Sharing Ways Of Building Self Esteem To Increase Social Competence

Having a healthy self esteem is one of the fundamental emotional needs for all children.

Below are some pathways for improving self esteem:-

1) Provide emotional support

- reduce negative statements and critical comments

- correct child mistake by focusing on the effort rather than the result

- empathize with your child's feeling, be an active listener, acknowledge and validate his feeling

- talk to teacher to understand how he is doing in class

- let your child know that it is OK to make mistake, may also show him purposely without his notice that you as parents/adults can mistake too, but it is OK, we can learn together to correct it.

2) Increase social competency

- watch favourite TV or video program with your child and talk about character feelings & behaviors

- work on a task together, whether prepare sandwich/tidy bed or keep toys and talk about sharing the task and co-operation

- take time to talk to child on his journal of the day at school from social perspective

- provide increase opportunities for child to interact with his peers and observe how he fits in as part of the group

3) Provide Opportunities for Developing Skills in Mastering Tasks

- increase the child's ability to master the tasks to improve his self-confidence

- know when to allow the child the opportunity to stumble and learn how to success on future attempts

- asking child to perform appropriate chores whether in class or at home can help to develop the child's sense of responsibility & independence in completing tasks

- break task into small steps to ensure & managed success for the child and then build on successes

4) Provide Opportunities for Developing Skills In Emotional Regulation

- help you child to step back and cool down when fustrated

- teach child to recognize and label the emotional like angry, fustration that can lead to lack of self-control

- create an atmosphere of structure, predictability and natural consequences of mis-behavior

- explore his strength in choice making for his consequence of misbehaving from a range of possibilities you provide with him.

5) Celebrate Success

- post your child's work in a prominent place(wall/white board/refrigerator etc)

- reward the child's positive accomplishment with a treat/reward/happiness certificate

- draw attention to at least 1 positive thing about the child and share his success stories

- catch the child being good, make a big deal of his accomplishment, make him feel proud and empower to do more to promote success.

It has been really a great week for me, having attended & observed 2 EIP sessions with my little STAR & ended with a caregiver forum sharing on The Different Perspectives On The Successful Employment of Adult in the Spectrum. There are great work in progress but must also recognize that it will not be as fast as we parents want them to be, need patience, faith & hope.

I am also please to see & appreciate the beautiful work put up by the EIP teachers, the immeasurable joy of seeing my little STAR working in group, staying together, working on tasks and activities as part of the group and follow teacher. Though at times, he may still saps into his fixation/repetitive interest or distracted by external envrionment, but the critical support from teachers have been great to manage success, I am just grateful to the heroines at work not only in EIP but also to other external professional from various therapy group as well.

Most importantly, at the end of any learning process, it must be what my little STAR enjoys and be motivated to learn that leads to his next outcome. We can only be hopeful that best opportunities we provided for or expended, things are in the right direction thus far.

I am looking forward to next week End of Term Mini Sport day in school and strong finish to Term 3.

Winner's Statement:-

When we take the road less travelled, sometimes it is a lonely journey. But remember that your sense of joy is heightened, simple things mean so much more and ray of sunshine can reach your heart. Then the road isn't so bad and we are in together for this joy of living for as long as it takes.

Knowledge Sharing - Self Esteem Base on 3 Key Self Competencies

In addition to the evolution of self esteem base on our growing understanding and increased perceptions of ourselves and the world around us as one ages forward, it also influenced by our percepton in 3 specific area:-

1) Cognitive/Achievement Performance

For children in special education, learning and achievement can be 2 areas that cause significant frustration and challenges. They may work hard to master tasks, but their efforts may not result in success for many reasons, such as poor memory, processing problems, deficit in critical thinking and problem solving and generalization of instruction/skill. Praising for their effort or breaking down complex task into smaller segments can assist the child to master more difficult tasks in stages that build on earlier success.

Very often child with ASD may be misunderstood by teachers, peers or other adults as not achieving adequately because fo their lack of effort, hence understanding the child and build on a good relationship with child is crucial for their willingness to learn, 5As of attention,acceptance,appreciation,affirmation & affection will come in handy. Success breed success, to manage success, we will have to prepare him to work harder and rely on practice makes perfect to achieve the confident he needs to feel good about himself. Celebrate success by drawing attention to at least 1 positive thing about the child every day, post his work on prominent place on the wall, white board or refrigerator.

2) Physical Competencies

For children receiving special education, developing a healthy self esteem may require some to stretch outside their academic areas which they can excel in and increase their self-confidence and the feeling of success. Exploring opportunities in the community for our child to become involve in activities that might contribute to the development of potential comptencies and skill in areas such as sport, music or art. Recognizing that this extra curricular activities are an important component in building self esteem for the children in special education and doing just enough(not restrict but also not too over schedule) can go a long way to the child's future outcome in development process.

