Intervention in Social Skills: The Behavior of Children from the Perspective of Parents and Teachers

Abstract

Studies have highlighted the difficulty of conducting interventions with parents when what motivates them to seek therapy is a behavioral problem of a child. As a way of preventing and treating this complaint an intervention procedure was prepared and applied with school children, with the aim of promoting better social interactions between the children and their peers. The aim of the study was to verify whether the social skills learned by the children during the intervention were generalized for the school and family environments. A total of 7 children participated in the study, who were enrolled in the second year of elementary school and presented behavioral problems at a clinical level in the school and family environments. To evaluate the results the following instruments were used: CBCL, TRF, SSRQ-parents, SSRQ-teachers, RE-SHE-P, and an observation protocol. The intervention procedure had a duration of 8 sessions in which the teaching of social skills was performed, the themes of which were: To greet, to initiate conversations and civility; to thank, to say good things and express opinions; to make friends, to help, play and share things; to wait their turn and control themselves; to make, answer requests and to thank; to name feelings and empathy; to compliment, kiss and hug; to admit mistakes, apologize and listen to criticism. The results indicated that, based on the reports of the parents and teachers, there were improvements in the behavior of the children, although not to the point of leaving the clinical level, however, from the observation protocol the parents and children presented a high frequency of skilled behaviors and a low frequency of unskilled behaviors.