Educating social abilities at pre-school age can be achieved through various means, but they will all lead eventually to games and playing activities. Playing constitutes a fundamental activity at this age, alongside learning, working and creating. Games are setting a favourable, fun, relaxed frame to learning and developing social skills at this age, playing the central role in children’s personality development.

What are social abilities? Social abilities cover a variety of aspects, meaning a lot more than just being talkative. Abilities such as responding to other’s emotions, understanding how others think, collaborating and negotiating with others are just a few of the many social abilities a person develops. In order to build social relations with his peers, a child needs to learn at pre-scool age certain social abilities such as adapting to the environment and the social group, sharing, following rules, using adequate language, managing facial expressions, maintain visual contact, listening.

How do the children learn social abilities? Parents play a fundamental role in developing social abilities in children, but children learn from other sources too, such as other family members, playing partners, school peers, teachers. There is no unique strategy to teach social abilities, due to the variety imposed by age specificity or individual and personality variances.

How can we help children develop social abilities? A very important step is to encourage children to openly speak about themselves. “I am…”, “I like to…”, “I can….”, “I learned how to….”, “I am not very good at….” are good indicators of the image children form about themselves as well as about the things they can or cannot do. The ease with which children express their opinion about themselves and their abilities should be used as a guide to social development strategies. The ease of verbal communication, the time required for a child to express his thoughts, the willingness or reluctance to engage in this kind of communication are all cues to the approach that needs to be followed.

 Another aspect which will prove its importance in time is the manner in which the child learns to formulate and transmit thoughts. It is well known that a child learns the behaviours, words/ syntagms, working habbits of the adults who spend time with them. Learning communication stereotypes is an important element of the above. As an example, it is important to expose the child to a type of feedback where the adult starts from the positive elements and finishes with the negatives, in a manner which shows empathy and understanding, maintaining however the idea that there are still aspects which need to be addressed.

The emotional component is very important to children’s social development. Children at pre-school age need to be encouraged to talk about their own feelings and emotions, about the things which make them feel good or bad. Parents should respond in the same way in order to teach the child the importance of allowing others to express themselves too. Personal space is another important factor in the building of children’s social relations. Every person needs time on their own and a space in which to feel comfortable. Disregarding these personal needs may create negative responses and rejection.