Is Your Kid "Falling Behind Socially"? #71

This episode is for the parent quietly watching from the sidelines, wondering if their child is falling behind socially—or if they’re the only one who seems worried about it. We step into those moments where your kid hangs back, plays alone, gravitates toward adults, or misses social cues, and we slow the whole story down. Instead of rushing to labels or fixes, this conversation reframes social “lag” as temperament, context, and skill development unfolding on its own timeline. We explore how easily our own childhood wounds sneak into our fears, how extroversion gets mistaken for health, and why opting out isn’t the same thing as being excluded. Most of all, this episode offers relief: a way to see your child more clearly, respond with curiosity instead of panic, and trust that many of the traits that worry us at six can become strengths later—if we don’t shame them out of existence first. 

Chapters

• 0:00 The Karate Studio Snapshot
• 2:50 Naming The Fear Of “Falling Behind”
• 6:40 Scrapping The Plan To Tell This Story
• 9:40 Shoulds, Comparisons, And Traps
• 12:07 Madeline’s Question About A Floating Five-Year-Old
• 16:20 Two Brothers, Two Social Styles
• 21:05 The Jackson Reveal And Playing Alone
• 28:16 Is He Lonely Or Just Choosing Solitude
• 33:21 Temperament Over Deficit
• 37:46 Extroversion As Default And Its Costs
• 43:16 Becoming Conscious And Not Reliving Our Wounds
• 49:16 Reframing The Question We Ask Ourselves

Transcript

Jon @WholeParent: 0:00

The karate studio is loud and echoey. Bare feet slap the mat, belts snap as kids tug them loose, the sharp citrus smell of cleaners still hanging in the air. A cluster of six year olds collapse on the floor in a circle, comparing stripes, arguing about who's faster, laughing at each other's fart jokes. Except for one little boy. Off to the side. It's your kid sitting cross-legged against the wall, fiddling with a loose string in their uniform. Alone. If you're a parent, that image can stick with you. Because the fear isn't just that your kid is awkward, it's that they're being excluded. This episode is for parents who are watching moments like this and running the mental math in their head. Why aren't they making friends? Is this normal? Is this just a phase? Because every parent is trying to secure for their child what no parent can guarantee. Being wanted. On today's episode, we're going to talk about the fear behind the phrase falling behind socially. And look at what's actually happening when kids are on the edges of groups, slow to jump in, or are more comfortable just observing than engaging. So, if you've ever sat on the sideline of an activity pretending to scroll on your phone while tracking every movement out of the corner of your eye, this episode is here to help you understand what you're seeing and what your child actually needs from you the most. Let's get into it. Welcome back out to the porch. I'm excited to talk about this episode because this came directly out of an experience that I am in the midst of. And I would share that experience with you, except Madeline, who sent a DM to me, actually is facing basically the exact same thing with a kid the exact same age. Now, Madeline didn't tell me if her kid's in forest school, but I just had an interaction with my son tonight, this very night, not even an hour and a half ago, and realized, you know what? I got a DM about this, like not even two weeks ago. Now I should go back and I should craft this episode. So I'm starting later than I normally do because I scrapped what I was going to talk about and I'm talking about this instead. I think it's really important because even I hear that shark music, or I don't know why I said even I, like I'm somehow different than every other parent who listens to this, but I feel the shark music. I feel the fear when I think that my kid is maybe not where he should be socially. And that's a really key word to begin the episode is should. A lot of what we're talking about today has to do with this idea of what should be happening. And when we start shoulding ourselves, we wind up in big trouble. We begin to compare, which is almost universally a mistake. Not only we do we compare our kid with other kids, we maybe can compare our kid with their siblings. That's something that I was doing. And so I want to get into it and I'll tell the story of what happened tonight along the way as I answer the first question. Our first question comes from Madeline. It was a DM on Instagram, and she says, I don't know if this is a real problem or not, but my son is five and very sweet, but he never seems to be the kid that other kids want to play with. At birthday parties, parks, play dates, he just sort of floats. Like he's there, but not in it. He'll play with someone if they invite him, but he never jumps in on his own. Mostly he just plays alone, off to the side. I just don't want him to be lonely. I was lonely as a kid, and it breaks my heart seeing that with him too. I keep watching him on the playground instead of talking to other parents, and I know that's probably not healthy, but I just can't stop. Am I supposed to be doing something about this? Or is this one of those things where I wait and hope that it fixes itself? Madeline, I am so grateful that you sent me this message because I have this amazing like blessing in my life, and not just my kids. And it's that so many people ask me questions about parenting, whether it's through the membership, that's where I get most of my questions. I obviously get lots of questions through DMs. Occasionally people email me, that's what they're supposed to