The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
Sharing and other Social Skills #010
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How do we teach social skills like sharing, turn taking, and making friends? Unravel these themes in the latest episode of the Whole Parent Podcast. We kick off with a the struggles our kids have with sharing, debunking myths and laying out strategies that emphasize balance and respect for personal boundaries.
Navigating the tricky waters of parenting, we find ourselves teaching our kids not only about the joys of sharing but also the value of autonomy. I share personal anecdotes and listener experiences that show how giving children the power to choose what they share actually fosters greater cooperation.
We also discuss the delicate task of stepping back to let natural social consequences unfold, and the importance of post-conflict conversations, creating a comprehensive guide on nurturing interdependence among our little ones. Instead of intervening, we debrief.
Finally, we explore the power of play in building leadership and cooperation in children, with a special focus on how introverted and highly sensitive children engage with their peers. By incorporating child-led play and the "Yes, And" improv technique, you’ll learn how to cultivate a safe space for your child's social development.
Our discussion concludes with an invitation to share the insights gained from our podcast, creating a supportive community that thrives on collective wisdom and understanding. Join us on the Whole Parent Podcast for a heartening discussion that celebrates every child's individuality and the art of sharing in parenting.
So the first thing that I want to say is that introversion is a feature, not a failure. So if you feel, like man, I my failing as a parent because my child is an introvert, please we got to change that mindset. I'm not saying that that's what you feel. I'm saying that many parents that I've worked with deep underneath the surface is the great fear that their child won't be successful because they're an introvert. Nothing can be farther from the truth. The world has changed by introverts. The whole parent podcast is on the air. Hey guys, welcome to the whole parent podcast. My name is John. I am at whole parent on all the social medias and for my whole life I have wanted to say something like that because I grew up in Chicago, still live there today and or Chicago land, I should say, because I was not from the city proper and I grew up listening to Chicago Cubs baseball and that's how they started every broadcast. So thanks for indulging me on that.
Jon Fogel:Well, let's get into talking about parenting. That's what we do on this podcast. We answer real questions from parents like you. Occasionally now we host guests to talk about their areas of expertise. I'm super excited to have some awesome guest episodes coming up soon, but mostly we just talk about parenting. We talk about how we can raise resilient, psychologically, relationally physically healthy kids, socially healthy, as what we're talking about in this episode social skills, and how we can do so with confidence. Because you get so much competing advice and input out there on social media and parenting books, we're just trying to put it all together. I am a dad of three and, yeah, so I'm just kind of bringing you along for the journey, as, as I take in what what I have, I've helped hundreds of parents to grow and change and parent more effectively parent without punishment, parent without some of the harmful things that may have been done to many of us, and so that's what this podcast is all about.
Jon Fogel:And today, like I said, we are talking about social struggle. So I want to just jump right in with our three questions from four from today. They come from Owen, sophia and Audrey, and I'm actually going to start in reverse order with Audrey. Today, audrey says Hi, this is Audrey. My child's name is Jake, he is six years old and he is an only child. Jake is often, or sometimes, sorry, has difficulty sharing toys and taking turns when playing with other children. It leads to conflict during play dates. How can I teach Jake to share? Audrey, thank you for an amazing question about sharing.
Jon Fogel:We have not talked about sharing yet on the podcast, and I think it is long overdue, because sharing is one of the most difficult things that kids struggle with all the time, kids who are only children, as in the case of Jake, and I wonder if you pointed that out. It's interesting to me that generally people don't tell me in their question whether their child is an only child or whether they're a youngest or whatever, or the oldest, unless the conflict or the thing that they're asking the question about is related to sibling issues. In this case, I wonder if the reason that you pointed out is because you think that maybe only the fact that he's an only child leads to him struggling to share, and to that I say we don't have data to support that only children struggle with sharing any more or less than kids who have siblings. So if you're kind of beating yourself up, maybe we should have had another kid or whatever, and I don't know your circumstances, obviously, but that's not necessarily true, right? We don't see that kids who are only children really struggle to share any more than kids who have siblings and in fact I know of many cases where younger siblings have a harder time learning to share and we'll get into why that might be developmentally than older children tend to and again, that's just anecdotal. We don't have a lot of data that I'm aware of and if you have data supporting that, please shoot an email over to podcast at wholeparentacademycom and let me know, because I'm always looking for more research that I can read so that I can answer these questions to the best of my ability and with the most efficacy, and I am always open to correcting when I have made an error.
