Infants and toddlers might ‘serve’ vocalisations, words, touches, facial expressions such as smiles, eye-contact, gestures, expressions of emotion, and laughter or they might reach for something, squirm, move towards you or towards something of interest, or touch you! You can return more of the same!

Linda Clarke – Senior Tutor, Massey University

Supporting infants and toddlers to develop social skills

Social skills are the skills that we use to get along with others in ways that are healthy for ourselves, and for other people. They include the skills to communicate, to express emotions appropriately, to regulate emotions, to regulate our behaviours, to see perspectives of others, and they’re such important skills, because they help us form friendships and they help us form relationships. For infants and toddlers, these are skills that many of them, especially the more complex ones, are still developing. So, infants and toddlers have some social skills – they’re learning a lot of social skills. But one thing I want to note is that having social skills doesn’t mean that we are outgoing or exuberant or super-friendly – it doesn’t have to mean that.  Social skills are different than temperament. So, we can be outgoing and have great social skills, of course, but it’s also okay to be shy, or slow to warm up, or a little reserved, and that doesn’t mean we don’t have social skills. Temperament is different.  

What opportunities are there for infants and toddlers to learn social skills in early childhood environments?

An infant would communicate by waving arms, waving legs, by looking, by tracking, vocalising, crying, reaching out. So those are already pretty amazing communication skills that an infant has. Now, those communication skills and social skills will grow when somebody responds to the infant. So, when a teacher or an older child responds in ways that are serve and return – back and forth – the infant’s social skills will grow, and they’ll know that they have agency, that they can begin a communication – an interaction – that they can form relationships with the others, that they’re listened to, that they are important, that someone’s going to respond to them, and care for them if they’re upset, if they need something, or if they simply want to talk.  Just in some seemingly quite simple things, there are incredible opportunities for social skills, but if that opportunity isn’t taken, just the opposite learning could happen for an infant, if there is consistently no response.

How important are the relationships that teachers form with infants and toddlers?

I guess relationships is a little bit of a catch-cry. Of course, they’re important in the foundation of our teaching. We’re responsible for forming professional relationships with all the infants and toddlers in our care, and for ensuring that happens within the group of infants and toddlers in our care. So, there’s a bit of team work there, really. In forming professional relationships, interactions and intentionality are really important. We need those toddlers and those infants to know that they have someone – that they have a secure base, and someone who cares about them. There’s so much for infant and toddler teachers to do. This really actually takes skilful and specialised teaching, because we also need to be attuned and be able to listen to infants and toddlers. We’ve got to have a good knowledge base of their developments so that we know what their needs are, and how we can support their learning and wellbeing.  

We need to be able to be calm and unrushed. Sometimes our early childhood education environments are kind of busy, so bringing a calm, unrushed presence to that is so important to support learning. In the context of interactions and relationships and responsiveness in early childhood centres, social skills can happen during play, during routines, during activities. When infants and toddlers are participating and when they’re just watching. Every moment is an opportunity to learn and potentially an opportunity to teach.

What are specific strategies that teachers can use to support children’s social skills?

There are specific teaching practices that teachers can use to foster social skills, and teaching practices are the actions or the words that we use to support children’s learning. There is some great information about social emotional learning in He Mapuna te Tamaiti, and there are some great examples of teaching practices within that resource as well.  

Going back to emotional knowledge and skills, and how we foster that in the infants and toddlers – because emotional knowledge is such an important part of social learning, you really can’t separate the two – reading books about emotions is a really useful teaching practice, because that brings in an emotion-rich vocabulary. Infants and toddlers hear more emotion words, and they hear a range of emotion words. They begin to understand the names for their feelings. We can have conversations about emotions, talking about a character in a book, for example: well, he looks frightened, I wonder what scared him. Reminiscing is great, as well: remember when we were really scared in the thunderstorm? We can be expressive, and make emotion faces, and just engage in everyday conversations about emotions. 

Also, when toddlers and infants are experiencing feelings, it’s really important that we help them to work through that and support them to co-regulate. We do that by naming it to tame it. So, when we name an emotion that an infant or toddler might be feeling, they get to learn the word for their feelings, and they know that it’s okay to feel that way when we affirm the emotion. I’ll give another example. Say a toddler is struggling to put her gumboots on, and it looks like she’s frustrated, a teacher can say, ‘whoa it looks like you’re really frustrated – I feel frustrated too when I can’t get my gumboots on’.  Sometimes that’s all that it takes to help a child to start to feel better.  

As well as supporting all that emotional literacy, we can support social skills in so many ways. Again, reading books about social skills and friendships, using puppets – there are all sorts of great resources out there that we can use to help to engage infants and toddlers in conversations and learning about social skills. During everyday activities and play, we can use prompts, such as if I’m sitting with a toddler at a table, and we see a friend walking past, I might say, ‘oh look – there’s Mia. Say: “hi Mia, come and play”’. So, just those little scaffolds to help children interact are very useful. 