do. Podcast at wholeparentacademy.com if you want to get your question in the Whole Parent Podcast. But the benefit of that, the blessing in that is that occasionally I get questions that remind me that I'm not alone in experiencing what I'm experiencing with my kids. That probably there are kids out there just like my kids doing some of the very same things that my kids do. And so I'm gonna tell you first the story of my son, who's also five, five and a half, and kind of this moment. And I'm I'm gonna share, it's it's pretty vulnerable, so uh stick with me, and I'm gonna try and do my best to just be objective. So the first thing that you should know about my kids is that I my two older kids, Ollie and Matt, are three and a half years apart. And my oldest Matt is he's got his own social challenges, like every kid does. Uh kids are not born ready to socialize, they have to learn this. Like socialization is a skill that is learned. And for many kids, it's really easy. For other kids, it's more challenging. That's what this episode is about. But it's a developmental capacity and it takes repetition. And for my son Matt, that repetition looked very different than for my other kids. But he was always extroverted and he always wanted to jump in and he always wants to play with friends. And sometimes he's too extroverted. Like today, we were trying to go out to dinner. We go out to dinner on Monday nights almost always. It's just me and my kids who go out. My wife stays back. And we go out to dinner on Monday nights, nothing fancy. We typically go typically go to Potbelly Sandwich Shop, which is like a it's a chain, kind of a fast casual place chain here in Chicago. And there's some others around the country, but it originated in Chicago, so there's the most in Chicago. It's a place that I actually used to work, not this specific one, but that was like my job in college. One of my many jobs in college was working at Potbelly Sandwich Shop as a delivery driver. And my kids love it. Um we have kind of our order where we order two things of mac and cheese and split them four ways. We order two milkshakes and split those. And so it's just a really fun thing that we do. And tonight we were trying to go on Monday nights. We almost always go. And part of the reason why we go on Mondays is because it's the one day when like the next door neighbor kids can almost never play. It's the first day back of the week, and they can usually play on the weekends, and their parents almost always say no on Mondays. And so my son had gotten a maybe instead of a no from the next door neighbors and my nine-year-old. And he was like, I don't want to go to Potbelly. And he has actually stayed back in the in the past when this has happened. He's like, I don't want to go because what if they say yes? And we have to always just be like, oh my gosh, they're not gonna say yes. Like, but he's so extroverted that it feels like such a loss to have a person try and play with you and not play. Like, if if if they ever came to our door and we weren't there, like we have like this is like destroyed entire outings where we were like getting ready to go do something so fun as a family, like go to the zoo. We have a membership to the zoo, and and he'll be like, No, I don't want to go because my friends can play now. And so it like the extra version is so extreme. Now, my next kid comes along and he's different. He likes to play with other kids, but he also needs lots of time alone. And when we started, when he started school this year, we were he goes to an outdoor forest school. We were kind of nervous because we were like, he's starting a lot younger than our other son did. We didn't he didn't start going until he was seven, almost eight. And now here's Ollie going at five. And we were like, oh man, that's but but we think he's ready. And he'd been saying, I'm ready, I want to go to school. So we sent him, but when we did our first couple parent days, he just seemed to stick to us like glue and not play with other kids. And his teachers kind of said, No, that's not true. He plays just like not when you're here, it's kind of he's acting kind of weird. And we were like, okay, but that's typical, right? Like there, I should do a whole episode on how why kids act differently around their parents than around their teachers and their peers. But we were like, okay, that that makes sense, I guess. But we just always had this creeping sensation in the back of our mind, like, no, maybe, maybe he doesn't. Because we knew, like, compared to Matt, like he does not really run to go and play with people. And then tonight, uh, I was talking to him and I said, Who's your best friend at school? And he had a really clear answer. He said, Oh, my best friend is Jackson. And I said, Is that the per he was telling me a story about sitting with somebody at lunch? And I said, Is that the person who you were sitting with, Jackson? And he said, No, uh, Jackson's only there on Fridays. A lot of the kids only go one day a week, which is again kind of strange. It's mostly homeschoolers. We are the weird ones for sending our kids all of these different days. And I said, Oh, oh, okay. Uh, so who is your friend in this class? And he said, I don't have any friends in this class. He said, Jackson's my only friend. And he did not say it in like in like this sad mopey way, like my son would have, or I would have. Like, oh, Jackson's my only friend. He was just kind of matter-of-fact, oh, Jackson's my only friend. And I was like, Well, who do you play with on Mondays and Tuesdays? And he was like, usually not nobody. Sometimes, sometimes I play with somebody, but