressful than rejuvenating. It can be a time when they feel unsure as to how to engage. A game of tag is usually prevalent on most school playgrounds and is fairly easy to join. We encourage kids to make the statement, “I’d like to play” rather than asking, “can I play?” when they approach a group of kids and want to be included. Once a child is part of the group, though, the tagging can sometimes get a bit rough. For kids with sensory sensitivity, being “tagged” can feel akin to a physical assault. Overly zealous tag players can turn a game of touch tag into “shove” tag making the already reluctant tag participant even more hesitant to join.

One solution to this issue is to introduce a version of tag known as “Clip Tag” instead of touch tag. This game is a favorite at our social skills centers for several reasons. With Clip Tag, there is no “it” and no touching of each other and the rounds have a clear start and end. Clip Tag is played by taking a spring-loaded clothespin and clipping to the middle of each child’s back. Kids will sometimes try to skew the game by hiding the clip under their hair or armpit so fair play may need to be encouraged. Once everyone has a clip pinned to their shirt, the kids all run around and try to remove each other’s clips. Once a child’s clip is removed, they are out of the game until the next round. The last person with a clip still attached is the winner. When Clip Tag is played by the rules, the children should not need to touch each other since they only need to touch the clip to remove it. If your child would like to introduce this game to their school, he or she might need to get permission to bring the clips to recess. We purchased several packs of these clothespins for $1 each at the local dollar store. The rules for Clip Tag are below. A recess aide or other school staff member might need to review the rules at the start of the game but then playing should no need further adult intervention if everyone is playing fairly.

Rules for Clip Tag:

1. Ask permission to bring the clothespins to recess.
2. Give everyone who wants to play a clip and have them clip it to the middle of their back.
3. Remind everyone that there is no grabbing or tackling to get the clip.
4. Depending on the space, you might want to delineate where the boundaries are so the play space isn’t too large.
5. Ready, set, go! Everyone runs around and tries to grab clips off each other.
6. The last person who has a clip still on is the winner for that round.
7. If the round goes on too long due to the last two players being locked in a “tie” situation, count down from 10 and if one of the clips is not removed, declare a tie.

Note: We did not invent clip/clothespin tag (it’s been around for a long time) and could not find a source to credit.

By Donna Shea & Nadine Briggs

I (Donna) had my 10-year-old granddaughter Maggie at our house for a sleepover a weekend or so ago. I love spending time with her. She’s just such a great kid. It’s been a shift for me watching her grow from her child self into the beginnings of her adolescent self. While I miss part of those little girl days, I love the new conversations we are having, and I learn so much from her about what it’s like to be a pre-teen these days. She talks to me a great deal about recess “drama,” the music she loves and the anime that has become a new passion in the last six months. She takes me back to my 5th-grade self, and I realize there are many similarities and many differences between her and I. Hanging up posters of heartthrobs, same. Spending hours in her room, writing down thoughts, daydreaming and listening to music, the same. Parents being embarrassing, the same. Life is all about her friends, that’s the same.

What’s different is how she interacts when she hangs out with her friends. While I rode my bike all over town to see my friends, she facetimes. While I spent time arguing with my sister over using the one phone in the house to call my friends to talk for hours on end, she talks to hers in a text-based way through apps and games they play together. She talks to me about online terms that I don’t understand – i.e., virtual cosplay (having your avatar dress up as a character from a movie, book, or video game, especially one from the Japanese genres of manga and anime). I have her teach me about apps. She laughs at me but shows me anyway. She tries to teach me how to take a selfie. As you can see from the picture, I have not yet gotten the hang of it, and likely never will.

We talked at length about my concerns about her being online so much instead of outside. Maggie explained to me that the places she goes to play games (such as Roblox), where she can play and talk to her friends at the same time, are the playground, backyard or neighborhood for them. They meet there, hang out, giggle and chat. In some ways, they are safer, and their parents know where they are. They go “in” to these online forums to play, rather than out to play. In other ways, I tell her I still feel they are missing out on something, and then I get teased about being old-fashioned. And maybe I am, but she loves me anyway. Maggie is still a well-rounded kid and tells me she likes going outside; she just doesn’t want to be told she HAS to go outside. We talk about balance. She shuts it off when requested to do so without complaint (well, maybe just a little complaining, she’s ten after all). She does not have any phone or texting capabilities as of yet, but in all honesty, that doesn’t seem to be a major part of what the kids are using online with each other considering all of the apps available to them. We talk about being trustworthy when she’s out in the big world of the web and not searching for content (especially on YouTube) that her parents wouldn’t approve of her watching. Maggie talks to me about how she knows how to cover her tracks by clearing her history, but she doesn’t break the rules because she doesn’t want to lose her privileges.

