No social skills

[kennedy9154]

I have a 7 year old son who has very underdeveloped social skills.
He is a very social child, who will walk up to anyone and think they are automatically his friend. When I take him to a playground, he will approach a child or group of children and just join the group like he was invited, and begin playing whatever game/activity they happen to be playing.
Almost without fail, this leads the other children to stare at each other, whisper, shake their heads, and after a few minutes, to try to get away from him, first by running to a different part of the playground, usually several times, then eventually by calling him names, and telling him to just leave them alone, which he seems to ignore for the most part, until I see what is happening and tell him to go play somewhere else.
I have tried to talk to him, and tell him how he needs to approach other children, but he quickly forgets, and our next trip to the playground, pool, or other social setting ends the same way.
It breaks my heart to see him trying so hard to make friends and meeting failure every time he tries.
He has no siblings even close to his age (1 is 21, 1 is 24 and 1 is 25), and being older parents, there are few children in the family his age either.
In school, he has no friends to speak of, and at school functions, I have witnessed the same behavior from his fellow students. I really could use some advice/suggestions that might help him develop some social skills that would help him with this problem.

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Aw. That's so heartbreaking. It sounds like he's very resiliant though.

I've known kids like this. Usually the kids at school already know him, so he's not freaking them out. But, kids he's never met, I'm sure think he's some kind of threat.

I don't have any advice, other than to help him find his niche in the world. Everybody has one. Maybe it's with the Martial arts kids, or the musical kids, or the board game kids. You just need to seek out group activities where he can meet his "people". With his outgoing positive personality, he should be able to make friends easily. My daughter was not outgoing, but found her place in the dance world, then in music.

[Kristine233]

I'd suggest activities where social skills are modeled for him on a consistent basis with a lot of direct involvement and purpose. Some children need a bit more direction when it comes to social skills and aren't naturals or don't pick it up as easily.

Our school has a social skills group that is specifically designed to work on these types of skills. Not sure if yours does, but it may be something to investigate.

My child was/is much like yours. No matter what I told him he didn't grasp social concepts and it was a trial and error over and over with kids for him to realize his method just wasn't working. Yet, he didn't know how to fix it and in the heat of the moment couldn't recall what we had told him to try. Kids go on impulse, act first and think later. With many kids the impulse isn't always socially acceptable. So the goal is to do an activity enough that the socially acceptable interaction IS impulse. So how do you do that when they haven't mastered it the first time?

We met with other parents who had similar experiences (in our case our son has Autism so it was other parents with Autistic kids) and found activities they were involved in. One of the parents was a very patient boy scout den leader and we decided to give that a try. All activities were lead by an adult and parents were present to guide the children through everything. As the kids gained comfort in the activities the parents could back off. Over time, the kids were comfortable together and had learned the "social rules" of that setting/group. Of course, each setting and group is going to have different social rules and some kids need help identifying those, so guided exposure to many different settings can be helpful. We tried baseball next and am happy to report we are in our 3rd year of both. Also, when a group of kids all have a focus on a specific activity they aren't focused on what another child may or may not be doing socially. All kids involved would be learning about social cues just from being around other kids and the adults though.

With a lot of adult modeling and experience with peers doing specific activities our son has learned much more about social rules and has started to apply them to other situations. He definitely needed somewhere to start and just tossing him out to kids for free play would have been disastrous! He still has awkward social moments but they get to be fewer and fewer all the time.