usually, usually not very many people. And this is what we had observed. And so we were like, I'm sitting myself kind of hearing the shark music. I was like, oh my gosh, my kid. And I said, Aren't you lonely? And he said, I live in a house with three other kids, dad. I go to school with 15 other kids. How could I ever be lonely? They're there, I can see them. And I said, But don't you feel lonely if they're playing? And here comes my nine-year-old chiming in. He goes, Yeah, and they go to the same school. And he said, Yeah, you know, one day, just way to exacerbate my fears, by the way, Matt. New fear unlocked. He goes, you know, one day, I actually saw Ollie's class class playing tag, and 14 kids were all playing tag. Every person in the class, including the teacher, was playing tag, except for Ollie. He was over playing at the Mud Kitchen by himself. And I said, Ollie, tell me about that experience. And he was like, Yeah, sometimes I don't feel like playing with the other kids. And I was like, dude, is it because they're excluding you? They're not involving you, they're not bringing you in, they're not inviting you, and he's like, No, I just I and he didn't really I'm I'm like making it sound like it's more coherent than it even was. He was just like, no, that's not it. And I was like, oh man. So and I wanted to go back to that same well again. So aren't you lonely? But I didn't. I just said, okay. Well I love hearing about school. Thank you for telling me. And he was like, okay. And then later, about 10 minutes later, when he was just about to go to bed, I said, Ali one more question about school. Do you like school? And he said, Yeah. I like school. School is so fun. And I just said, Huh. The reason I tell you that story on this podcast and Madeline is because I often think that we treat extroversion as if that's a sign of health, and solitude or introversion as a sign of risk or deficiency or like disorder. But I just as I talked to him tonight, and as I know this kid, because it was my own kid, I didn't have the objectivity until I stepped away and started preparing for the episode. To think about what I would have just said to you if that hadn't happened to me just now. And what I would have said to you is But that is not necessarily true. Some kids are slower to warm up, they're cautious, or they're selective in who they want to be friends with. They might only want one friend who they really trust, and that might be exactly what they're looking for. And that can just be temperament, not deficit. That can just be who they are. And I think about my wife, who is introverted, and she it is not, it is not for lack of like desire or not for lack of trying that she wait, I'm saying this wrong. It is not that she tries so desperately to be friends with all of these different people and constantly have her social calendar filled with all of these different outings that she's gonna. I know this 32-year-old person to be a person who just prefers to every night if she can hang out with me. But, you know, if we have somebody come over once or twice a week, that's a lot compared, right? The holidays just happened. We were going to all these holiday parties. It's not like she's unable to do it, it's not like she's socially awkward when she's there, but she's she would be perfectly happy to just hang out with just me. And I think that that's the thing that we often fail to see is that the world is often set up for extroverts. The world feels like that's like extroversion is somehow the default right way, and introversion or solitude is the wrong way. And I think that we instinctively feel this way a little bit. There's there's some there's some truth in the idea that true solitude, like solitary confinement, when we take away all social interaction from a person and we make them live on their own for a period of time, that that's really unhealthy. There's truth in that. But when a person is opting to spend alone time, is opting to go to solitude, is opting to play off on their own, as your son does when we when you go to the park or when you go to a play date where he might just play off to the side because in Ollie's case, off in the mud kitchen. It's not that they're there's something wrong with them, or that that's somehow maladaptive, but that that's a way that they kind of recharge their battery. And I think that this is the thing, is that we wind up not actually evaluating our kids in these moments. We we are we are creating like social right and wrong and what it's supposed to look like. And as soon as we do that, we've we run the risk of doing harm to our kids, actual harm to our kids. I'm not saying that you are, but we run the risk of doing harm to our kids because we start to prescribe to them, well, no, actually, health looks like playing tag when everybody else was playing tag. And if you're not doing that, there's something wrong with you. And then the kid winds up hating their environment because it they don't feel free to just be themselves. I stepped away from that situation with Ollie, asking the question: Am I really can so concerned about him, or am I impressing upon him the reason why I felt lonely? And this is Madeline, where I'm really gonna hit you, because I don't know. You said that you were lonely as a kid, and it breaks your heart. I was also lonely as a kid, and I was lonely not in the way that Ollie was lonely. Ollie, I think Ollie might be lonely, and I don't know how you experienced the world, I only know how I experienced the world, but I was lonely even though I really desperately wanted friends. Like I was too much for other kids, and that's actually one of the