Jon Fogel:But as far as I'm aware, there is no data to support the idea that only children have any more difficulty sharing, and that's because sharing is a developmental challenge for kids. It's something that they have to learn how to do. It doesn't come naturally to kids. It only happens through social relationship and actually practice sharing. And it doesn't have to be with a sibling. It can be in a daycare environment, obviously.
Jon Fogel:Jake is six years old. I don't know if he's in a traditional schooling environment, but it can absolutely happen at school, it can happen on play dates, it can happen so many other places. We can teach our kids to share in so many ways. We can even, in some ways, teach our kids to share with us. We can be some of the early people who they can share and take turns with, and we're going to actually get into that with another question here. And so, audrey, if you're listening I hope you're listening because you've submitted a question, but make sure to listen to the whole episode, because some of the stuff I'm going to say to Sophia, who is our next question, is also going to relate and be helpful also to Jake. So there is no data that I'm aware of, in other words, to support that.
Jon Fogel:Any number of siblings makes you share earlier or better. However, many, many kids struggle to share, and it's something that is almost not talked about. What I hear on social media most often is don't make your kids share, right or don't? A better way to say that might be don't impose authoritarian or dictator status type stuff, type punishments and threats and bribes and things like that authoritarian parenting tactics in order to make your kids share, and to that I say yeah, I wouldn't advocate for imposing authoritarian tactics on your child in almost any situation, certainly not to teach social skills, because they are somewhat anti-social skills right. When you go authoritarian and you say you must share, you must do this, you must do that, and when you become a tyrant, that teaches your child to enact that type of power over those who they feel that they may have power over, and again that's kind of getting into our next question, but so I don't want to go too deep into that.
Jon Fogel:But children struggle to share, ultimately because they are going through a developmental process where they are establishing a sense of autonomy, an agency, where they didn't really have that autonomy and agency earlier on. And I've talked about this in many places on social media and I'm sure I will talk about it on this podcast so many different times. But kids exercising and learning how to express their own autonomy and having agency is a really important developmental step. They are learning their place in the world as distinctively separate from their family unit, while also being interdependent or intra-dependent on their family unit for care and support, and that's a positive, good thing. Right, we balance dependence and independence to make intra-dependence or interdependence, which means you go out and you seek help when you need it.
Jon Fogel:And in this process of developing independence where there was only dependence before, when you're a toddler, or when you hear the toddlers who say me, do, me do, or I want to do it, which obviously Jake is six years old, so he's probably way past that point of saying I must do everything for myself, or just saying no arbitrarily to everything, or demanding or whatever. Those types of toddler behaviors are what we see, that autonomy seeking behavior come out and manifest, as in toddlers, oftentimes in young grade school age kids. We see that autonomy seeking behavior manifest as having a difficulty taking turns, losing as well, failure, early signs that kids are really really struggling to lose or fail and, of course, sharing. And so, counter-intuitively, one of the best things that we can do to help a kid share is to actually establish certain things that they don't have to share. This is similar to my advice to toddler parents, and this is just a little toddler tidbit for you in this episode that's going to be more about older kids than toddlers.
Jon Fogel:A little toddler tidbit if your child's saying no to everything, there's a chance, so there's a good chance that it's because they feel that you are saying no to everything, and so one of the ways to help your child to say no less is to say yes more yourself, in the same way with sharing with a kid like Jake, who's six years old establish a couple of things, a couple of items whether they're sentimental objects, you know, a stuffed animal or even a new toy that they might get and say, hey, this object is not something that you have to share, and also appreciate that that's not an item that you would want to bring to a play date or that you would want to have out when the play date is at your house, because it's something that you cannot share. So we do this with my seven-year-old all the time. He has certain things that he just does not want to share and we actually give him the agency or the decision-making ability to decide which of those objects within reason we'll get to that in a moment he doesn't have to share and by identifying a few objects that he feels he doesn't have to share, then it allows him to feel like those other objects he can share and it just comes down to I need to know what belongs to me, I need to know that I have power over the things that belong to me and in the process of learning what belongs to whom and who who's does this which toys are mine and which toys are for sharing and which, or whatever. In the process of establishing those kind of seemingly rigid boundaries, right, we actually wind up increasing our child's capacity to share. And before you say, well, that's not how it's going to be when they grow up and you know they're going to have to learn to share, even those hard, difficult things to share. No, they're not. You don't. In fact, most of us don't.
