Complete Guide for Teaching Social Skills to Children with ADHD

Children with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), generally are unable to pay attention and show hyperactivity and impulsivity in different ways. They are in constant motion, do not seem to listen, often talk too much and rarely finish their task, as they are easily distracted. Children with ADHD live in a make-believe world without other interests and lack in social understanding. Teaching social skills to children with ADHD helps them in recognizing the pleasure of acceptance and has a remarkable social impact on their lives and can also improve their self esteem.

Teaching social skills to children with ADHD is a great way to incite the feelings of cooperation, emotions and other social attachments. It helps immensely to understand the value of connection and thereby prompts the child to advance towards making and maintaining social amity. The teaching process focuses to improve the individual social skill of the children with ADHD and takes care of skill building process with simple exercises.

Children with ADHD are mostly not confident about their role when sitting in a group and do not feel comfortable in the social ground. The role-playing act can be delivered with proper teaching of social skills to children with ADHD, which should begin at the home of the child. Parents should understand the situation and should contribute to this element. This helps in making a substantial impact on the behavior of the child in a social atmosphere.

As in all cases, parents play a primary role in the development of social behavior of their children. Therefore, the responsibility of teaching social skills to children with ADHD, lies primarily on the shoulders of the parents.

• The main aim of parents should be to increase the child’s perception value of the social environment.
• It is better to learn the area of demerits where the child is poor in exhibiting positive reaction to a social environment and the causes of such peculiarity.
• There are some elements that must be found out by the parents so that necessary help can be restored to develop social skills in children with ADHD.
• Find out the cause whether it is a group of children, the child is finding troublesome to approach or needs a break in the dialogue before making a contribution.
• Find out whether the child is having trouble looking in the eye of the other person while speaking or not. Mark whether the child is mixing with his friends or staying aloof from the crowd or if the child is maintaining his.her cool or not.

These are small but crucial attitudes of the child that parents should mark and take needful steps to rectify.

A fairer share of teaching social skills to ADHD children, goes to the teachers. Therefore it is important that teachers should adopt specific strategies to address the problem of an individual child.

• The initial plan should be to put the children in pairs which will be the first step towards socialization. Encourage various social interactions to prevent withdrawal nature of the children. Training on the control of anger, calming strategies, setting up of behavioral goals etc are the important aspects of the education process. In addition, teachers should review the child's IEP (Individualized Education Plan) for specific strategies to address the child's ADHD behavior in the classroom.
• Involve such children in group activities, praise them on their good work, pay attention to their queries, and repeat your instructions many times. These small things do great wonders. Tell them to copy your activities. You can make a game out of it.
• Pose hypothetical situations in front of them and teach some social gestures like hello, goodbye, ways of greetings, saying thank you and sorry etc. They might not pay attention in the beginning, but with your repeated instructions, they start responding and copying you.
• Training on the control of anger, calming strategies, setting up of behavioral goals etc are the other important aspects of the education process. Go slow and be patient! That is the key!

Teaching of social skills to children with ADHD enables children to understand the value of social attachments and the learning also helps them to improve their social interactions. Teaching social skills is important for including children with ADHD into mainstream society and also for social acceptance and helping them develop a high self esteem.