SOCIAL SKILLS
Positive peer relationships offer a critical buffer against stress and psychological difficulties. Rejection by peers is devastating to children, teens, and adults. It can be associated with such long-term problems as low self-esteem, poor academic performance, feelings of aloneness and loneliness, and even juvenile delinquency.
Without the friendship of peers, children and teens feel alone, confused, and out of sync with the rest of the world. And these feelings can have serious repercussions for their future. Research has found that rejection by peers is devastating to children and teens and can lead to such long-term problems as low self-esteem, poor academic performance, depression, failed relationships, poor parenting skills, and troubled careers. Being able to make and keep friends clearly plays a vital role in a child’s emotional health and well-being.
Social issues are especially problematic for children, teens, and adults with ADHD, social anxiety, and learning disabilities. However, there is good news for children and teens who struggle in social settings with their peers—poor social skills can improve with coaching. And people learn interpersonal skills best in the company of others. That’s why In Step offers many interpersonal development groups, including our renowned Social IQ development program – Stepping Stones. Stepping Stones has been raising the Social IQ of children and their parents for over 25 years.
Stepping Stones is unique in that it follows a step-by-step approach to teaching children of elementary school age how to make and maintain friends and increase the child’s awareness of the impact of his or her behavior on other children.
How Stepping Stones Group Therapy Works
The Stepping Stones groups meet weekly for one hour, and the program is 9 months long. We help your child build the following social skill sets:
- Joining in/making a good first impression
- Communication and conversation skills
- Reading social signals
- Raising self-esteem
- Coping with teasing
- Managing stress
- Solving social problems
- Resolving conflicts
- Managing anger
The children learn these skills through friendship group activities, exercises, and psycho-dramatic techniques, as well as practice assignments at home and peer feedback. We stress the importance of using these newly-learned skills at home and in school to reinforce the newly learned behaviors.
The Parents' Role
Stepping Stones is an evidence-based social skills group. Our research clearly demonstrates the critical role the simultaneous parent groups play in a child’s acquisition and generalization of the social skills kids need to make and keep friends. Stepping Stones – a Social IQ development program – emphasizes strategies and techniques for parents and children to try at home. Through reinforcement and sustained practice, parents are able to foster positive social and emotional change, more successfully manage challenging behaviors, and lessen family stresses and conflicts.
Stepping Stones Schedule
These groups meet once weekly for one hour in the evening and/or on Saturdays. We also now have daytime groups, which may better fit the schedules of home-schoolers.
The course of treatment is an average of 35 weeks, with the parent groups running simultaneously.
Additional Social Skills Groups
The Early Childhood program is designed to help children in grades pre-K through 1 who are generally socially appropriate but have lapses in their social behavior. For example, they may be socially withdrawn or impulsive. These groups develop basic social skills such as sharing space with others, developing eye contact, taking turns, listening skills, recognizing, and expressing feelings. Parents receive feedback from one of the group leaders in the last 15 minutes of the group to discuss improving communication at home, managing challenging behavior, and building cooperation at home.
For more information about our groups, please contact us by email or call 703-876-8480.
The goals of these groups are to help group members interact with each other, find common interests, and lessen feelings of loneliness and isolation. These therapy groups are geared toward teenagers with autism (or related disorders) who actively desire relationships with others. While group members want connections with their peers, they have difficulty knowing how to relate to them. They struggle with reciprocal communication, self-awareness, perspective-taking, initiating and sustaining conversations and/or going with the flow with others.
Our therapists incorporate many different modalities to achieve the goals of the group, such as CBT techniques, activities/drawing, role-plays, mindfulness exercises, games and other interactive techniques to help teach and reinforce learned skills. Parents receive feedback by one of the group leaders the last 15 minutes of the group to discuss topics such as improving communication and supporting group goals at home.
For more information about our groups, please contact us by email or call 703-876-8480.
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