Promoting social competence in children: A cognitive-social learning approach

Research suggesting a relationship between early peer relations and later life adjustment has prompted a growing number of researchers to develop intervention stratgies for isolated, rejected, and friendless children. Although most of these strategies have been on a "skill deficit" hypothesis and have taken the form of teaching children specific social skills, there is considerable disagreement in the field as to what skills should be learned and how skills should be trained. This problem has been exacerbated by the fact that, although a variety of skills training methods exist in the literature, most have been developed from implicit rather than explicit theories of social competence and skill learning. This paper represents an attempt to organize many of the concepts and principles presently used to develop social skills training methods for children within a cognitive-social learning perspective. The following pages focus on the identification of skill deficits that may lead to later social difficulties and on the derivation of skills training methods that might be used to remediate each type of deficit. The implications of the proposed training methods for program assessment and implementation are also considered.