While I absolutely love hanging out with students one on one, it is definitely not the most effective way to help them develop social skills. I am not their peer, our interactions will be different than those between them and kids/teens their own age, and I can't help them with challenges that I don't witness.

When kids and teens are in a social group I can see exactly how they interact, what they excel at socially, and how/why they are struggling when it comes to making and keeping friends.

I can (and do!) create situations where:

* I challenge my students' cognitive flexibility

* I showcase their strengths

*I honestly have no idea how things will turn out!

In this week's podcast/YouTube episode, I'm sharing everything that went on during our first week of summer camp.

Even if you live across the world and don't care about camp, I encourage you to check out this episode. I talk about all the activities we did, situations that came up, how we all handled them, and share strategies and suggestions for how anyone can help their kids/students be more socially successful.

Here's a clip from the episode:

One of the things, for any of us that are teachers, parents, counselors, anything, is for every one of our kids, we have to know their line. We have to know where the line is between how much we can push them without pushing them over the edge. And that line is in a different place for every kid. So that's something that's really important to me, for all of us that are with anybody really, even in friendships and romantic relationships, we all have that line. And so it's really important to me to find that line and to respect it.

With this student I knew that I could push him pretty far and we would be okay. And so I was pretty firm with him and I let him know that if he chose to isolate himself for the rest of the afternoon, totally fine. That's his decision. But it was going to be a really boring day because he wasn't going to be able to just hang out on his phone. If he chose to isolate himself he wouldn't be part of anything else that we were doing, and it was going to be a really long, boring day if that's what he chose to do. And then I walked away. Because my goal is to plant a seed in his brain. It's not to start an argument with him.