Parents and teachers can help teach social competence first by demonstrating it themselves. Second, by displaying faith in the child’s ability to achieve. Third, by explaining the existence and nature of the tools available to the child for the purposes of developing social competence (the ability to coordinate affect, cognition, and behavior). It is important that the expectations of patents and teachers for a child’s development of social competence be age appropriate.
Shall social competence have a different definition for each developmental stage? Certainly, the application of the definition requires addressing individual efficacy; it is important that children not be expected to perform beyond their developmental capacity. In that respect, social competence must be defined in terms of developmental achievement, but this task has been imposed upon us by the artificial stage demarcations that have arisen out of an intellectual construct that may have no more utility than a metaphor to help us, the observer to understand phenomena. Those demarcations may well be analogous to latitude and longitude lines drawn upon a globe. Developmental social competence underneath these lines of demarcation just might be a seamless spectrum. Far more important is a multi-dimensional criterion for assessment of social competence.