Maggie has an entire playscape available to her that, at her age, I couldn’t even begin to dream about when I was ten. She sees her friends at school, hangs out with them in person on a regular basis and demonstrates excellent social skills, so her going “in” to play seems to be most akin to the hours I spent on the phone, but with the ability to play together at the same time.

While I am a firm believer in making sure that kids maintain a balance between on and off-screen time, I am spending time listening to Maggie to understand how her world works in this digital age of friendships. It is different, but in many ways, just the same.

By Nadine Briggs and Donna Shea

Each new school year brings the chance for kids to make new connections with potential friends. Parents look forward to their kids having a fresh start. They are hopeful that this year will bring the right mix of kids for their child to make friends. As your child hopped onto the bus on the first day of school, were your fingers crossed? We’ve been there.

As the saying goes, give hope a chance. If your child has had a history of social difficulties, hope may not be enough to ensure success this school year. In our experience, most families wait to provide social support when they hear concern from their child’s teacher at the October parent/teacher conferences. Some parents take action at that time to put support in place but others take longer to figure out next steps. Before they know it, the holidays are upon them and they don’t have the time to fit in an additional activity. Parent wait until the new year, and that’s when our phones ring like crazy for kids who need social support. By then, many months have passed for the child who hasn’t made any friends and our social groups are often filled. Your child might end up on a waiting list for social support.

We suggest giving your child support on the front end of the school year. If kids make friends and all is going well, then you can discontinue support at that point. Support can include lunch bunch, recess club, or an after school social skills group like Donna and I run in MA. Perhaps touch base with the school guidance counselor and ask them to check in regularly with your child. Or you can create a routine of reading a chapter each day from How to Make & Keep Friends: Tips for Kids to Overcome 50 Common Social Challenges.

Being hopeful is great but not always enough. Feeling accepted and having friends is an important part of the school experience and your child’s happiness. Give your child the best chance for social success. Give hope a chance.

By Donna Shea & Nadine Briggs

I’m (Donna) working with a sweet gal who is entering 5^th grade next week (I’ll call her Amy) and is suffering from significant social anxiety about returning to school. Her worrying predominantly involves any social event or activity where Amy feels she may not know anyone. I have worked with Amy on the top 10 tips that we give all kids on how to make new friends (found in our first book, How to Make & Keep Friends: Tips for Kids to Overcome 50 Common Social Challenges). I have also worked with Amy’s mom to build in a small reward each day that she successfully used the tips at her sports camp this summer, and she will now be earning a new app or song for her phone when she uses these tips at school. Here is how to encourage your child to initiate a new friendship at school this year.

1. Try to make just one new friend instead of several friends all at once. 
2. Be friendly and say hello first to other people.
3. Practice conversation starters with family so that you are ready to talk with other people.
4. Remember to listen when other people are talking. 
5. Show that you are friendly with your facial expression.  Practice smiling in a mirror. 
6. Ask to sit with a new person at lunch or on the school bus. 
7. Ask what kinds of things he or she likes to do.
8. Remember that other kids also want to make new friends, so they might be interested in having you as a friend
9. Show you are friendly by helping other people out. 
10. Throw out a feeler for a get-toge You could ask a new person“Do you like to swim? Maybe you could come over and hang out at our pool sometime?”

If Amy can remember these tips, her anxiety will be short-lived.  She will begin to feel more comfortable after the first couple of days of school, and as she settles into her classroom routine and work groups. Her anxiety is more the fear of the unknown. She has told me that having a concrete social “plan” based on these tips makes a little easier to feel braver and face the unknown.

By Nadine Briggs and Donna Shea

When kids have difficulty forming strong friendship connections, they tend to hold on more tightly to the friends they do make. A healthy amount of attention is fine, but sometimes the connection may begin to feel more like an obsession. Kids might claim that they can’t be happy unless they’re with that particular friend. They might even make threatening statements about the friend if their anxiety takes hold. The more they perceive that the friend might be pulling away, the tighter they will hold on.

The result can often be losing the friend if the other child feels suffocated by the obsession. Your child might be driving away the friend they are working so hard to hold onto.

How can you prevent this fixation from ruining the friendship? Work to broaden the friend group to include more kids. Create special memories with other friends to create more balance. Point out how our different friends all bring something different and needed to our lives. One friend might be the funny one that always brings laughter, another might be a good listener and problem solver and another still might be quirky and interesting to be with.

Friends are not easy to find for some kids so it’s understandable that they want to hold on. Clinging too tight, though, could cause them to lose the relationship that they cherish.