Jon Fogel:I have done marriage counseling for many, many couples and one of the things that will come out in marriage counseling sometimes is a partner who has violated deeply violated the trust of their partner by taking something that was a non-sharable item and and using it. Primarily this is a laptop or a cell phone, right? Not that one partner should be hiding things from the other. Obviously, open, openness and transparency are values and relationships, but it can feel like a massive violation of privacy and trust to take somebody's cell phone, for example, and go through their text messages. You would not allow someone I doubt you would allow someone to, or just anyone to, do that. You may have one person in your life who you feel comfortable with allowing to do that, but by and large, you would not allow other people to go through your things in that way.
Jon Fogel:Kids are not different. They are trying to establish where they end, and part of understanding where they end is where does my stuff end? What do I have control over? And kids who feel that they have no control over any of their stuff Will then grasp for that control. They will try and act out that control and they will try and say well, you can't share anything with me because nothing belongs to me, so therefore I must scrap and take whatever I can. So you can do this in a couple different ways. I know parents and this is probably a conversation for a sibling episode as well, because this happens a lot in sibling relationships but you can have a box or a shelf when you know and not a lot of things, but where they can take a few things that really deeply are sentimental, that they really don't want to share, and things can can move right. They can go from being a non-sharable item when it's brand new and they're very excited about it and they want to be careful with it, and then it can become a shareable item as they somewhat lose interest in it or or as they are less attached to it or whatever. But you can have those items that are non-sharables and just appreciate that that's. You do that too as an adult. This is not a bad thing for them to do, and sharing is is a part of autonomy seeking and development.
Jon Fogel:Learning to share is a difficult skill. It requires a level often of perspective taking that young kids just do not possess and so understanding that that saying how would you feel if? Might not really work on a six year old. Very well, you will. You will enact this kind of counterintuitively by actually picking out the items that they don't have to share. That can be super, super helpful as a tool.
Jon Fogel:The the last piece is that I don't think by and large, unless it gets physical, that we should intervene in the moment when our child is struggling to share. Obviously, this is within reason. Take every piece of advice that I give Within reason. But I think as much as we can not intervening in the conflicts that arise between our child and another child Related to sharing, the more they actually can start to understand the negative social consequences natural social consequences as, in fact, the natural negative social consequences of withholding some thing from someone else. Right, if you're playing some Game that you really don't want your friend to play while your friend is over and they get upset at you. That's actually okay. It's okay to allow that to happen. You don't have to save your child from discomfort and in fact, oftentimes the helicopter parents who swoop in and save their child from any negative social interaction and any amount of discomfort are the same parents who wind up with a child who lacks any level of frustration, tolerance. So you actually One of the ways to teach your child to share is to let them not share and then suffer the social consequences of not sharing.
Jon Fogel:It's not. It's not a pretty or a fun thing to do. I don't like doing it myself. However, it can be an effective tool, because the mistakes that we make, social or otherwise, are often some of the biggest Uh ways that we learn, apart from modeling right. So that's another way that we can help our kids to share is to share with them and identify when we're sharing. Oh sure, I am happy to share this with you. Right, it's every kid that I know eats off their parents plate when they get something delicious. You know, you get. You know, whatever a french fries that we ordered restaurant, some of you get french fries. Your kids are going to try and pick off your plate and if you let them do that, just use that as an opportunity to direct their conscious attention and say sure, I'm happy to share my french fries with you. So then that's modeled for them.
Jon Fogel:But the other way that we learn, outside of modeling often, is through the natural consequences of our actions and the mistakes that we make. And so allow your kid to make mistakes related to sharing and then process those mistakes with them later. Oh, I saw that you were, you know, not in the moment, but I saw later. You know, hey, jake, I noticed that you were hanging out with Ben and Ben Got really upset at you. What was that all about? Be curious, you know. And then that will open up that dialogue. For, oh well, I wasn't sharing this thing or I didn't want him to touch my x, y, z, and then you can kind of explain yeah, that is really hard. It's hard when we don't want to share and a kid wants to share with us, and those can be amazing moments. So it's.