questions that we're getting to, is a kid who's kind of a lot, and I'm ADHD, and I was kind of a lot, and that meant that that sometimes I got socially excluded or bullied and things like that. And so I was lonely, but I desperately wanted to be wanted. That's different than what Ollie's experiencing, and probably what your kid's experiencing. But if we are reliving our own social wound, then we aren't actually going to be curious about what they're experiencing. This is what I talk about in my book when I have a chapter called Becoming Conscious, and it's probably the chapter that I talk about least, even though it's really important and I'm glad that it's in the book. Becoming conscious is all about personal differentiation. That's the topic of the chapter. And it's not about social interaction. In fact, the book that I'm kind of toying around with and writing a proposal for right now is more about social interaction. This book is not about social interaction, it's about not inflecting our own historical trauma. This this chapter is not about not inflecting our own personal narratives and trauma into our kids, allowing us to have the personal differentiation to know, oh, this is actually an insecurity of mine, not necessarily an insecurity of theirs. And so we call these things with our kids concern. We're concerned for our kid, or we're we're worried about them. When what actually we're experiencing is grief in our own story, that we're experiencing grief that like that we were lonely, and that that is still a wound, that's still unresolved. And I don't think that it ever is fully resolved, but what happens is that the concern sounds like what if my child inherits this loneliness that I have, but actually it's a grief that we couldn't control how the world treated us. And so gr that that it becomes fear. So it's not really like I'm concerned, it's more like I'm being triggered, I'm I'm afraid. And so I think asking a different question, instead of is my kid socially behind, or is my kid lonely, or are they being chosen? Are they being excluded? Like that's ultimately what we're saying. Like that's the difference between me and Ollie is that I wasn't being I was being excluded. He's not being excluded. He's choosing to opt out. I think instead of asking the question, is my kid being excluded, or are they failing to be chosen? Are they not being chosen? Is there something wrong with them that people don't like them? I think instead of asking that, we have to ask, what's going on in my kid as this is happening? Does their body look relaxed? How do they talk about that? Do they feel good about it? Because that's where the social learning actually happens. When we get curious about how our kid is experiencing and interacting and moving through the world. Like the thing that I needed to come to terms with was that last question that I asked him. And I'm so glad that I did before he went to bed. I said, Do you like school? Because he just described, or both him and his brother described to me a situation. And by the way, when I see my nine-year-old, it's the opposite. He's the one leading the pack to play. Like everybody wants to be his friend. And he like is just has this gregarious personality and everybody wants to be around him. And that's how his friends are next door. And it's not that they don't fight, and it's not that they don't pick on each other sometimes, but so often, like, like they're never not playing with him because they don't want to. He's a fun person to be around and he wants to like attract attention. And I think sometimes I juxtapose that with Ollie of saying, well, if if Matt everybody wants to be around Matt and he's always around people, then if Ollie's not around people, it's because people don't want to be. Instead of saying, it's because he might not want to be right now. It's that that's not what he's looking for. And so I'm so glad that I asked that last question of the do you like school? Because it really drove home this idea that, like, why am I placing my own interpretation on objective facts? The objective facts are he says, sometimes I choose to play alone, and that my nine-year-old says, I've witnessed him playing alone. That's the my my wife and I have seen at Parents' Day that he plays alone. Those are the facts. But we moralize those facts and we create a narrative around those facts and we create a s like a like a should, but we shouldn't do that. Because we're afraid. Instead of saying, Oh, is that how he's most comfortable? Is that how he's feeling connected? Because the truth is, as many times as I've seen him play alone, those experiencing are just those experiences are just the ones that stick out to me. Because just as many times I've seen him play with his brothers, I've seen him play with the friends that come over to the house at church, the kids constantly playing with other kids. When we've gone on on other events to to his school, especially when his friend Jackson is there, he's just he's playing the whole time with other kids. He's but it's those times when it seems like he's alone that become we have we have what's called negative bias, which is our brains look and scan for the for the threat at all times. And so when we see something that's going well, we don't even see it. And so that's I I might be putting too much of my own story onto your story, Madeline, but I hope that it gives you some, if if nothing else, to just know that you're not alone. Like I chose to answer this question because you're not alone. And this is a normal thing for some kids, but your fear that comes and is buried in that, like, I feel that too sometimes. Okay.

