Are the communication strategies we're using getting in the way of children’s friendships?
Connection with others is an important part of what makes us human. We are social creatures. For many parents I have met over the years, supporting their child in making friends is a key priority for them. We all want our children to feel happy and to have a sense of belonging, having friends is a huge part of that.
Being able to communicate is fundamental to building friendships. The play of young children makes use of a lot of non-verbal communication with simple sharing or chasing games. However, as children grow, their play and interaction become more and more reliant on spoken language.
There is a trap we sometimes fall into when enabling children with SEN to communicate – we introduce tools that they can use with an assigned adult or a small selection of adults. This is very helpful for getting children’s basic needs met. However, it does not give them access to a wider community or to a peer group. The tools themselves are great; it is the implementation that’s flawed.
Let’s take signing as an example (because I love signing and never stop preaching evangelically about it to the embarrassment of my colleagues… here she goes again). For most children that need signs to support their spoken language, if they are lucky, they are taught to sign and there are perhaps one or two adults in their school setting who they can sign with. They will sign with these adults to make requests, ask questions or tell about their weekend. This is an amazing step in the right direction, giving a child a voice is an incredibly powerful thing! For generations children with communication needs have been desperately waiting for these opportunities. There continue to be many children who are not valued enough to be given these tools. However, being able to communicate only through an ‘interpreter’ adult has real limitations for social opportunities. Children need to be able to communicate with their peers in order to develop quality friendships. Imagine having to have your teacher involved in every conversation you ever have with your classmates. Of course, this is going to be a hinderance to feeling like ‘one of the gang’. Kids just want to be kids. They want to feel that they are on equal footing. It’s pretty hard to feel cool when you can’t communicate directly with the other kids or need an adult do it for you.
Children with typically developing language actually pick up the use of communication tools very quickly. If we get them involved in learning to use these tools alongside their classmate that really needs them, then we are giving all of the children a powerful tool. A tool to communicate. A tool to include everyone. Often a tool which supports their own learning too.
Imagine if the teacher that knows how to sign, signed when talking to all of the children (not just that one child who is totally reliant on it). Imagine if when she chatted to the children at lunch or asked another adult in the room to get some paint, she was always signing when she talked, what would happen then?
Well, for starters, she would be a better signer! As with any skill, the more you practise signing the better you get. Both accuracy and fluency improve. More importantly, signing would become imbedded in the classroom that teacher works in. It would just be part of the everyday, rich tapestry of learning and communication opportunities. Signing would just seem totally normal to the children in that class. The children would pick it up too. They would start to sign when singing songs together, when telling stories, when returning the teacher’s ‘Good morning’ or maybe when asking to go to the loo. And when that one child who needs signing (even more than the other children) used signs to ask them for something, they would know what the child was saying and be able to respond to that child’s hard-won attempts to communicate. Maybe they would even sign back! Imagine that!
Now, being a bit of a passionate signer, I have used this as my example. Powerful as signing is, this applies to lots of communication tools we use to support children with additional needs:
- using symbols in visual timetables, storytelling and labelling
- using colour coding to support the teaching of grammar (e.g. colourful semantics)
- multi-sensory approaches to learning new vocabulary (WordAware is great for this!)
- social stories
When we teach children to communicate we want them to be able to communicate with as many other people as possible. So, let’s make sure we are setting them up for success by including as many as possible in using those communication strategies too.
If you would like to learn to sign or improve your skills, have a look at our upcoming workshops https://www.confidentkids.co/training-events or join our free Facebook group Confident Kids Makaton