Jon Fogel:I'm not saying don't do anything. I'm saying oftentimes allow the interaction In to occur again, unless it gets physical or violent in any way, but allow the negative interaction to occur Without your intervention. Your intervention is going to come on the back end as you process that with your child, and this especially is true for older kids like six, seven, eight I know that doesn't sound older, but school age kids I should say that's less effective with like a toddler, two year old, three year old, who's struggling to share it's. They're going to have a hard time processing it later with you, just from a vocabulary and and communication standpoint, verbal communication standpoint. So I hope that that helps and I want to transition right away no break right into this next question. I've lined these two questions up back to back because this one is actually very, very similar. It's about Caleb, who is age five, but it's different enough that I wanted to cover both, right? So this is from Sophia. She says my child's name is Caleb. He's age five.
Jon Fogel:I've noticed that Caleb, when he plays with his friends, he always takes charge and he doesn't allow his friends to make any decisions during their imaginative playtime. I'm afraid this is going to start to start to frustrate his playmates and I'm concerned about the impact that I might have on his friendships. How can I address the situation and help Caleb learn to cooperate and share in decision making during his play with his friends? Really really good question, sophia. I think a lot of us see this, and the first step in this is you you pointed out I'm afraid this will start to frustrate his playmates.
Jon Fogel:The first thing I want to say is we need to be observers and not predictors often times because our predictions. It is true that Caleb at age five, at age 25, acting this way, that will likely frustrate his peers and co-workers, but at age five, children develop their own social relationships that can look pretty different oftentimes than adult relationships, and so what feels to us like a child is being a dictator sometimes is actually just that's the, the way in which their playgroup has kind of elected a leader, and so I don't. I don't want you to get into the trap of saying I have to fix something that isn't necessarily broken now. I think it's a great idea to have your have a conversation with Caleb Outside of the of his playtime. You know if he's at the park and he's always taking charge. You know, maybe on the car ride home or or the next you know, an hour later after snack or something, to have the conversation between what it looks like to be a leader who enables and who lifts up people, versus a tyrant or a dictator who commands people. So that's, I think that that's a great conversation to have, but just to approach that conversation not from a place of judgment but from a place of teaching. So not to say you are being a dictator or tyrant, but instead to say like hey, I noticed that you often seem to be leading the games. I would just wonder you know, do you think that other kids would, would like to have an opportunity to lead? And again, they're going to struggle with perspective taking. This early right, five years old, it's hard to perspective take, but you can start to build in those kinds of conversations that can lead later to that type of perspective taking, an empathy that will allow him to not just be a leader but also to be a collaborator. So I think that that's a big piece.
Jon Fogel:And the biggest piece in play between becoming a leader and a dictator or a tyrant is to is to what, what? How do they handle when somebody pushes back? So a tyrant or a dictator this is, this is human history and adult psychology, not just child psychology, but but a tyrant or a dictator, when somebody pushes back, they double down and they clamp down right, that's. You see it in politics. You see it in toxic work environments. That's how people do this and, by the way, this is toxic parenting too. When your child pushes back on a boundary that you have, are you the leader of your family where you're able to process through that and get them on board and and yeah, you may have to hold the boundary it may not be super happy for them or you're a person who any oppositional force just makes you defensive and double down and punish and threaten and or bribe right, you can do it on the other side. That's the actions of a dictator versus the actions of a leader or a person who is willing to take criticism and adapt and involve everyone.
Jon Fogel:And I actually have a really good game that you can play with your child, caleb. That comes from the world of improv. Someday, by the way, I have, I'm in the process of writing a book. I'm I've written a book. Now it needs to be edited and rewritten and then goes through a big, long process. It's not going to be coming out until January of 2025. But one day I do want to write another of either this next book or a book sometime in the future about the, the relationship between improvisation or improv games or the act that. You know I'm from Chicago, so this is a big part of our theater scene is improv and being a really great parent, that really great parenting is improvisational.
Jon Fogel:But I have an example that I want to kind of tease here. That is a really good way that you can help to teach. So everything I said to Audrey about Jake you can take all of that here too. If he is being a dictator, if he is kind of forcing his will, that's one of the things that you can do. All the stuff that I said right With that, not just about stuff, but but about who gets to take turns leading to but, but not, but not so much that you're just assuming that he's being a dictator wouldn't, when in reality he might just be a leader, right, and he might be. In the end, it might not be the problem that you think that it is not to say that you shouldn't address it, not to say that we should only be disciplining our children and by disciplining I'm meaning teaching right, that we should only be teaching and parenting our children when they do something. That's a problem. No, engage with them in all aspects of life and that's how you're going to avoid 90% of the problems is by disciplining them when there is no problem.