SPEAKER_00: 23:29

Let me take a break and come back to another email. Our second question comes from William.

Jon @WholeParent: 25:50

It was an email, and he says, I keep hearing that kids figure this stuff out, but I don't really know. My daughter is almost seven, and she'd honest honestly rather sit next to the teacher or read than play with other kids. Is it weird that she would rather hang out with the teacher than the other kids? The first thing I want to say to this is that a lot that could have just been said for Madeline and my son can also be said here, right? Opting out, as I've said before in this episode, is not a character flaw or necessarily even a delay. It's often just a self-red regulation strategy, right? Like sometimes kids just that's what they do. But I also want to say at the same time, that there are kids who develop differently than other kids and may feel more comfortable with adults than other kids in the moment. This is a place where I think that there can be some growth that can take place if she's opting out of playing with other kids to attempt to try and sign her up for some stuff and see how it goes. Now, it may go terribly. She may need to like sit on the sidelines. Like, if you sign her up for soccer, she may need to sit on the sidelines and watch. It might be helpful just to like take her and watch what like a soccer practice even would look like before you do that or dance or whatever. But what right now, what it sounds like is that she's more comfortable, as you said, with adults than with other kids. And I want to say that social growth in this way is not linear. Like, I think a lot of us think that, like, oh, kids are this age and then they act this way, and then they are this age and they act this way. A lot of our problems in parenting, and this is not just limited to social interactions, is that we think that growth is linear, that that we have these growth charts, right, that we get when they're really little. We're kind of conditioned to see them this way. Like, oh, at this age, they should be lifting their head up, and at this age, they should be able to hold their neck steady, and at this age, they should be able to sit up, and this age they should be able to roll over and crawl and and then walk. And we we think of these things like the motor skills. And the reason why we have all of these benchmarks is so that we can see if there's something that's not going according to normal expected growth patterns and intervene. So, my son Ollie, again, I'm talking a lot about him today. This doesn't have to do with his social uh kind of interversion, although maybe it does. I guess I've never really thought of that. Um, maybe just right now on the podcast. But uh, he had a speech delay, right? And we wouldn't have known that if we didn't have an older kid who was really advanced in speech. That actually made us feel worse about the speech delay because our oldest was like so quick to speak, and then now we're comparing it to that. But because, again, all of these things are variable, we didn't know when we should be concerned and when we should have, or not even concerned, but when we should get early intervention and uh speech language pathologist involved until uh without these benchmarks. So there's a good reason for the benchmarks, but it can also get parents into this mindset of just like checking boxes and like this, this, this, this, this. And a lot of my work in studying education has been around this idea that like kids just don't learn that way and they don't develop that way and they don't grow that way. They don't grow linearly. It's that when we take a population of a thousand kids or a hundred thousand kids, then we can apply those benchmarks to it, and this is just how statistics works, then we can see kind of the trend lines of like, oh, you know, there's kind of a standard deviation of like, oh, kids may not learn how to walk exactly at one, but you know, they all learn how to walk in within like a standard deviation or two standard deviations of one year old. And I don't even know what the standard deviation is for walking, but maybe it's like you know, a month or two months, and they all use you usually learn how to walk somewhere in that, and if they don't, that's when we're concerned, if they're like falling outside of the third standard deviation because they're in like the lowest, you know, in the only th.3% or something like that. And I'm betraying my it's been over a decade since I've taken statistics, so I'm not, I'm probably not uh explaining this in a very easy to understand way, but that's why we use these benchmarks on a wide scale, but they don't often, they they often cause us more anxiety than they need to on the narrow scale. And so understanding that social growth, like emotional regulation, like so many other things, is not linear. And that you could have a delay in any of those pieces, right? So I just said opting out is not necessarily delay. But also, even if there is a delay, it doesn't mean that they'll never catch up. And this is like really important, especially for my explosive kids. Again, this is not really about social connection or social interaction with peers, but for explosive kids, they often have the lagging uh skill of frustration tolerance and emotional regulation. So they may be cognitively on pace with all of their friends. They may often and