Child Coaching

Child Coaching

Child Coaching

Coaching children is challenging. And, coaching children is rewarding, whether to improve sport, schoolwork, music or relationships. Children's coaching, like any other coaching, involves challenges. Treating each child as a person, avoiding favoring those who have exceptional abilities and accepting children who have attachment disorders or learning disabilities are few challenges parents, coaches and care providers face while shaping a positive personal and intellectual outlook of the children. Child coaching purports development of relationship and emotional intelligence, academic ability and effective thinking. Coaching children is also meant to prove the skills of children, changing their beliefs, and developing their sense of identity. Effective coaching involves use and application of cognitive theories and techniques.

The path of parenting is strewn with potholes and traps as any parent will tell you. Yet, in spite of the pain, anxiety and frustration, we continue. Parents love their children — so we persist. There is also that nagging part of us, working hard in some way to give our child more hope skills and possibility for their lives than we had in ours. It's not that we have failed or underperformed, more that there is a part of us — maybe it's called wisdom or experience — demanding to be heard. With the pressures of modern life including long or unsocial working hours, family break—up is reaching crisis levels. Whatever your own circumstances, and with stability or not, any child in your care remains important to you. As parents we need all the help we can get. Not for our sakes but for the children.

The experimental evidence supports the social-skill-deficit hypothesis. Children coached in social skills made gains in sociometric status. Reflection on the components of the coaching procedure, therefore, may be fruitful in helping to establish a fuller account of the dimensions of social skillfulness. Social skills are complex and multifaceted, and successful intervention attempts should target the important components of social skillfulness. Researchers who make intervention attempts with children often have assumed that inducing behavioral change is sufficient, but the coaching procedure assumes that certain types of cognitive processes should also be changed if social competence is to be enhanced (Wiley et al 2001). What is required, therefore, is an explication of the dimensions of social skillfulness that have been incorporated in the coaching process. What are the components of social skillfulness and how might training influence the development of these components? One dimension of social skillfulness involves children's knowledge of general interaction principles or concepts. Oden and Asher focused on this dimension when they sought to teach children the meaning and importance of participating, cooperating, communicating, and being validating or supportive of the other child. The presumption here is that general concepts such as these can be used to guide behavior across a variety of situations (Gross 2005). It may be that provision of these general concepts IS Central to the effectiveness of the coaching procedures.

A second and related dimension of social skillfulness involves knowledge of the specific ...