Jon Fogel:But but you can also do this, and so I want to take this opportunity, just for like five minutes, to kind of go down a nerdy improv rabbit hole with you guys, because I think, sophia, if you did this with Caleb and many parents on this podcast listening to this right now, if you did this with your kid, you would be really astounded by the results. And so what this is is it's the most basic form of improv, and it's called yes and improv. It's one of the basic rules of improv is that when you are in an improvisational scene with someone else, when you guys are acting on a scene, that your job is to go with whatever they say, to say yes to whatever they're offering and and not to do what's called blocking, and blocking is when somebody says something in an improv scene and you immediately respond by saying no, that's not what just happened by playing a game like this with your kid, where they are having to also say yes, and to everything. First of all, the kids love improv stuff like this often because it feels like you, as the adult, are entering their world of imaginative play. It's hard for adults to do imaginative play. It's easy for kids. We need rules like yes, and, and it helps us to get into a childlike space. So your kids will probably love playing a game like this with you. It might be challenging, it might cause some controversy and conflict. When there is a way to play, as as with board games or whatever else, I strongly recommend, if you're going to play a board game with your kid, make sure it's age appropriate so you can follow all the rules, because when you start throwing the rules out the window, then actually the game breaks down and it doesn't become a teaching moment. Same thing is true for a yes and improv game. So basically, what you're going to do is you're going to. You can Google these or whatever, but you're going to start with some sort of prompt. We're going to the store, but we're in medieval times or we are flying on the back of a unicorn. It doesn't matter what. The prompt is right. Just Google improv starting prompts for kids and you'll find, I'm sure, dozens of them.
Jon Fogel:But the but, the role of the game is that as you act this out together, as you do, imagine of play together again. This is you and your child, not your child and other children, although I suppose you could do that as well. Every time they bring something to the table, you have to say yes to that thing. So if they're calling somebody on their cell phone, or if you're calling somebody on your cell phone in this, in the game that you're playing, and they say, all of a sudden you realize that your cell phone is actually a snake, you can't say no, it's not a snake, it's actually just a cell phone, because I was calling a pizza place and that wouldn't make any sense. You have to react and respond oh my God, it is a snake. Oh, and like freak out, right, so. So that's how you play on your side. But then you're going to encourage them to accept the yes and posture to what you bring to the table. So then we went up into a helicopter and jumped out with parachutes.
Jon Fogel:If your child says no, I don't want that to be the game, push back a little bit, right, five years old, we can start to push back a little bit and say well, that's, that's the game that we're playing. We have to say yes to whatever it is and you can adapt and adjust and move the you know, move the story forward and and really emphasize that yes posture. To play this type of game then allows for your child to be in that leader mindset rather than the dictator mindset or the tyrant mindset, that when kids bring valuable insight into their play that they're going to be more likely to say yes. And it also becomes, if you do this enough, a step that you can, a shorthand way for you to intervene with your kids, which again, I don't, as I kind of said earlier, I don't really like intervening with your, with kids when they're in social interactions with other kids, because that's they're learning, that that's happening is in those peer interactions. But if you find your child is frustrating their playmates by being too controlling of the game, then you can say, hey, caleb, let's do some yes, like let's just you and me, they don't have to know about this, but let's try and do a little yes, and with this let's try and bring in a posture where when they bring something to you, you're not going to block that and and and belittle it or push it down. You're gonna actually go with it. So that's, that's the yes and improv game that you could bring to your child or you can bring to the relationship that can really really do some amazing things. Before we move on to Owen and Zoe, which is a little bit different we're gonna be talking about a shy kid here and we're gonna talk about social skills and social interactions beyond relationship to sharing or taking turns.
Jon Fogel:I just want to make one quick call to action, which is as if you've heard more than this episode. You've heard me say it. We have had so many amazing people download and listen to and let me know that they've heard and that they've been benefited from this podcast, that they've found value in it. Well, we have had only a fraction of a percent of those people actually go and take the three minutes that it takes to review the podcast, whether writing a review or just hitting that five star button on Spotify or an Apple podcast. Simply doing that allows this podcast to thrive and flourish and and get to the next level where we can start to do. Even. We get even better guests on to join me at some of the amazing types of people that that I already have lined up. But the only reason I've been able to line those people up is because our podcast is reaching more people, and the reason our podcast is reaching more people is because a few of you have gone and done the review and rate for this podcast on your podcast platform. So continue to do that. For those of you who have, if you can rate it on another platform, do that. But for those who have not done that yet, really, this is your call to action. This podcast is 100% free to you, right? This is just amazing content that you get twice a twice a week, right, like it's a lot of time to do that. All I'm asking in return is three minutes of your time to go in and rate and review, and I'll be back at the end of the episode to also tell you one other way that you can really really help us, and that's to share it with a friend.