often are advanced physically, where they're you know able to climb or run fast or like these kind of physical developmental skills, they're really well balanced, all this stuff. But where it comes to frustration, tolerance, emotional regulation, they're they're lagging. Like this is a normal part of life. And so I think there is some place here for growth of saying maybe we try signing up for some stuff, but also don't become the person who's constantly focusing only on the places where your kid is lagging in other in any way. And and there may not even be a lag here. Like, I this way it's like so hard to answer these questions sometimes because like in this case, it may just be actually that she's advanced. There are some kids who would who who are so socially advanced that they kind of at seven are opting out of the kind of juvenile childishness of peer play. It's just like, oh, it's kind of like all my all the peers are kind of just telling butt jokes and stuff. And like that was my joke at the beginning, right? All the fart jokes. Like all my peers are telling this, and like I'm just not interested in that. I'm interested in talking about books and reading, and and you know who can do that with me? My teacher. You know who's not gonna do that with me? Like Alan over there in the corner, who's like making paper airplanes, and and kids can identify this and they can feel more comfortable in given settings. So so I'm not even saying that it's a delay. It might actually be that she's advanced in that way. But I think the way to to to work on this is that we do need some growth in the peer playing, and and probably the way to do that is to provide safe opportunities. And so I'm not saying that we do a sink or swim here where like, okay, I'm gonna sign her for soccer and just push her in. I think that that'll backfire. I think that that will probably cause more harm than than it will prevent. But if she has higher sensitivity and or even social anxiety or things like that, or ADHD traits, it can be that the peer relationships need more time to grow. And they're context-dependent, right? That's the other piece here. Like there are different play styles that can be perfectly capable of socializing in one setting and then struggle in another. So what you've decided said here is that okay, she would rather hang out with the teacher, but just in your question there, I can already identify that the context here is school. Similarly, like, and I don't mean to keep going back to my own kids, but in my own situation, Ali seems to be way more likely to play independently at school, partially because he doesn't have a lot of alone time at home. Like his most of his play at home is happening with around peers. And so school actually is a place where he can feel some semblance of like, I can recharge my social battery. And I'll tell you, in the first couple weeks after he was coming home, we were actually sending him, and this sounds bad, we were sending him up to his room of his own desire because he just needed time away from people after being at school. And then slowly over time, he adapted and said, you know what? Instead of like really overwhelming my social battery and my extroversion and really absolutely exhausting myself, what if I just opt out so that I don't get overwhelmed and I we don't see the meltdowns and the restraint collapse that we were seeing early on? Maybe that's just because he got used to it, or maybe that's actually because, again, it's context-dependent, and he found a way to make the context fit with the way he was socially adapting. So I would say that that in your case, there is a place to try a bunch of different places and scenes and types of things. Some kids, sports is like not the thing. So I just said soccer, but some kids it needs to be dance, some kids it needs to be theater. There's a lot of people actually who, when they get to put on the role of like somebody else or in improvisational spaces, they can feel social connection in a deeper way. A lot of socially anxious people are actually great actors and actresses because that's one of their coping strategies. It may be that she needs to find people who have more like-minded interests with her. Like, again, she'd rather read or maybe talk about books. And right now at her school, she's just surrounded by probably whoever is in her neighborhood, right? Like it there's some semblance of like-mindedness because you live in the same town, and probably I would guess there's there's you know only so much variability there. Although in my school there was a ton of variability with income where some kids of my school were below the poverty line, and some of them were like living on the lake and mansions, millions and millions of dollars. I was the weird one because I was in the middle somewhere. Um, you know, and that and so it's probably that there's some similarity, but not necessarily like chosen groups, like there's no shared interest necessarily. And so I would say look for other contexts and see if you see that coming out in the same way. Because right now, there's only one context that's kind of listed here. And because social growth is not linear and it's context dependent, I would say find other contexts and see how that goes. And if it is frustrating, and if it is not doesn't go well, and if you sign her up for soccer and she hates it and wants to quit, um, well, and