Why Will No One Play with Me?

INTRODUCTION

I will never forget the first time a child asked me “the question.” I was living the dream in my blossoming career as an academic and social skills coach for children. I had a full schedule and a wait list, and I was working with clients at a world-renowned ADHD center alongside some of the most respected leaders in the field. I gave parenting talks and professional workshops on how to help children pay attention and develop more effective study skills and self-regulation. It was thrilling to know that through this work, I was making a dramatic difference in the lives of hundreds of children and their families. Kids who had been overwhelmed by their struggle with schoolwork and behavior issues were making remarkable progress.

Then one day, an eight-year-old boy’s simple question revealed a secret suffering that haunted these children no matter how much their grades improved.

Jonah was a sweet but angry boy who struggled in school and flew into rages over homework. As we began to talk about his complicated school situation, I asked him, “If you could change anything, what would it be?” I thought he’d say something about his teacher or the ongoing battle over reading logs that featured nightly in his home. Instead, after a long, anxious pause, he replied: “Why will no one play with me?”

Why will no one play with me?

The hopelessness of that one question shook me to my core.

The things that were foremost concerns for Jonah’s parents—his schooling, his homework, the reasons he was first brought to my office—were the furthest things from his own mind. Worse, they obscured the deeper problem he was wrestling with every day. Jonah wanted to know why he was left out. Why other kids ignored him or were mean to him. He wanted to fight less with his classmates. He was a desperately lonely child. He wanted to know how he could make friends, and if I could teach him.

Jonah was not a smiley kid, but when I told him there was a possibility that if he learned how to change his approach he could make more friends, he beamed. That smile! In that moment, I saw my first glimpse of what I would soon learn is a crippling, unmet need for millions of children—whether or not they have a diagnosis. And I discovered a way to help them. I had found my calling. I set out to make sure that no child would ever be left to struggle alone with that question. And no parent would have to struggle alone to figure out how to help. Thus, the Play Better Plan was born, and now this book.

I wish I could say Jonah is the only child who has asked me this heartbreaking question, but over the years, many, many more have asked the same, in one form or another. Some kids have asked me why they are invisible to others. Other kids wonder why people think they are weird or annoying or bossy. Some don’t understand why they are the only kid in class not invited to a birthday party. Others have told me stories about how no one on their basketball team passes them the ball or how they are regularly ignored at recess. Others simply state that they don’t have any friends. No one to play with. No one to share a laugh with, or a secret. And the parents of these children have echoed the same frustration, pain, sadness, and confusion, sometimes despair.

If you are reading this book, you may have heard something similar from your child or seen it yourself. Right now, you may even be acting as your child’s best buddy and confidant because he doesn’t have anyone else to hang out with. But as much as you love your child, you know that he is not meant to spend every Saturday night for the rest of his childhood with you. Of course, you see your child’s flaws and foibles, but you also know his or her best self, the lovable one you wish everybody knew. But that’s not the child the other kids see.

Maybe your kindergartener is loud and can’t sit still in school, and other kids in his class are put off by his volume and constant barging around. Maybe your fourth-grade child can’t look other kids in the eye. Or your eight-year-old has a meltdown every time you ask her to leave a playdate, and the tantrums discourage other parents from inviting her over again. Or your ten-year-old says alienating things to other kids and they don’t want to include her.

Watching your child struggle with loneliness is painful. You’ve probably tried talking to him about his behavior, begged him to try harder or behave better in public. You may have tried bringing him to a new park or kids club, hoping he would find someone new to bond with, only to see the usual disappointing results. You may have tried talking to teachers and other parents about how your child has been excluded or perhaps bullied by others. But odds are, if you’re reading this book, none of these efforts have led to lasting change. Unfortunately, this problem is not going to solve itself. Your child wants to get along, fit in, and make friends, but she doesn’t know how.

