communicating partners

Children learn to be social and communicative by interacting with people. Consequently, they will learn a lot from the ways partners interact with them. Below are some ways adults can interfere with a child becoming social and communicative: Do his partners act in ways he cannot try? Do partners focus on getting him to do what they want? Do partners do most of the doing without waiting? Do partners mainly question and command the child? Do partners dominate or control interactions with the child? Do partners act serious and focus on specific answers? Do partners ignore the child and focus on their goals? Do partners act more like a directive teacher than play partner? Do interactions lack a sense of humor or enjoyment? Do partners criticize or penalize the child for his attempts? Do partners attend more to negative than positive behavior? WHAT HAVE ADULTS DONE TO HELP CHILDREN BECOME MORE SOCIAL? Forty years of clinical research have shown that certain strategies help adults build ...

One notion that helps many people understand turntaking is the comparison between ping-pong and darts. Turntaking is like a ping-pong game in which each partner takes a turn and then waits for his partner to take his turn. Ping-pong requires 'matching' in that each person hits the ball in a way that the other can return. Each partner has a turn and expects to keep the game going. In darts, there is only one person and a board, and the person throws the darts at the board. The point here is that a child will learn more if he is more like a ping-pong partner than like a dart board or a dart thrower. The kind of turntaking we are referring to can be misinterpreted in many ways. Turntaking here refers to people-to-people interactions, doing something directly to or with a person in a way that relates to what that person is doing. When a teacher tells a boy to "wait his turn" on the slide or says "it's not your turn yet, you tell your story after Carlos," tha...