Help Your Child Develop Socially This Summer

As a parent, it’s difficult to see your child struggle in social settings. How they interact with their peers during the preschool and grammar school years sets the table for how well they’ll do in more complex environments later in their lives. Identifying and addressing their struggles during this important formative period is much easier than it may be during the adolescent and teenage years, when kids tend to become more distant and withdrawn. Yet helping your child overcome the struggles that he or she experiences socially is often too big of a challenge for you to effectively tackle on your own.

Recognizing You May Need Help

Some say that it takes a village to raise a child. Perhaps nowhere is this more evident than cases where a child is struggling with emotional, developmental, or behavioral issues. Your unique insight into your child’s personality is vital to helping them overcome the obstacles he or she faces in his or her social growth. Yet often, introducing outside influences may serve as the perfect complement to your own efforts in helping your child to improve.

Summertime is one of the most ideal times to help your kid start to build better social skills. He or she has more chances to interact with his or her peers socially, and the increased time that you have with him or her will help you better observe what his or her particular struggles may be. Becoming much more popular today are the summer time social skills camps that seem to be popping up in most of the more suburban neighborhoods. In our region of New Jersey, you can just do a search for summer camps for kids and be overwhelmed with great opportunities for your child. The chance to be surrounded by other children that share many of your kid’s same issues could help him or her to develop better social skills if the program has that aspect as a goal. Add into that that mix counselors trained specifically to help children develop more effective executive function skills like organizing and planning, and you can start to see the positive impact that such a program can have on both yours and your child’s life.

Resources throughout the Country

Many mistakenly think that such programs are only geared towards teens and tweens. However, you’ll find that there are a number of social skills camps designed specifically for children in elementary or preschool.  Among the more popular are:

• - Emerald Cove Day Camp – San Juan Capistrano, CA.
• - Sport Fit Tennis Camps – Bowie, MD.
• - Social Thinking Groups – Princeton, NJ.
• - Charis Hills – Sunset, TX.
• - Camp Buckskin – Isabella, MN.
• - Camp Mirman – Los Angeles, CA.

The first step in helping your child develop social skills is realizing that you’re not alone in your struggles. There are resources out there like the aforementioned summer programs for kids and this preschool summer camp in Princeton NJ that will place your son or daughter in the ideal setting to overcome the challenges he or she may be facing. By embracing this assistance, you’ll see a dramatic change in your child’s temperament, placing him or her in a much better position to succeed as he or she enters the next school year.