Jon Fogel:Ok, so, without further ado, let's hit our last question, which comes from Owen. He says hi, my name is Owen. My child's name is Zoe. She is four. I've noticed that Zoe seems a bit shy around other kids and struggles to initiate play. How do I encourage her to develop social skills and be more confident in interacting with children Her age? Great question, owen. I think this is another place where I want to. I want to. I'm not going to push back, I'm not saying that but I want to make sure that we identify some things before I give my tip. And my tip is going to be related, very, very similar to what we just talked about with Caleb and Sophia A child led play tactic that we can use or practice that we can use to help our child to feel more confident.
Jon Fogel:But the first thing that I want to say, before I get into that, is that we live in a culture that really, really celebrates and, in an exaggerated way, lifts up, prioritizes extroverts over introverts. That's just a part of our society. People like extroverts although people want to have extroverts on their podcast and they want to listen to extroverts and extroverts tend to get more promotions and things like that, although some of the best creative thinking and most imaginative thinking often comes from introverts. I look at it. You know I am in a marriage with an introvert and often some of the best stuff that you've ever heard about whole parent might come out of my mouth the extrovert but it often comes from her brain as the introvert and so the first thing that I want to say is that introversion is a feature, not a failure. So if you feel, like man, I'm failing as a parent because my child is an introvert, please we got to change that mindset. I'm not saying that that's what you feel, owen. I'm saying that many parents that I've worked with, deep underneath the surface is the great fear that their child won't be successful because they're an introvert. Nothing can be farther from the truth.
Jon Fogel:The world is changed often by introverts. They aren't always elected to public office, they aren't always the front person, but oftentimes, and in fact most of the time, they're the person behind the scenes. My favorite people in the world are all introverts. I'll put it that way. So introversion is a feature, not a failure, and introverted people tend this is not totally universal, but introverted people tend to have a few close relationships, while extroverted people tend to have more less close relationships. So we might have more friendships. We might have quote more friends, although not always and those friendships won't always be as deep. Introverts will have a few really, really deep friendships and the truth is what we know is that as long as you feel connected to people in general, it's not gonna be a big draw on your mental health. It's gonna be a good thing for your mental health.
Jon Fogel:So if your child has absolutely no relationships, it might be time to implement some of the things that I'm gonna talk about with ChildBudPlay and practice. But if your child has a couple close relationships, it's okay. If they're not the most popular kid in class, in fact it might be exactly where they wanna be, and it's not a failure, it's a feature. So just feel that, identify that and this is the child that we have. I have introverted kids and extroverted kids. The introverted kids of my kids, that's the person that they are and that's not a failure. That's a good thing about them and it's going to mean that they're gonna be able to leverage that in amazing ways to be physically, mentally and emotionally healthy, in the same ways that extroverts are able to be physically, mentally, emotionally healthy by leveraging their extroversion. So trying to force a kid into something that they're not making them fit, you know a square peg round hole is usually going to wind up biting you in the behind, and so don't go down that path. So that's the first thing I wanna say.
Jon Fogel:The second thing that I'll say is that beyond simply introversion, extroversion, we also have the spectrum of sensitivity, whether that's highly sensitive or tend to be less sensitive, the kids that are in that, let's say, 20% at the top, the most highly sensitive kids. What Dr Elaine Aron has found in her research, as well as other researchers who have kind of doubled down on this research and looked at this work, what they've found is that for that 20% of the population that tends to be what we might classify as highly sensitive, what Dr Becky unfortunately doesn't cite, elaine Aron, but what she calls deeply feeling kids, even though it's just high sensitivity, and what other creators and what other authors have called the orchid versus dandelion paradigm or spectrum, the orchids in that case, with these highly sensitive kids, they often need a lot more time to observe before they interact and so again, not a failure, a feature they will observe what's going on for a long time before they insert themselves. And so my son, when he started, he's highly sensitive, he's extroverted but he's highly sensitive. It's kind of a not always, they're not always. You can be highly sensitive and extrovert, or highly sensitive and introvert, or vice versa. He's an extrovert but he's highly sensitive. And so when he starts new things, like a soccer team or gymnastics or whatever, sometimes he doesn't just dive right in, sometimes he stays in the background or stays on the wall and watches for a period of time.
