5.6 Social skills
Thinking functionally – skills deficit coping
Students with challenging behaviour may experience deficits in their academic and social emotional capacities. In times of stress associated with academic and social challenges, such deficits can leave them feeling vulnerable. Their efforts to cope may be to get feelings of mastery, agency and competence through engagement in disruptive and anti-social behaviour e.g., being the class clown, being the toughest child in the class. These students may also be looking to get away from feelings of shame and embarrassment linked to their delayed capacities compared to their same aged peers.
Such behaviours may include lying, attempting to cheat on tests, being secretive or teasing and bullying others on perceived areas of incompetence to pre-empt others picking on them first. Building on these student’s social emotional capacities would benefit them academically and socially while reducing the need for these students to engage in these maladaptive coping behaviours.
Social skills
Remember from chapter two the competing pathway and replacement behaviour? When we think about disruptive behaviour from a functional perspective we think about what replacement behaviour we can teach the child that is acceptable to the context and the people in it. This replacement behaviour is what we want the child to do to get what they need instead of the current serious, disruptive behaviour they are using to get what they need. Therefore, the replacement behaviour must serve the same function as the serious, disruptive behaviour (that is, it must be an acceptable way for the child to either get or escape) otherwise there is no point in the child using it. If a replacement behaviour does not serve the same function as the disruptive behaviour then the child will not use it. Instead, they will continue to use the serious, disruptive behaviour that did fill the function of enabling them to get or escape because it is working for them.
The goal is to teach a replacement behaviour that works better for the child than the disruptive behaviour and if the replacement behaviour does work better than the disruptive behaviour, the child will use it and keep using it because it works for them. Replacement behaviours need to be more efficient and effective than the disruptive behaviour and this includes taking less effort to demonstrate. Many replacement behaviours are associated with social skills and teaching the child how a particular behaviour looks and sounds in context. Often we assume that a child knows what an expected behaviour looks and sounds like without stopping to think what if? What if, that behaviour does not exist in the child’s world beyond school? What if, that behaviour has never been demonstrated to the child? What if there has never been reason for that behaviour to be used?
Because many disruptive behaviours can be triggered by a lack of social skills, social skills are a crucial ingredient in any