Child development experts describe children who have a hard time understanding social cues and managing their behavior as having social skills deficits, or weaknesses. These lagging skills basically mean the child’s social radar and social response system aren’t as robust as they need to be. That makes it hard for them to read social cues accurately or understand the unspoken rules of social relationships or play, or to adapt their behavior in response to other kids or as a play situation changes. Without these skills, a child can no more be pressured or cajoled to become a better playmate than a child who’d never learned to swim could be pressured to swim across a lake. If they could, they would. But if they don’t know how, then adding pressure only triggers more stress and that triggers the brain’s fight-flight-or-freeze survival reflex—not helpful behaviors in a playgroup. Like all of us, your child needs to be able to cope with pressure and people to get along in the world.

This book, and the Play Better method itself, is based on the growing volume of scientific literature that addresses a full range of clinical and coaching interventions for children with executive function weaknesses. For that reason, the Play Better Plan can address a spectrum of issues and diagnoses that some children may have, including attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), attention deficit disorder (ADD), nonverbal learning disabilities, dyslexia, learning disabilities, and autism. But to be clear, the Play Better Plan is designed for and works for any child who struggles socially. Whether a child is shy, has moved to a new community or changed school, or is anxious or discouraged by the way things have been, Play Better coaching and activities will help them learn new ways to connect with other kids and make friends.

I WAS “THAT CHILD”—LONELY, BULLIED, AND LEFT OUT

I know the problem only too well from my own childhood experience. When I was in the fifth grade, I went to a private school. My class was small and happened to be filled with mostly athletic boys. Aside from myself, there were only two other girls in the class. These girls were mean—very mean—and unfortunately, I was often the target of their cruelty. They would constantly bait and humiliate me. Lunchroom dramas were a regular occurrence. “Caroline, come sit with us,” they’d say sweetly. So I would join them, tickled pink. But as soon as I opened my lunch box and spread out all my food, they would get up and leave. During reading time, they’d ask me to read and then mimic my stumbling. One day, they even lured me into the school’s basement bathroom and locked me in. Because the wooden doors in the old 1940s brick schoolhouse were heavy and nearly soundproof, no one could hear my screams and tearful pleas for help. I was locked in the bathroom for over thirty minutes before the teacher realized I was missing.

My social radar was extremely sensitive and constantly on high alert, so much so that I was socially anxious. I was more attuned to grown-ups—they called me “an old soul” with some affection—but I just didn’t know how to talk with other kids. I didn’t understand these girls’ motives and I would fall for their traps every time. Over the course of that year, my anxiety became debilitating. I grew fearful of going to the bathroom, and I’d try to hold it until I got home. I stopped reading and speaking aloud in class whenever possible. I became self-conscious about body image, as most girls do at that age, but I avoided sports or other active social activities, which made me gain weight and grow only more self-conscious and miserable. My grades and my self-esteem plummeted, and I became lonely and very unhappy in my isolation.

My mother was attentive but at a complete loss as to how to help me. Talking with the teachers and administrators did not improve the situation. Much later in life, I was diagnosed with ADHD and dyslexia, but in the fifth grade, there was no name for what was holding me back. At that time, my parents and teachers were completely unaware of learning disabilities, ADD/ADHD, or social skills weaknesses.

As a child, my social skills difficulties and learning disabilities made my daily school life especially challenging. I remember thinking, “If I can’t figure this out, I must be stupid.” If it weren’t for my mother’s constant encouragement, I might have given up completely. Eventually, my family moved, and at my new school, a teacher saw my struggles and was able to teach me ways to cope with my disabilities and tune in to my peer group. Among other things, she taught me to pay attention to what the other kids talked about and to think about what I might have in common with them, how to calm down and sometimes not talk, and be more confident. Through her, I learned that the world was not going to come to me, and she showed me how to engage with that world of kids. I slowly made friends and regained confidence. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned was that I wasn’t helpless to help myself—I just needed to learn how, and I needed someone to teach me.

This book teaches you how to offer those same lessons to the child in your life.