3) Social Competence & Social Skill

Although very young children often prefer to engage in solitary or parallel play with peers, but as they mature and grow, there is an increased emphasis on the need to develop skill on interactive and co-operative play with peers. Social competencies hence become an important influential factor in development of self esteem. This involves 4 pre-requisite skills:-

a. The ability to recognize and respond to both non-verbal and verbal information

b. Sensitivity to the needs and feelings of others

c. The ability to engage in interpersonal problem solving

d. Awareness of peer group norms

Children with special needs are likely to experience social difficulties from their limited ability to attend to informaton that is presented verbally, visually or physically during the process of recognizing, interpreting & responding to social cue.

Following key areas are difficulties why child with special needs may find themselves considerable harder to interpret social information and manage success in social relationship namely:-

organizing information, attention span, memory & expresssion, sequencing information, isolating key elements of information & transferring information from one situation to another

Responding to social situation may cause trouble if response does not match the situation in term of timing and /or intensity. Children who are hyperactive or impulsive often over react to social stimulation, some may just by pass the interpretation component and go directly to response. Those who are passive or hypoactive(slow to respond) may take too long to response and miss appropriate opportunity for reaction. Children with limited expressive langauage may take long time to process information & participate in the response. Children who are overly passive may give off few social cues or provide little feedback to which others can respond.

Ultimately, the nature of our social self esteem whether positive or negative comes from feedback based on the interpretation of how others evaluate our social response.

Winners' Statement:-

Sharing Knowledge On Understanding Child's Self Esteem & Its Development

F0r kids with ASD, social awareness isn't a set of concrete, itemised skills. Mannerism can be taught but learning to be at ease among others is more of a state of confident being that grows with careful nurturing of several important character traits, one of which is for a healthy Self Esteem.

Self Concept is a complex beliefs about ourselves, formed from 3 major source of information that we obtain from others: words, feeling and behavior. " What I think about myself" is often base on others' comments about me; "What I feel about myself" often comes from others' emotional reactions; "How I behave" is often in response to others' responses to me.

Ideal Self is our set of beliefs about how we should be, which can comes about from actual or implied critical judgements by significant people in our lives or by a process called social comparison, in which we compare ourselves to other people and set our ideals accordingly.

Self Esteem is then the overlapping of the above 2 components, it is how much we value our characteristics, a form of judgement about whether our abilities and qualities meet or fall short of the standards we believ are ideal.

Children who have low self esteem can display a wide range of less adaptive behaviors. Emotionally, they might seek constant reassurance about your affection for them or could be highly reliant on parents, as seen in separation difficutlies, Socially, they might not be able to have any fun, might be withdrawn or not being able to enter a group without becoming either too self-conscious('shy') or too boisterous, building & maintaining friendship can be a hinderance for their lack of enough confidence to assert themselves . Their development can be compromised as they avoid trying something new, refuse to take risk or be adventurous, or give up easily.

We can either improve their skills for which they value, or make them realise that they actually possess many of their ideal qualities, or lower our standard for them. There are few routes which may help improve their self esteem:-

1) Promote competence to manage success in a meaningful wway, because success breed success. Our children needs coaches to :-

a) break tasks down to acheiveable steps.

b) give positive instructions, very often adults may accidentally set children up to fail by telling them what not to do(don't run) instead of what they could do(take small steps on the wet floor)

c) encourage children to be independent about performing age appropriate skills, to give them something to feel proud of, make a big deal out of their success.

d) teach self instruction skills to manage task not only being able to perform but also being able to organise oneself to do it proficiently.

e) provide authentic & specific feedback so that children know precisely what they have to do to be successful.

2) Acknowledge their effort less their autistic inherited traits which they have no control over and celebrate their successes, focus more on process to maximize their potential so that they can have more information feedback about their attainment.

3) Encourage realistic ideals/standard for the children, by accepting first yourself, and respecting children and their feelings even if they may not have any control of the way they feel.

4) Promote risk taking by encouraging and giving children permission to be adventurous, learning through practise make perfect.

5) Teach children to evaluate negative feedback, by being a good listener to them and accept what they feel, cheer them on or by way of encouraging them to rethink about the situation and asking them realistic question to put thing in right perspective in moving forward.

Self Esteem is also influence by 3 self comptencies in 3 keys domains namely: cognitive(academic/school/career), physical(athletic/artistic), and social(peer group). Will hope to share more in the next blog post.

Walking in this path less travelled is a life long learning process with multiple extra effort & sacrifices, I am grateful to be able to learn this extra as he becomes the joy of my living.

Navigating the long and winding road of Autism means we work with an incomplete map and poorly marked street sign, there is no 1 fix solution to any problem or learning challenges. We just have to strapped ourselves to our safe vehicle call FAITH and believe that our travels will carry us in the right direction. Taking time to enjoy the views of the journey can be one great joy of living as we move along.

The purpose of life is to be masterful with what you have, by focusing your time and energy on activities on the things that make you come alive. The more you focus on what you have and learn how to grow with time, the happier you become, this is the path to the uncommon life.

Winners Statement;-

‎"Without leaps of imagination, or dreaming, we lose the excitement of possibilities. Dreaming, after all, is a form of planning." ~ Gloria Steinem