Social skills
Beginner concepts

Communication & social skills

As your child ages, communication skills and social skills become more and more important.

Introduction

As your child ages, communication skills and social skills become more and more important. Being able to communicate about puberty will empower your child to understand the changes that are happening to them. It will also help you to understand how they are feeling about those changes.

This page is a summary of the things to consider when supporting your child’s communication and social skills as they go through puberty. The information on this page is not a complete list of all the things you need to build your child’s communication and social skills. However, it might give you some ideas for what you should focus on next.

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Strategies for you to try

Get comfortable talking about puberty

Supporting your child’s communication and social skills through puberty means that you need to become more comfortable talking about puberty. This includes using the correct terminology for private body parts and behaviours. E.g., penis, breasts, vagina, masturbation. This may be a bit awkward at first, but using the correct terminology will help to minimise the confusion that can happen when different people use different slang words. The more comfortable you are in talking about puberty to your child, the more comfortable they will be to talk to you about puberty. Model good communication and social skills in your conversations Modelling good communication and social skills in your conversations helps to show your child how they can be a good communicator. This can include modelling things like:

sharing
turn-taking in conversation
asking consent (e.g., consent to go to a friend’s home or touch their belongings)
respectful disagreement

You can model this in your conversations with your child and your conversations with other people as well. You could also record a video of yourself or your child modelling good communication and social skills. Your child can then re-watch the video as many times as they need to learn the skill. This is called video modelling and can be particularly useful for children with autism who may find face-to-face social situations confronting.

Create opportunities for your child to practice their communication and social skills

Support your child to practise using their communication and social skills at home by involving them in family conversations. You can focus on the key skills that your child needs to work on. Praise them for things they did well. Repeat key messages for things that still need improvement. As their skills develop, they can practice in more diverse and difficult situations. You can also talk to your child’s teachers about how they can reinforce the same messages in the classroom.

Use resources to communicate about puberty

There are many different types of resources for children to help support their learning about puberty. Some are also made specifically for children with intellectual disability and/or autism spectrum disorder. These resources will often use more concrete language and have lots of visual in them. Here are some resources you might want to have a look at.