THE IMPORTANCE OF PLAY AND THE PLAY PARADOX

Social skills weaknesses are caused by a wide variety of factors, but the most common one—and the subject of this book—occurs when the part of the brain that manages the complex connections for social behavior, the brain’s network of executive functions, is unevenly developed. Executive function is the hub of skills such as attention, memory, organization, planning, and other cognitive or critical-thinking skills, self-regulation, metacognition (the big-picture, bird’s-eye view), and the ability to modify our behavior in response to others to achieve a goal.

These are the basic skills every child needs to function well in the social world. In a nutshell, if a child’s executive function social skills are weak, then he has a harder time understanding and managing social interactions. These problems show up in

Play is the first and most natural environment for all learning. Social behavior, by definition, is best learned in the company of others, where children can experience themselves in the context of spontaneous social activity and relationships, learn how their behavior affects others, practice seeing things from another child’s point of view, and learn how to get along with others. Children used to have more plentiful opportunities to learn these lessons naturally through the trial and error of old-fashioned unstructured play. In recent years, the loss of improvisational playtime has robbed all children of significant “practice time” for learning to get along and make friends. But the impact has been especially significant for those with executive function challenges that make it hard for them to adapt and find ways to socialize. In the world of invitation-only playdates, socially awkward or difficult children get left out and become only more out of step with their peers. As the gap widens, these children often become socially isolated. This play paradox—those with the greatest need getting the least opportunity—only complicates the challenge for those children and for their parents.

Many children with lagging social skills are highly intelligent or talented in other areas, such as athletics, mathematics, or music. Social competency simply is not one of them. Unfortunately, they pay a high cost in childhood, increasingly so in adolescence, and on into adult life, as people skills become essential in personal relationships and the workplace.

The good news is that social skills can be developed just like any other skill. Scientists have discovered that when children with social challenges engage in skill-building activities on a consistent basis, they can learn how to interact effectively with others in a social setting. And this means that, no matter how hopeless the situation may feel now, your child’s friendship challenges are far from insurmountable. With your help, your child can build social awareness, improve executive function skills, and learn how to make and keep friends. This is the heart of social skills coaching and why it is so important for your child and for you.

WHAT COACHING IS AND WHY IT WORKS

Coaching is the process of teaching, guiding, showing, and practicing skills with your child. It isn’t helicopter parenting or micromanaging your child’s behavior or relationships. It’s not about protecting them from the normal bumps and bruises that are a healthy part of growing up and taking charge of yourself. Quite the opposite: coaching helps prepare them with the basic skills they need to meet whatever comes their way, notably learning how to see their challenges clearly, strategizing and setting goals, picking themselves up after a failure, and problem-solving so they can stay on their feet the next time.

Children learning to play soccer benefit from having a coach to explain the rules of the game, demonstrate and model the skills needed to play, practice the skills with them, observe them using those skills in action on the field, and give constructive feedback and encouragement after games and scrimmages. If a soccer coach simply told a child, “Go score a goal,” without showing how it’s done, you wouldn’t expect the child to play well. It’s the child who must take the skills onto the playing field, take some spills and get a few bruises, but the coaching and skill-building prepare him to know the rules, hone the skills, and be the best he can be for the game.

Children with social skills weaknesses need help learning those basic skills so they can participate socially—so they aren’t committing fouls constantly or getting sidelined season after season. On the social playing field, if your child is perpetually clueless and clumsy, she’s going to get trounced. Telling a child to “behave” or “get along” on a playdate is just like sending that kid into the soccer game with no training. Skills are the crux of the matter, and coaching and practice develop the skills.

As your child’s coach, you’ll learn to ask, listen, and learn about your child’s experience. You’ll help your child understand the unspoken rules of social behavior, how to watch for cues from other people, and how to adjust their behavior as needed. You’ll cheer small successes as the stepping stones to bigger ones. You’ll work with your child to develop the game plan, the playbook, and the overarching goal: for your child to make friends more easily and “go along and get along” with others.