By Donna Shea & Nadine Briggs

For two people who focus on supporting kids with making and keeping friends, it may seem counter-intuitive for us to discuss ending a friendship. It is an important question that came up this summer and is worth considering when a friendship may be over. Friendships do end, though, and your child or teen may need or want to stop a friendship and not know how.

Sometimes friendships end with a bang. This can come in the form of a betrayal or argument, or something egregious enough that your child or teen no longer wants anything to do with the friendship. We would advise that your child or teen re-visit the thought of completely ending a friendship after he or she calms down. Good friends can be hard to find, so it may be worth looking at whether or not what happened is forgivable. There are times when it won’t be forgivable. In this case, encourage your child to make a clean break of it (blocking numbers and social media, etc.) and if he or she has to deal with the ex-friend at school, to do his or her best to act respectfully while maintaining the end-of-friendship boundaries.

More often, friendships fizzle out. This happens especially between age 10 and when moving into the first year of middle school but can occur anytime in a child’s life. Kids find that the friendships that fulfilled them in elementary school may markedly change as more specific interests (sports, band, etc.) emerge. It’s important to help your child understand that this shift in friendship is a natural and normal phase, despite as difficult as it can be. If your child is moving in a different direction and has friends that are having a difficult time letting go, encourage your child to again be respectful, but also to allow your child to refuse invitations politely or to “be busy.” We should also let children know that if their invitations or being refused, or a particular friend is now always “busy” that these are quiet signals that the friend may either need a break from the friendship or has moved in a new direction. When your child is sad about this, and he or she may be, empathize and allow a child to grieve the loss of the friend without allowing him or her to get stuck. Kids may experience a time when they don’t have any friends and this is also natural but usually only temporary. He or she can use the tips in our book on how to find and make new friends.

Friendship also ends due to distance or when a friend moves away. Keeping up long distance relationships, even in this day of video chat and social media, requires investment in friendship on both sides. Adults will have an easier time of this than kids do, so if you find that your child spends less and less time talking to his or her best friend that had to move away, that’s okay. However, some kids can be devastated when his or her best friend, and only friend, moves. This happens more than you may think. Encourage your child to have at least two good friends, just in case one of them does have to move.

There are times when you, as a parent, may have to end the friendship between your child and other friends. If you feel that another child or teen is having a bad influence on your child, or if your child has suddenly formed friendships with kids you are not familiar with, and has distanced themselves from from kids you know well, then it may be time to intervene. If your radar goes up, listen to it. Your child may be angry with you and even tell you he or she hates you, but your child’s safety and well-being are more important than a questionable friendship.

 

By Nadine Briggs and Donna Shea

At this point in the summer, kids start thinking about the new school year. They wonder who his or her teacher will be, and which kids will be in the class. Anxiety might start to creep in if these thoughts of “what will happen” start to take hold in a child’s mind. The onset of August is a great time to reconnect with kids from school, especially if your child has not done much socializing so far this summer. Having fun times with friends from school can help to alleviate the anxiety. Here are a few tips to get you started:

Reach out to current friends to grab the low hanging fruit if your child already has solid social connections. Also, think about kids your child may not have played with too much in the past but who you feel might be a good friend fit for them. It’s usually easy to find the parents’ contact information by using social media, school directories, white pages or mutual friends. This is a good time for you to put yourself out there and try to connect with people you might not know as well, so that your child can get to know their child. Who knows? You may end up with new friends too! Once you’ve made contact, it’s time to plan the play date:

1. Create a fun event to invite the kids to, especially if you don’t know them well. Some examples are a craft day at your house where you invite several kids to do a pre-planned project such as tie dye t-shirt making or dream catchers. Have a playlist of upbeat, kid-friendly music playing to set a festive mood.
2. If it’s a nice day, ask the guests to bring swim suits and towels and prepare some water balloons or turn on a sprinkler.
3. Have slice and bake cookies or raw cookie dough ready to go. Cookies in the oven create warm feelings with the delicious fragrance wafting through the air.
4. If your child likes to be active, plan a hike on a nature path with a scavenger hunt. Just hiking might seem too boring for some kids but if they have a list of things to find, then the hike takes on a whole new level of interest. For example, have the group search for heart-shaped rocks, orange leaves, sticks that look like animals, etc.
5. Try to organize a time when a group of kids meets at the school playground they are attending in the fall. This reacquaints them with the play structures as well as the other children. Follow it up with ice cream and the kids will love it.
6. Some kids might need social coaching prior to social events like these so that the play time goes well. Encourage them to think about what their friends like to play and which activities others would enjoy. The outings should be things that your child enjoys as well, but it’s important for them to consider the interests of others when planning a social event.

Making fun memories now will set the stage for kids to seek each other out at recess once school starts. Hopefully this will be the beginning of long lasting friendships and a successful, less worrisome, launch to the school year.