Jon Fogel:It's possible that Zoe, at four years old it's not even that she's necessarily an introvert, it's that we're going to so many different environments that she feels that she has to observe before she engages. And so we go oh well, she didn't play with any kids there. We gotta try the next place, or we gotta try the next thing, or we gotta put her in sports or we gotta put her in this, because she's not making any friends Sometimes. Just consistency of going to the same place over and over you go to the same park over and over, you just play with the same group of friends over and over that allows those highly sensitive kids that need to observe before they interact to do the requisite observation and assessment and then eventually, on the fourth or fifth play date or on the fourth or fifth practice, then they'll participate. And forcing them to participate before they have that time to make that assessment is almost always going to bite you in the long term. And then the last thing because we're running out of time here and I wanna make sure that I hit this as well is that, as with the yes and Improv game, as with the processing later with Jake and Audrey.
Jon Fogel:Another thing that you can do with your child is child-led play, in other words, them leading the play with you, and so you are a safe person for your child. I really, really hope so, and because you're a safe person for your child, that means that you can play with them in a way that will feel safe to them, and so I just wanna highlight this and say anytime that you spend intentional time playing with your child and allowing them to lead, that is one of the confidence-building things that then allows your child to go out and feel that they can meet new people and interact and grow and change and initiate. As you said, play with new peers, and so be a person who plays well with your child, who doesn't just spend a lot of time worrying about whether your child is interacting with peers, but who's practicing with them. You are their safe practice space, and so sit down on the floor with your kid which I'm sure you do, owen but just be even more intentional and encourage your partner, if you have one, to also interact in this way. Sit down and allow your child to lead deeply in imaginative play. Say yes to whatever they're saying Show them that it is fun to play with someone else and that can really really do a whole host of amazing things and benefit your child. So that's what I have for you and as well as kind of the things that I've talked about with Jake and with Caleb.
Jon Fogel:I think that this is kind of the way in which we do it. We become the safe people and I can't stress that enough. This goes for Audrey, this goes for Sophia as well. We, when we become the safe home base, our children tend to go out and interact in the world in more confident and ways. And sometimes you know, not sharing is a lack of confidence. I'm worried. What if something gets taken? Not being the leader is a lack of confidence, right? What if somebody takes my spot? For me, the more we can be that safe home base and make them feel that they belong and that they're securely attached to us, the more they have that ability to go out and and be amazing social partners out in the world. So I hope that helps. All right, guys. This is the end of the episode for this episode on social skills on the whole parent podcast. Thank you so much for joining me today as we tackled some really amazing questions from really amazing parents.
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Jon Fogel:Every single Thursday, I will send out an email. Sometimes it's related to what we talked about on the podcast man, I really tripped over myself there and sometimes it's totally, totally separate. Sometimes it's just amazing content that performs better or is better given in written form. I also, on there, will tell you about exciting opportunities to connect with me and the whole parent platform and the whole parent nation as a whole on that email list. It's the place where you can find out about all the upcoming events my upcoming book that I mentioned in this episode, upcoming live trainings that I do, anything related to whole parent. You're going to get it on the email list. It is not a place where you're going to get spammed all over the place. I'm not going to send you a bunch of emails about sales, although occasionally, when I do have something, I will send you a note. Hey, you might like this, but it's really a place where, every Thursday, you just get amazing parenting content delivered to your inbox for free.
Jon Fogel:The last thing that I'll encourage you to do is that if you have a child in your life who struggles to share whether they are your child or not you want to share this with a partner.
Jon Fogel:If you want to share this with a parent, if you want to share this with a friend or a peer, a mom friend, a dad friend please do so. Shoot them this episode and or shoot them any episode of the whole parent podcast that you feel applies to them. That is one of the most amazing things that you can do, not only for me and the platform and whole parent podcast as a whole to keep us going, but it's also an amazing way that you can benefit somebody in your life for free, that they get to just listen to this and learn and grow. Every single one of us needs a village, and sometimes it takes building our own village by sending the types of resources that are benefiting us to our friends, and then you know. Just imagine what it would be like to have somebody to discuss the whole parent podcast with in your life. I bet you that would be super fun. So that's what I have for you on this episode. Thank you so much for listening and until next time. This has been the whole parent podcast.