Here’s what you won’t do as your child’s coach. You won’t assume you know the reasons for your child’s behavior. You won’t criticize, nag, or shame your child or impose your own goals; instead you will partner with him to help him develop his own. You won’t pressure your child or rush the learning process. Most of all, you won’t forget to show confidence in your child’s capacity to learn and grow.

I often say that coaching is parenting with a playbook. In most instances, a child’s social struggle is not for lack of a caring parent. Like many parents, you may have spent years advising, instructing, correcting, or cajoling your child to try harder to get along with other children, but nothing seems to stick. All of that shifts once you begin to use the simple, proven coaching techniques that make you a more effective listener, partner, and problem-solver with your child.

Like any of us, children share more when they feel heard and understood. They can put their guard down, engage more readily in the coaching process, commit to developing their social skills, and invest in their own success. The two-way coaching conversations you’ll learn to have with your child will help her reflect on her behavior and the impact it has on others and the way they treat her. Together, you’ll identify the message her behavior conveys and whether that message helps or hinders the way people understand and respond to her. Together, you’ll use problem-solving steps to generate strategies your child can practice, then try out in playdates. New experiences of success build new self-confidence and ultimately give your child the awareness, motivation, confidence, and skills to be more socially active and at ease.

“IF THEY COULD, THEY WOULD”: FIVE WORDS THAT CHANGE THE WAY YOU UNDERSTAND YOUR CHILD

A client from long ago told me that one of the most life-changing things I shared with her as I coached her daughter through some early learning and behavioral challenges was to remind herself: “If she could, she would.”

In more than fifteen years as a family coach, this seemingly simple idea—If they could, they would—has unlocked solutions to some of the most stubborn problems children face. This simple distinction can transform your understanding of your child, change the story you may have had for years, and open a dramatically different field of play and growth for your child.

One of the grounding truths that modern psychology and child development research tells us is that, generally speaking, children do not willfully set about to self-sabotage, to fail at being a kid and disappoint their parents. Every child wants to succeed. Every child wants to “grow up” and develop the mastery to be a capable human being. To do that, they must learn to work with their own unique brain wiring—they must learn to figure out what’s holding them back and then how to do something about it.

The idea that a child “would if he could” is important: When you frame the issue that way, you instantly reframe your perspective on the situation, on your child’s behavior, and on his potential for change and positive growth. Once your child begins to develop the executive function skills necessary for effective social interaction, every incremental success will motivate him to continue, and you’ll see the results that wishful thinking could never have delivered.

Sure, if they could, they would asks you to take a little leap of faith. When your child seems oblivious to the feelings of others or to the way her behavior affects how they treat her, it might seem logical to lecture longer and louder until she finally learns the lesson. But popular wisdom applies here. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over, expecting different results, then if lecturing and disciplining your child hasn’t changed her behavior by this time, where’s the wisdom in continuing to do it over and over and imagine different results?

In many ways, this powerful philosophical shift is easier than you might think. You know your child better than anyone, and you know there is more to her than the behaviors that are holding her back socially. The big truth is that everyone is working on something. That’s a powerful place to start, and a story line that opens a child up to change.

WHY PLAY BETTER AND WHY NOW?

Several years ago, parents and colleagues began urging me to share my Play Better method more broadly. Knowing how parents and kids alike are caught up in hurried lives, I set out to present the Play Better Plan in a book that you would find easy to read and fun to use with your child.

The Play Better lessons, materials, and activities come straight from my own practice, tailored for you, the parent-coach, and your child, to take advantage of everyday moments for practice and discussion. Activities are custom-designed to be fun and rewarding, with incentives to boost motivation. There, snags and missteps can be duly noted, discussed in postplay debriefing, and turned into learning opportunities, with attention to things that went right and to those that can be improved the next time around.

The Play Better Toolbox features engaging hands-on activities—questionnaires, activity sheets, and lessons—that you and your child will use to develop new skills.

Through coaching conversations and practice both at home and away, the Play Better method strengthens the executive function skills children must have to pick up on social cues, anticipate the impact of their behavior in a situation, self-regulate and manage their emotions and responses in social settings, and connect with other children to make friends, play happily, and feel socially confident.

