How to Raise Friendly Kids (3): Friends are forever

If you want your kids to be friendly and succeed in life, you must help them develop social skills by providing them with many opportunities to experience interaction with friends. So what are those social skills kids need?

Last week, I described the first 8 out of 15 friendliness skills and today, I will introduce you to another 7: Avoiding criticism, Being positive, Keeping secrets, Never gossiping, Not being bossy, Listening and Being fun.

I believe that these skills are more important than academic and thinking skills, because social skills can clear the way to good academic performance, but not the other way around. Stress is the biggest inhibitor of thinking and creativity, so having good social skills and a good social group can make sure your child is happy and confident, which will expand their capacity for learning.

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How to Raise Friendly Kids (2): Me and you together

I am sure you will agree that kids need social skills and they cannot learn them by sitting in front of the computer. In order to learn how to be friendly, you simply have to spend your time with real friends and engage other people directly in various situations.

If you want your kids to have friends, you must teach them the right friendship skills and provide them with many opportunities to experience and develop those skills. So what are the social skills kids (and grownups) need?

There are 15 of them and today, I will introduce you to 8 of them: Sharing, Having Manners, Giving Compliments, Starting Conversations, Winning and losing with grace, Collaborating, Working in a team and Helping.

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In My Opinion

As a parent, you must have found yourself facing a stubborn child who will just not do what you ask of them. No matter what you want – clean your room, do your homework, stop nagging me to go home – kids sometimes seem to insist on doing the exact opposite.

If that is not enough, your partner may suddenly have strange notions of what should be done and how it should be done with money, around the house, in the yard or on vacation. You find yourself wondering if they have “lost the plot” and if you are the only person who can see things clearly.

These sorts of clashes can be very unpleasant and distressing. They also have the nasty habit of escalating to scary proportions very quickly. Whatever you do to make the other side “get it already”, they grow more persistent, until both sides start throwing hurtful comments, calling each other names and absolutely fuming.

Well, I am here to offer another way of looking at things, which is likely to help. But first, a couple of stories.

The Experiment

Last week, Ronit and I watched a movie called The Experiment. It is loosely based on Stanford University’s prison experiment, but instead of students, a group of adults who really need money are promised $1,000 a day for a “perfectly safe” 14-day experiment. They are taken to an isolated warehouse (the real experiment was in a campus basement), where they are divided into Guards and Prisoners. The guards are given simple rules and told to respond “commensurately”, which means “in proportion to the offense”, and never to use violence. In the “guard” room, there is a red light that will come on if the experiment has to be terminated.

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How to Raise Friendly Kids (1): What are Friends for?

When we play The Value Game in my parenting workshops, friendship is usually somewhere at the top of the list after happiness and love. As part of the game, I pretend to be a fairy and ask the parents to write the things they would like to bless their kids with. Most parents do not know they can, in fact, grant their kids those wishes and all they need is the special “fairy dust” of love and determination.

Every interaction with others requires social skills, so friendly kids have a better life than those who are not friendly. Usually, they are healthier and have higher self-esteem.

Although some kids are naturally friendlier than other, social skills can be learned from a very early age. As with any other skill, the younger the child, the less they need to unlearn and the more “naturally” friendly they will be, so there is no better time to start than today.

Some time ago, some of my son’s friends came over for a music jam and had lunch with us. One of the topics of conversation was “Facebook” and Gal and I asked them how long they spent on Facebook. Most of them (except one) said about 4 hours. I asked in shock, “A week?” and they said, “No, a day”…

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Stronger Together

I did not get my social skills from my agents, so I had to hold on to “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger” and survive many “near death” experiences before the idea sank in: If I want to survive, I must have good relationships with my parents, siblings, friends and teachers and I had better learn the rules FAST!

The bad news is that grownups without social skills were once kids without social skills. The good news is that kids without social skills do not have to be grownups without social skills. They can change. In fact, you can improve your social skills greatly at any age.

