Social Skills Torture? Do I Have That Right?

I posted part of this to the Nest parents board so if this is a repeat for you, sorry about that!

I just had an interesting experience this morning.

I work with a life coach and sometimes we do artificial worst-case scenarios, very similar to what is sometimes done in DuckyBoy's classroom during the "SDI" time, which I think stands for Social Development Interaction. Something like that. I never realized the similarity until I did one with my coach this morning.

Last week at our parents' meeting we watched a video involving 4 kids having 2 crayons. The idea was, I think, to help them work out possible solutions so they could all color. (Or, I think if the 2 without crayons had decided to do something else, maybe that would have been ok? I don't know.) I should say, DuckyBoy was NOT in the video. I don't know if the exercise was done with his group also or not.

Here was the problem. Part of it anyway... The focus was on the 2 boys who did NOT have crayons. They were the ones interested in finding a solution, so they were getting the attention.

The 2 boys with crayons were just coloring away.

I think the 2 with crayons should have been made to stop and all 4 work out a solution before anyone could color. After all, when we raised issues about it at the meeting, particularly the need to reward assertiveness in one of the boys who was suggesting a solution, the answer we got was, "There's a whole group here, we need to work on a group goal. We work on that issue with him at other times."

But this was NOT a group effort. Unless "You can have it when I'm done" counts ... and I didn't even hear THAT from the boys with the crayons.

So. They thought of taking turns, they thought of breaking the crayons, and they thought of the obvious solution, Getting More Crayons. Since they were in their classroom where they color every day with boxes and boxes of crayons.

They were told they could not get more crayons. This clearly did not make sense to one of them, who kept suggesting they get more. When we watched the tape, the therapist explained they were trying to get him/them to be flexible, not rigid, since they knew that he in particular would want to get more crayons so he could get his preferred color, which was not one of the 2.

Isn't that the definition of crazymaking??? Not teaching???

So. Back to me this morning. The concept was, "Imagine the worst possible thing that Mr. or Ms X might say to you if you say Y." Then what do I say or do in response, and so on.

Frankly, it was difficult and emotional! My coach had to remind me it was fake at one point in order for me to be able to keep thinking about it.

Let's review: I am 43 and have accumulated a lot of coping skills and labels for my feelings that I was able to use to continue through the exercise. I knew it was artificial since I was speaking with a different person altogether than the one in the scenario. And I still ended at a stalemate of sorts.

My son is 5, and he has fewer emotional coping skills than the average child -- or, at least, less understanding of how and when to use what he has. The kids in the video were 5 or 6. There was no acknowledgement that the scenario was just for pretend, "We know we could just walk over and get the other crayons but let's see what else we could come up with," and it was obviously very.real.to.them. Especially since the other 2 kids just sat and colored and contributed little to nothing to the exercise!!!

I had shelved thinking about this over the weekend, but it's come up as a thread I sort-of-accidentally started on our citywide parents' board for this program. And now the more I think about it, the more it seems wrong.

One of the moms said most of the exercises they do in SDI come from the work of Michelle Garcia-Winner. They use her work but not strictly or exclusively, which I appreciate -- they want the flexibility to tailor it to the kids they're working with.

Overall I've liked what I've heard about M G-W's ideas, but something's not right with this. Something needs to be tailored for a better fit.