By Donna Shea & Nadine Briggs,

We are two pretty fierce mama bears when it comes to our sons and daughter. Surely, the same is true of all mothers, whether your child has special needs or not. Every once in awhile though, a mama bear will get in the very way of the people who are only trying to help her cub. We might refuse to listen to an objective outside observer, be anxious that the people trying to help will be judgemental (which yes, is a risk), or be so stuck with fear for our child ourselves, that we can’t step aside to allow someone to help, even when we bring our cub specifically to that person for help. We may even strike out and make the helper feel bad for not helping, even when we haven’t allowed them to do so.

There are other times when our mama bear behaviors are even overwhelming to our child. For example, I once had a child in my summer program, who had signed up online and through email and I had not previously met. The little one was coming to me for help with shyness and conversation skills. At drop-off, I said good morning and started to introduce myself, only to have mom cut off my words, take the child by her shoulders, turn her towards the kids that were playing and instructed her to go and play. The instructions came non-stop. Mom would ask me a question and then cut off my answer. It was a bit unnerving and frustrating for a first meeting to take that tone.

After mom left, the little girl easily assimilated into playing. She wasn’t at all shy about playing, it was engaging in conversation that was difficult for her. She answered questions when asked and was the bingo caller for us. She just has difficulty with initiating and back-and-forth conversation. As you read this, do you wonder why? At pick up, I was peppered with questions? “Did she talk?” “Did she talk to the other kids?” “She’s been to so many therapists and programs and nothing has helped.” All this, while at the same time, physically moving her daughter to force her to look at me and giving multiple, non-stop commands.

Mama bears, if you are reading this, it is not my intention to ever insult or offend another mom. Connecting the dots and pointing out the obvious is a LOT easier to do as a social coach for children, but sometimes I wish that the helpers I had over the course of my son’s struggles had been more direct with me. I’ve been in those shoes, desperately wanting help for my child, so much so, that sometimes I also forget that I am the one that can provide the most help with a little direction as to how. We mama bears are the experts on our kids, but sometimes an objective expert can see that one little change we can employ to make it better.

In this instance, my advice would have been to encourage the daughter to initiate a conversation or respond to someone socially and try not to force. Converse, don’t command. Stop talking and start listening. Relax mom. You’re doing okay. Move out of the way and give your cub the time and space to respond.

 

 

By Nadine Briggs & Donna Shea

For people who struggle with anxiety, they can routinely experience what we refer to as “hair on fire” moments. This week at my social skills center, a little 6-year-old boy began to panic when the foam fort he was building was about to collapse.

I could hear the anxiety in his voice gaining steam. It was easy to see that without an intervention, this could escalate quickly into something behavioral. If his anxiety was allowed to grow into near panic, he would have lost all reasoning skills and the ability to solve the issue at hand.

In that moment, I said, “I see what’s happening here. What do you think we could do to solve this problem?” By getting him into problem-solving mode, my intent was to solve the problem, of course, but also to shift his thinking from the worry center of his brain to the logical center of his brain. He didn’t answer with a potential solution so I offered one. “If it falls, you know what we’ll do? We’ll just fix it! Easy peasy!” So we did. We secured the walls and put the fort right again. Afterward, we always want to “close the loop” so to speak. So I then pointed out, “it’s a good thing we didn’t get too upset over that. It made it so we could just fix it and keep playing and having fun.”

These short lessons, delivered in the exact moment when a problem occurs, are precisely what this little guy needs in order to feel like he’s in control of what goes on around him. He’s on his way to learning how to put out his own “hair on fire” moments.

By Donna Shea & Nadine Briggs

During a social group a few weeks ago, I watched one of my tween girls shut down in a conversation, as though someone had hit an “off” switch. She was talking about her sadness in having to change schools and how she was going to miss all of her friends at her old school. Right away, I observed that the other gals involved in the conversation began telling her not to worry about it and that she would make new friends. They told her some things she could do to make new friends. They told her not to be sad about it and to focus on being excited about the new school. They were trying really hard to help make her feel better. I watched her face grow sadder and eventually, she just stopped talking about it and began to draw.

I sat next to her and said, “Tell me, who you are going to miss the most?” She told me. I asked her to tell me why, and she did. I then said, “it has to be really hard to leave friends that you know and a little scary at the thought of meeting new people and teachers.” She said it was. I watched her turn the switch back to “on” in our conversation. After a few minutes of talking about the friends she was going to miss, she was ready to hear some suggestions about making new ones.

In trying to help our kids and teens and even our adult peers, when we jump right into problem-solving when they really just want us to listen, we inadvertently turn that switch to “off” and then don’t understand why they don’t want our help. Empathy is the “on” switch.