Peer Interaction Skills

Many children don't have anyone to play with because they tend to drive other children away. They need a lot of supervised practice in playing nicely with other children. This can be done using the following steps.

1. You must have a discipline (time-out) and positive contact (time-in) routine well established first. Trying to teach these skills without a routine way of discipline or praise is almost impossible.
2. Call another child's parents and invite their child over to your house to play with your child. Tell the parents that you will be supervising the play activity.
3. The children will be playing inside. Decide ahead of time how long the play will last, and convey this to the other child's parents. Don't schedule or plan any other competing activities for yourself. Most of your time will be taken up with the children's playing.
4. Watch the play very closely. Use as much brief, gentle contact (time-in) as you can with your son or daughter whenever he or she is playing nicely.
5. Be prepared to use time-out as quickly as possible for any bad behavior, such as obnoxious talk, refusing to share, or withdrawing from the activity.
6. During your child's time-outs, be prepared to continue the play with the other child so that she isn't sitting doing nothing while your child is in time-out.
7. Don't give your child any benefit of the doubt. If in doubt, put him in time-out.
8. If your child is thoroughly used to time-in and time-out, the first supervised play session should go much better than past play sessions. Continue having such play sessions several times each week.
9. The more experience your child gets playing nicely with other children, the easier this will get for you to handle. After your child is consistently doing well with one child at a time, you can begin inviting more than one child over. However, don't press your luck. Invite one child at a time until your child is really good at playing cooperatively.
10. Expect to have to continue watching your child very closely during play for a long time to come.

For more information, see

Time-In

Time-Out Technique