Socialization with Children with Special Needs

1. Socialization with Children with Special Needs Socialization Emerging through the Functional Emotional Developmental Milestones

2. Children with Developmental Delays Can Develop: • Empathy • The ability to read emotional signals • The ability to negotiate with peers

3. Typical Social Development • The emotion selects the behavior • Build foundations from the bottom up • Create heightened states of emotionality to help the child use and connect emotions to his behavior • Ex: big smile gives a word like “hi” real warmth and meaning

4. Building social skills within each stage of development • Regulation and Shared Attention • Engagement • Basic Communication • Continuous Flow and Shared Problem Solving • Using ideas creatively and spontaneously • Using ideas logically • Higher levels of thinking

5. Regulation and Attention • Child must be able to see the world, faces, expressions, behaviors, etc. • This requires being calm, regulated, attentive, focused and having an awareness of physical sensations. • Social Example: Child must be able to stay calm and balanced when there are other children running around them. They also need to be aware of their surroundings and not be completely self-absorbed

6. Engagement • Must be comfortable with other human beings • Warm, trusting, and engaging • Floortime play develops pleasurable interactions • Social Example: Child must feel secure and confident when in room with other children. Cannot force them be with other children if they are anxious or scared.

7. Basic Two-Way Interaction • Purposeful communication • Chains of interaction • Exchanging gestures and sounds • Social Example: Verbalizing or gesturing to a child that they would like to play with their toy.

8. Shared Problem-solving • Beginning Complex social negotiation • Create interactions that mediate between what the child wants to do and the satisfaction of his goal. • Focus on nonverbal cues as well as language • Mastery of social interactions depends on a subtle reading of emotional cues and signals. • Social Example: Interacting with another child around a hide and go seek activity that involves 20 or more circles of communication.

9. Using ideas creatively and spontaneously • Look for spontaneous language rather than scripted/learned ideas • Set up emotionally stimulating pretend and realistic scenarios to use as vehicles for expressive language • Encourage them to talk about their feelings resulting from social interactions • Social Example: Child has a nice interaction with his group of friends by asking them what type of pretend food they would like and making it for them.

10. Using ideas logically • Connecting ideas together • Answering all “w” questions • Ex: “Let’s play basketball instead of videogames, because I want to go outside” • Logical reasoning • Understanding the rules to participate in society • Social Example: Child has to follow the rules of a new game that his friend made when they are on the playground.

11. Organization and Techniques to Encourage Socialization

12. Social Interaction Fundamentals • Start with smaller groups (dyads) and move slowly to larger ones. • Create multiple environments, sensory and symbolic, to encourage different types of interactions. • Remember that child/adult play is different from child/child play • Other children don’t always entice, initiate, or counter-regulate

13. Group Organization • Make sure all children in the group are solid at the 4th milestone: Shared Social Problem Solving with a continuous flow. • Have children with complimentary sensory system. • ie. an underreactive child and sensory seeking child. • You can include children with similar and/or different developmental profiles. • Optimally the children should balance each other out with their profiles.

14. Techniques to Encourage Socialization • Allow children to create their own interactions or games, and follow their lead. • Facilitate maintained regulation, attention, and engagement. • Encourage sensory based games and semi-structured activities. • Often we need to structure or introduce a game to facilitate interest and attention • Remember the goal is to encourage the interaction between the children, don’t do all the work for them. Encourage them to seek each others help or participation.

15. Techniques to Encourage Socialization • Use your affect to entice the children toward a common activity or each other. • Use your body to help a child carry out their social goal • i.e. playful obstruction • Ask questions to help the children maintain focus on each other and the activity. • ex. When a child wants to play a game, ask the child, “What do your friends think?” or “What do your friends want to play?”

16. Techniques to Encourage Socialization • Create physical problems that need to be solved with the help of many children • Encourage a child to get a friend to help them. • Ask questions that encourage the children to agree on different decisions before they get a need met. • What should we do? Swing or bounce?

17. Techniques to Encourage Socialization • If children are having trouble initiating their own games or activities, or are getting disregulated, use • Semi-structured games • Art projects • Music To initially structure the expectations, and allow them to expand creatively.

18. Facilitators must always… • Encourage interaction/communication between the children. • Redirect children toward one another vs. doing the floortime yourself • Counter-regulate • Keep environment under control • Patience • Let the interaction develop naturally

19. The Floortime Center • Contact Information: 4827 Rugby Ave. Bethesda, MD 20814 • Email: info@dirss.com • Website: www.dirss.com • Phone: (301) 657-1130