Routines are really important, because when we have calm predictable routines, then infants and toddlers know what to expect, and their sense of belonging, and their sense of security grows, and we’re really setting them up for success. So, that’s going to support their social learning, as well, and routines give opportunities to prompt again, especially in terms of asking toddlers to help each other. We could ask an older toddler to help a younger toddler to wash their hands, or a group of toddlers to help with set-up, perhaps setting out the tablecloth. I could go on and on. There are so many teaching practices that we can engage in, but what I would say is if you’re interested in supporting infants and toddlers’ social skills, is to have a look in He Mapuna te Tamaiti and get some great ideas from there.

How can teachers model social skills?

Yeah, so as well as the types of prompting I talked about in the teaching practices, we can model in intentional ways like that as well. For example: ‘oh, I’m going to share some of my playdough with Linda, because she doesn’t have any’. So, we can talk about our own valued social interactions. The other very important thing is to understand that, as teachers, we are always role-models. So we model social skills in the relationships we have with our colleagues, with whānau, with all the children in the care, and with all the people we interact with. Infants and toddlers are great observers, so they see this.  

We can be good role-models or bad role-models obviously, but I think the relationships we form are important in another way, too, because when we do have respectful relationships with others within our early childhood centres, you can kind of feel that in the room. It’s tangible, really – that feeling of warmth and respect and care for others in an early childhood environment. Conversely, when there is ill will, we can feel that, as well. Infants and toddlers of course, can feel that, and that’s certainly not going to set them up for success and not prove to be a way to role-model the ways we want them to interact with others, in ways that are healthy for themselves and others.

How can teachers respond to peer conflicts?

I want to acknowledge a group of teachers, or several groups of teachers actually, who I talked to through my master’s degree. I talked with them about toddlers’ peer conflicts, and they shared their strategies with me, and their thoughts about toddlers’ peer conflicts. I learned so much from them. So, what I’m going to talk about now really comes from those teachers, so ngā mihi kia a ratou. 

Conflicts are really interesting, because they’re emotionally-charged – not just for the toddlers but for the teacher as well. It’s important for teachers to consider how do we frame conflicts? For many of us, and I know I used to feel this way, I’d think, well conflicts are bad – I don’t want them to happen, I don’t want them to be happening in this early childhood centre, I want everyone to be peaceful, and playing together harmoniously, especially when parents walk in. But that’s not the reality. The reality is that conflicts are learning opportunities. They don’t happen because infants or toddlers are being naughty. They happen because they’re still learning their social skills, and they don’t yet have those really important social skills that they need to compromise, to negotiate, to see the perspectives of others, to have that cognitive flexibility where they can quicky change their mind. That hasn’t developed yet, so toddlers need our support to learn during peer conflicts. That doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going to solve a conflict, but it means that we’re going to support them to learn when conflicts happen.  So, unfortunately there isn’t a formula or a recipe for what teachers should do, because every conflict is going to be different, and it’s going to depend on the child, it’s going to depend on the situation, it’s going to depend on our relationship with those toddlers involved.  

I think one of the first things that we should do is, of course, make sure that any children involved in a conflict are physically safe. If there’s likely to be biting or some serious pushing, of course, we’ve got to go in and make sure – intervene to make sure that those toddlers are safe. From there: a big breath, because conflicts are emotionally charged, and then going in and bringing a calm presence into the arena of conflict. Sometimes when we move into a space where toddlers are in conflict, and we’re calm and we’re relaxed, and we’re there to help, that might be all it takes to help those toddlers to calm down and to sort it out themselves, but perhaps they do need more. So, then we might name it to tame it.  We might name the emotions we think the toddlers are feeling. Perhaps they’re angry, perhaps they’re frustrated, perhaps they’re sad. We might also name the problem: ‘whoa – two toddlers, only one truck’. That might be enough.  

All through these strategies, we need to stop and listen, as well, and give those toddlers time to process, to perhaps respond, to perhaps take some action. So, we do all of this quite slowly. From there, they might need more scaffolding – more support. It’s just a matter of kind of working it out as we go. Even though I don’t like to be a ‘don’t do this’ sort of person, I’m going to give a few dont’s, because it’s so important as teachers that we don’t go into the arena of conflict trying to seek a sense of justice. If we go into the conflict seeking a sense of justice, we’re not coming from a framing that this is learning.  We’re coming from a framing that someone is being naughty, or someone is to blame. So, there’s no point in trying to figure out who started it. It really doesn’t matter, because this is about the learning.  

Our role isn’t to seek justice, or to find out those little details.  Our role is to support toddlers’ learning. Often, we might think conflicts are about possession of toys. That’s quite often what they look like. So, we might rush and get another toy, or say, ‘go and get another truck’. But, in fact, conflicts between toddlers, while they might look like the fight is over possession, are often caused because toddlers are trying to interact with each other, and they don’t know how. So, they’ll go up and they’ll grab a toy. Maybe what they’re really trying to say is, ‘I want to play with you and the truck’. So, that’s really something to keep in mind: while conflicts often look like they’re about possession of toys, in fact they might not be.  

I want to finish with this really important point that came from the teachers I worked with. They said one of the most important things they do when they’re working with children in conflict, and when they’re working with children full-stop, is to remember to always uphold the child’s mana. I think if we go into our teaching with that thought, that we are always going to uphold the mana of others, then we’re going to be well set to support social skills.