I personally discovered the rules the hard way. At the age of 16, after being a total failure and being kicked out of school, without friends and having constant fights with my siblings and my parents, I figured there was something I needed to understand. By the time I finally got it, I had already had countless failed encounters with people around me that I had to get over. It made me vow that my kids would get good social skills from me from the second they were born.

So even if you are not the most social person in the world, your kids can be!

In his book “How to win friends and influence people”, Dale Carnegie wrote what I consider the bible of building relationships. Carnegie wrote his book in 1937 and it is amazing how relevant it is now. I copied the rules and used my explanation and suggestions for each of them. I hope you will find inspiration in those timeless rules.

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The Importance of Family

This site is about parenting and most of our posts are about how to be great parents, but today, I want to tell you more about why to be great parents and why to keep good relationships with family and friends in general.

Following heavy rains, many places in Queensland were flooded in the past couple of weeks. Floodwater rose higher than roof height in some places, inundating businesses, farms and many homes. As you can see from the photo, main streets became rushing rivers, carrying cars, parts of homes and various other things with them, uprooting trees and soaking property beyond repair.

We live on a hill about 10km from the Brisbane River. We have had heavy rains for a few weeks now and our yard is very wet, but as we hardly follow the news, our first indication of trouble in our own city was when our friends and family members started emailing and calling us to ask if we were OK.

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Happy Holidays from Family Matters

Family Matters is taking some time off from researching, coaching and writing and heading off on a family vacation. After all, this is why we do what we do – to help ourselves have a better family time together.

It has been an awesome year for us. We were very proud and happy that our daughter Eden, our happy thought, joined us in writing this year. We have had many personal achievements at work, in our relationships and with our kids. The only wish we have for ourselves is that next year will be even better. Better is a good formula for a happy life.

We want to thank all of the 150,000 readers we have had this year and give special thanks to all those who have posted comments, shared their opinions and contributed to the community of parents and educators around this blog. Whatever your personal views, we love to read them and engage in a discussion on the important aspects of parenting with you.

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Teen Drinking Party

We encourage our kids to have two parties a year – one at the beginning of the year to allow them to get have a great start for the school year and meet new friends in their new classes and one on their birthday. Every year, our kids have a great year.

Last month, our son Tsoof had his birthday party. Tsoof is 15 years old, but most of his friends are 16 or 17 and some of them have already started driving. When they come in the door, Tsoof’s friends always say they have been waiting for the party since the last one, because they always have a great time dressing up, playing games, singing and dancing.

This year, when he gave his friends invitations to his party one girl asked him, “Will you have drinks at your party?”

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Quid Pro Quo (2)

Last week, I wrote about the notion of fairness and how it can be used to manipulate people to do what we want them to do. Today, I am going to cover “the dark side” of fairness, which makes us do things we later regret.

If you have ever broken up a fight between kids, you are familiar with the exclamation “He/she started it!”

Further investigation into who “really” started it usually yields a detailed list of escalation steps, starting with something surprisingly small, even trivial, like “He stepped on my dragon” (little rubber toy dragon, that is) or “She made a face at me”.

But it is not just kids, is it? Any “married couple” (any couple sharing a life together for long enough, really) can tell stories of fights that started from nothing and ended up in days of angry silence, only to be resolved later when the original issue was finally addressed on its own.

So why is it we can be pulled into bad cycles with little things and get into big trouble “all of a sudden”?

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Quid Pro Quo (1)

When the ancient Romans wanted to be fair, they gave “quid pro quo”, literally “something for something”, meaning “a favor for a favor” or “you scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours”. Not that they were fair to everyone they met – just ask the other ancient peoples of Europe and the Middle East – but this particular expression stuck.

More importantly, the people of our time still feel the need to be fair and return favors. So much so that it can be used to manipulate us in various ways. I want to talk about that today. It also makes us do things we later regret, but I will talk about that next time.

To find out how this notion of fairness works, Psychology researchers went to a museum. They joined a tour, picked a person and started talking to them, then went away and returned with two cans of soft drink, one of which they offered that person, who had been a total stranger only 5 minutes earlier.

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