I’ve seen so many children move from feeling socially isolated, miserable, and misunderstood to feeling confident in their own capacity to connect with other kids and learn how to handle social situations that once overwhelmed them. I see parents shift from frustration or worry about their child to optimism they never thought possible. All of this is possible because you work together as your child learns these skills and practices problem-solving her way through new challenges. You’ll learn so much about your child, and yourself, too. The effects of the coaching conversations reverberate in so many beautiful, unexpected ways through your relationships and your family life.

YES—YOU CAN DO THIS!

If this coaching gig sounds complicated or hard, I want to assure you: you can do this. Parents tell me that having the plan actually makes it easier to understand their child, talk with their child, and help their child find social strategies that work. And let’s be honest, you’ve already been putting forth huge efforts to improve your child’s social plight.

As a parent, you actually have an advantage over anyone else as a consulting coach. You’re there and you care. You are always on the front lines with your child. It’s those everyday “teachable moments” that make the Play Better Plan so successful.

I think of the mother who told me that the turning point for her six-year-old son came just a few weeks into the program when he turned to her one day and acknowledged, for the first time ever, “I need to listen more.” Or the fifth grader who realized, “I have to talk to other people—they won’t just come to me.” For each child, these were steps in social awareness that they had never expressed before—that they never even had before. It wasn’t that they’d never been told these things. It was that they had never reached these insights on their own. With this awareness came choices to do something a little different, perhaps practice listening when someone spoke or to try saying hello instead of always waiting for others to start a conversation. Every choice they made with this in mind opened new opportunities, new coaching conversations with their parents, and new experiences of success in simple social interactions with other children.

Every child is different, and the program timeline will be different for each one. I’ve designed the Play Better Plan so you can adjust it to match your child’s pace, whatever it may be. In the coaching process, some new skills may develop more quickly than others for your child. Generally, though, within a month of starting the plan, most children make noticeable progress in their social awareness.

HOW TO USE THIS BOOK

Why Will No One Play with Me? is presented in four parts.

Part I (Chapters 1–4) explains in simple terms the brain science and behavioral factors that cause kids to be left out, the science of behavioral change, how social skills coaching works, and how the Play Better Plan specifically, with you as your child’s social skills coach, can launch a remarkable turnaround. These chapters help jump-start your understanding of the ideas that are woven throughout the Play Better Plan coaching plan, lessons, and activities. If you’re in a hurry to get started, you can move ahead to Part II and return to Part I anytime you want to read more about the ideas.

Part II (Chapters 5–10) covers the hands-on, how-to Play Better Plan coaching principles that make the coach approach user-friendly for you and your child. I’ll teach you the coaching strategies and skills to engage and guide your child and will give you the “game plan” you’ll use to coach your child at home and in real-time social activities. Other features include

Coaching tools include the Executive Function Questionnaire, the Interactive Conversation Guide, and other guides and materials to help you identify your child’s personal strengths and specific social skills challenges. Once you complete them for your child, these tools also help you prioritize behaviors to target for coaching, engage your child in the planning goals and strategies for practice, and respond effectively to new challenges or setbacks. You’ll find a guide for using incentives and rewards to make the program more fun for your child and that show how to follow through to continue to build and maintain results. You’ll learn how to tell when your child is ready to shift from home practice to a playdate “mission,” the goal of which is to use a specific skill that’s been practiced in a real-life play situation. Whatever else may go on in the playdate, every time your child uses the positive behavior highlighted for the mission, that’s a win: mission accomplished.

Part III (Chapters 11–19) includes the Executive Function Questionnaire Lesson Tracks and step-by-step skill-building activities. You’ll use these lessons and activities to help your child plan, practice, and build new skills. Child-centered activities and lessons include the Social Spy, Mind Your PEAS and Cues, Never Let Them See You Sweat, Flexible Me, and other lessons designed and illustrated to appeal to kids.