Making new friends or joining new social groups is not easy at the best of times. Not to mention if you don’t find it as easy or natural to communicate socially! Here at Hanrahan Health, we are constantly supporting children and young people from pre-school right through to their thirties with understanding social interaction and how to communicate socially. We all want and need friends and social interaction outside our family and it is essential to be able to communicate in society for our most basic of necessities.

Some of the fantastic resources we use at Hanrahan Health to help young people develop their social skills are listed here:

Talkabout

‍This is an amazing program involving many different resources including self-assessment questionnaires, card games, board games, reading scenarios and discussing solutions to social dilemmas. This resource has programs directed at primary school, secondary school and even one focusing on relationships (building self-esteem and relationship skills).

PEERS For Young Adults

This is a fabulous series of videos depicting positive and negative social interactions creating opportunities to discuss a successful way to interact socially or how to manage a negative social experience. Some themes included are:

  • Conversational Skills
  • Starting Individual Conversations
  • Entering Group Conversations
  • Appropriate use of Humour
  • Handling Teasing
  • Good Sportsmanship
  • Handling Arguments

Pragmatics in Pictures

This resource is designed to help us read, recognise and define emotions. As well as creating opportunities to discuss appropriate ways to react to and interact with people displaying a range of emotions. For Example: Happy, sad, scared, angry, bored.

All of these resources focus on learning about facial expressions and body language and how to read these in other people. Being aware of our own facial expression and body language is also very important when we want to make friends.

These are just a few of our favourite resources and we use them every day to help support our young people to give them the knowledge and confidence to grow into healthy young adults with healthy happy social lives.