Social interaction is a major challenge for most neuro-typical children and thus is far more sensitive when it comes to a child who has developmental delays and issues. Often parents find a range of personal emotions that they deal with when in a social interaction situation involving their child.
Social interaction can be broadly classified into 3 core areas:
• Social-perceptual understanding
• Social cognition
• Social commonsense
All three are important in the development of the child and are important milestones for achieving one of the significant aspects of the triad of development (e. social interaction skillset).
Social perceptual understanding is simply the ability of the child to detect and decode others mental states based on readily available concrete information. For example, a child linking the voice or tone of a person he is interacting with to a mentally confused state of the person is a huge milestone and is often learned via mirroring and understanding. It is based on perception and is an important area to be developed.
Social cognition pertains to one’s ability to reason about mental states with the goal of explaining or predicting a person's actions. For example, understanding the difference between a joke and a lie, typically a skill which we often don’t learn, yet we imbibe from our early development onwards. It is an important skill set as it relies on a neural pathway that works on understanding others mental and emotional states via indexing them with the self mental states experience. False belief systems are a large part of this area and can create havoc down the age line.
Social commonsense is concerned with teaching a child how to behave in a socially-appropriate manner in different contexts, such as how to stand in a queue, how to initiate conversation, and how to engage with people in conversation. This is an important skill set and is an integral part of the social interaction overall in totality as it relies on information processing and needs an evaluation of the current situation and environment.
All the above are important tenets. In my work experience, I have observed that RDI has been a fantastic resource for working on these extremely important milestones of the development cycle.
Through RDI these social interaction skills are noted to be given an opportunity to develop into a full-fledged neural pathway.
Do not hesitate to write to me for more information on the above to share more information on how the modalities are and were applied in success.
Therana Mamachan is a RDI Certified Consultant and also a
Assistant Head of Department for Psychology & Social Work for a leading
Special Needs school based in Dubai, UAE and can be reached on taranaraje@hotmail.com . She also
holds a MS in Psychotherapy & Counselling and has completed basic courses in
HANDLE and Carbone Clinic.