Helping Children Connect |
What Are Adverse Childhood Experiences?
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Social isolation of children born early in the pandemic caused social skill deficits.
Present day 5 and 6 year old children may have hidden difficulties with nonverbal language.
With accurate assessment of difficulties, remediation can take place the summer before school starts again.
Remember the pandemic? Seems like it happened a long time ago, doesn’t it, but it’s been only four years. We, humans, are geared to “forget” bad things so we can more easily move on with life. And the pandemic was a bad thing, a very bad thing. Not only did many people die, but for the greater part of two years, it isolated us and our children from being with others. Though we coped as best we could, solitariness damaged our children in ways that continue to affect them adversely now.
More than academics were affected
Children’s school performance was negatively affected. Efforts to recover what was lost academically have been met with some successes and are continuing. But much more than academic learning was lost. A chance to acquire the skills to interact and be with others was also lost.
Social skills are learned differently from academic abilities
Children are taught directly and formally what they need to know for school as they develop, but how do they learn the social skills that are needed to connect with others? We don’t teach social skills the same way as we do verbal language and academics. Children are left to learn them informally and indirectly from the interactions they have, first with adults and later with........