I have an episode about that. What do you do when kids want to quit? It was the last episode that I did. Uh, but it may be that that was just not a good she might build some frustration tolerance, and that's good, but uh, it may be that that's not the the avenue of the venue, and you can pivot off to something else. I think that that kind of summarizes it, William. And I will say the the last thing is I'm really appreciative that you sent me this email because I think it's this is one that like I really resonate with too, because one of my ways of coping was to hang out with teachers when I was being excluded. And so uh in many ways it was because I had much older brothers and I I understood the jokes that the teachers told, and i it was more like home to be around somebody much older than me than to be around a bunch of people my age. And that felt comforting and like safety. And so I don't know if your daughter is an oldest, but right now she or an only child, but right now she's connecting with people who feel safe to her. And it I think there's also a place here to celebrate that that your daughter feels safe with her teacher to connect with her. And it doesn't have to be like some big problem that we can work towards more peer interaction without demonizing the social interaction that she's getting. Okay, let me go to the last question.

SPEAKER_00: 37:51

Person for the membership, it's Ashley.

Jon @WholeParent: 37:58

Ashley says, This might sound bad, but I swear I'm not trying to be mean. My kid just does not get the social stuff at all. He interrupts, he talks too loud, he doesn't notice when other kids are annoyed, and eventually they just get mad at him and leave. He's six. We've tried telling him things like watch their faces or you need to wait your turn, but that just makes him mad or he shuts down. Part of me is like, is this ADHD or autism or is he just immature? I don't want to label him, but I also don't want to ignore something that is actually a problem. Ashley, this is a really great question because not all social struggles are just my kid is not, my kid's an introvert, or my kid wants to hang out with adults and not kids. Some social interactions are your kid is may actively making bids, but for his lagging skill, his lagging skill is understanding the social context as understanding the facial expressions. And I think it's normal to feel like, is this Audi HD? Is this autism? Is this like that? That is that is what I would feel. That is how I would respond. And I also feel the desire to not label and make something prescriptive where it could what what really is helpful with labels is that they're descriptive. They can tell us what a struggle, what kinds of struggles a child is having when they're struggling, rather than uh tell us why they're going to struggle in the future. And there's so much on this and self-fulfilling prophecies, and I should do an entire episode just on that. So what how I would shift the thinking on this one was I would shift from instruction in the moment of watch their faces, or you know, you need to wait your turn, which intervenes. And I think what you're trying to do here is essentially be his social eyes and ears. You're trying to have almost like a like a para-relationship with him, where you're trying to like be an aide who who can come in and fill in the gaps. I think instead of doing that, one of the more helpful things might be to do some after-the-fact narration. So the script that I would actually use, like in the moment, is just to observe. I wouldn't say anything. And if it's because emotions are going to be high, right? If you involve yourself, not only are you disrupting any opportunity that he has to grow and learn, you're probably also gonna be meeting him in a place where he's emotional and not in a good like headspace to learn and develop. Instead, I'm when we're driving home for the park or something like that, and by the way, I do this all the time. And I think that this is also very normal. Like, this is very normal that kids don't know the social rules because the social rules are like they need to be learned. Everything that you just described, he talks too loud. He doesn't notice when other kids are annoyed. He interrupts. Like in in some cultures, talking too loud, even in some families, talking too loud is like just how you get your voice heard. I can I can think of a family in my life where like at the dinner table, if you don't talk louder than the person who's talking, you're never going to be heard. There's no breaks. You just gotta over talk somebody. Uh, interrupting is again, this is what we mean by like it's a social, that's a social rule. It needs to be learned. The not noticing when other kids are annoyed, what what are the social cues that they're giving? So I think a lot of this stuff is like we we just immediately go, oh, well, he should just know. But again, it can be a lagging skill where it's like he just doesn't know that that's what's going on. So I would narrate instead, and again, this is so normal, and I do this with my kids, and I don't sit here going, my kids are the exact same as your kid, certainly not, but my kids definitely do stuff that bothers other kids all the time. I would say, Hey, I noticed that your body got really excited when you were talking, but their body wanted to take a break. This stuff is tricky. We'll figure it