Solve Social Conflicts: A 3-Step Guide for Kids

In any relationship, conflict will happen. Learning how to understand and solve social conflicts is an important life skill that helps your child build and maintain meaningful, lasting relationships.

This skill often isn’t explicitly taught in a classroom. Yet for many children and adults, the rules of the social world can feel confusing. Discussing thoughts, feelings, and behaviors openly, and how they connect to one another, builds social perspective-taking skills and helps your child better understand and work through social conflicts.

Michelle Garcia Winner and Pamela Cooke developed the Social Thinking Curriculum, and many of the concepts below can be credited to their work.

Step 1: Thoughts and Feelings

The first step in helping your child solve social conflicts is making sure they understand what thoughts and feelings are, and how the two differ.

What Is a Thought?

Thoughts are quiet words or pictures in our brain. Often, we can tell what someone is thinking about by following their gaze, since people are usually thinking about whatever they’re looking at.

What Is a Feeling?

Feelings form in our brain but show up in our body. Try acting out different emotions, like happy, sad, or angry, and ask your child to notice how their body feels during each one.

Explain that we have thoughts and feelings even when we’re alone. For example, while reading a favorite story to ourselves, we might be thinking about the story and feeling happy at the same time.

We also have thoughts and feelings when we’re with others. Specifically, we form thoughts and feelings about other people based on what they look like, say, and do. In turn, other people form thoughts and feelings about us the same way. Those thoughts and feelings can be good, neutral, or bad. Because of this, if we want to make and keep friends, it helps to do and say things that leave others feeling good and thinking kindly of us.

Step 2: Social Perspective Taking

To solve a social conflict, your child needs to be able to guess what thoughts or feelings others might be having. A few things worth discussing and considering when trying to take someone else’s perspective:

• What is the situation? Who is involved? What words, behaviors, and facial expressions did you notice?
• What do I already know about the people involved?
• Have I had any similar experiences to this one? How did I feel in that situation?

By combining what we know about the situation, the people involved, and our own life experiences, we can make an educated guess about how someone else might be feeling and thinking. Use these questions to help your child guess how the other people involved in the conflict might feel.

Step 3: Putting It All Together, the Behavioral Chain Reaction

Our actions toward others shape their thoughts and feelings. Those thoughts and feelings, in turn, shape how they act toward us, which then shapes how we feel about ourselves.

Start by helping your child identify their own behavior that led to the conflict, and place that in the first column of a chart. From there, help them fill out the rest of the chart so they can see how their behaviors, thoughts, and feelings connected during the conflict.

Next, fill out the chart again, this time listing potential solutions in the “my behavior” column. Help your child brainstorm behaviors they could try to resolve the conflict, placing each potential solution in the first column. Then, work through the rest of the chart for each option and help them choose the best one.

Looking for More Support to Help Your Child? Contact ETLC

If you’ve tried these steps at home but feel your child could use more help understanding thoughts, feelings, and how to maintain strong relationships, reach out to our team at Enrichment Therapy & Learning Center. Our specialists work directly with your child on solving social conflicts, and give them the chance to practice these skills in a supportive environment.

Schedule a free consultation today to begin your child’s journey toward healthy social relationships.