out together. And you might ask in that moment, did you notice that? And you might even narrate, did you notice that their eyebrows went down like this? Do you see my face? Or did you notice that they turned away from you? And now you're like actually giving lived advice, but you're not doing it in the moment where it's like you're trying to fix the problem. You're you're replaying the problem after the fact. And this is where all of the best learning and development happens. Again, not to continue to plug my book in one episode, but one of the the last chapter of the book, chapter 13, is uh is the part five of the five-step whole apparent method. And one of the things that we talk about is empowering for the future, not trying to correct in the moment. And empowering for the future often looks like what the exact example that I use in the book, one of the empower empowerment techniques is called mistake review. It's like watching film after the fact, going, okay, so like I saw that interaction. Here's how I saw that interaction. It's reflective narration, right? And that builds a pattern of recognition without the shame or the like disruption that comes when you try and intervene in the moment. And so maybe you're already doing this, but I would really focus on trying to do that and saying, okay, if your kid is just like struggling to understand the social rules and they really want to engage, you can do that after the fact by saying, okay, we're going to narrate this, we're going to empower for the future. Because I think what a lot of parents forget is that, like, one, kids have short memories. They could go back to the park tomorrow, see that same kid, and they're not going to immediately ignore them because like they were kind of annoying yesterday. They'll they'll start fresh. Kids have short memories and they just they don't actually have short memories, but they uh tend to not hold grudges in the same way or or hold on to um damning assessments of of other people's character, right? Like my kids wake up every morning and assume that I'm gonna be the best version of myself, even if I was kind of a jerk yesterday. And so I think that that the there's likely that that will happen in at the park. But the other thing is that you're not gonna see the same kids all the time. And I think it's good at six to be doing this because you you want to start to identify these things at six and help him identify these things so that he's not necessarily at 12, 13 still doing these things without knowing. It may be that he has some traits that just kind of turn other people off. Again, preaching to the choir, that's me. Like I have traits that turn people off, and people are just like, that guy's a lot. Um, but you know what? That has also served me in really advanced and and helpful ways. And that's where I want to end this episode. I think we're we're basically out of time. And I want to end this episode basically by saying all of the things that have been identified here, whether it's a kid who likes to be alone, a kid who likes to hang out with teachers rather, and and is, you know, their own interests, a kid who is just a lot, who is a big personality. All of these things none of these things are like inherent flaws. All of these things are traits that when leveraged correctly help kids to grow into and live healthy, adaptive lives. Good, healthy, mature lives. A kid who is a lot can leverage that ability. Other people cannot generate the type of excitement and enthusiasm. When I speak on stage, people are like, it's infectious. We want to get you back, we want you to come back and speak again. Why? Because I'm a lot. That's a lot in a social interaction one-on-one, but that has become a skill that I can leverage. The other people don't have access. They have to, they have to like drink a bunch of caffeine and hype themselves up, and and then they gotta like really, you know, they crash after they do it. I'm like, no, I that I'm a big that's how I do things. I'm just excited to be here. And that can be kind of off-putting at six years old on the park. But that's an invaluable skill later if we don't shame our kids out of thinking that that's the wrong way to be or they shouldn't be that way. Again, kids who are able to be alone and recharge their batteries and play independently, that's a skill. Because, man, do I wish sometimes my nine-year-old had the skill to just play alone? Instead, he's like melting down because the kids next door can't play. Like, that's a skill. That's an adaptive skill. Doesn't mean that it always is going to be the case. Being able to connect with people intergenerationally, connect with adults, even though you're a kid, be able to have conversations that are outside of just peer-to-peer silly relationships. That is a skill if we allow it to be. So I hope this episode encourages every parent listening who feels like their kid is socially behind, that actually their kid probably has some unique social traits that make them really well adapted for the world. And it's just going to take some time and development to get there. And I'm really glad that they have you as a parent who cares enough to listen to a podcast like this because you're going to be the perfect person to help them get there. Alright. I'll see you. Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. 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