Which comes first cognitive learning or social learning?
A parent recently asked me: Should I be more concerned with teaching my child facts and information or helping him interact more frequently and effectively with people?
We have been told that our son needed to be trained to learn cognitive skills like numbers and colors for school and to be reduce his “autistic” habits and become compliant before he will be come social and communicative.
Why does Communicating Partners begin by helping a child become social first?
Answer: First, because that is the way child develop and learn. Most scholars in child development agree that the key to learning in daily life is by socially interacting with people the child is attached with and who act and communicate in ways the child can do.
In fact it is now evident that a child will learn more of what he needs to be included in the social world from frequent daily interactions spontaneously than he will from intensive drilling on facts and skills for school. Making a child a successful student does not make him less autistic in real life and less isolated from society. Early and intensive social relationships are needed for that.
A second critical reason to begin by helping a child be spontaneously social is that the more directive and intensive academic and compliance approaches can have the effect of discouraging the child from being social and learning what he needs at the natural movement. Such a child can easily become dependent on his teacher or trainer and not learn how to socially learn on his own. Then he becomes a student who knows what others think he should learn but he does not learn what he needs to effectively navigate his own interpersonal world. I know children with autism who perform, and answer very well but are at a loss in daily interactions where his real life learning must take place.
A third reason for our focus of social learning first is that we and others have been very successful with many children and families in reducing the time that children are isolated from society. Both our research findings and our clinical reports from families show that many children with autism can become social when their families enter the child’s world responsively and nurture who they are becoming rather than distrusting their social potential and trying to make them into compliant students learning a set curriculum rather than an individualized life.
A fourth reason for our focus on social learning first is that it is something that anyone in the child’s life can do. Treatment is no longer limited to trained and paid persons, but is available to anyone interacting daily with the child. Children clearly can learn in every interaction if it involves two features: one, something the child can do, and something the child is internally motivated to do, and three, something the child can use in daily life.
A fifth reason is that, contrary to the belief and practice of many, most children diagnosed on the autism spectrum can become much more social and genuinely communicative than they are. Observation of many children with autism reveals that very little attention is usually given to seeing if, indeed, the child can socialize with persons who actually enter his world of sensation and action.
THE MORE YOUR CHILD INTERACTS WITH PEOPLE, THE MORE SHE WILL LEARN COGNITIVELY THINGS SHE CAN USE.
SOCIAL LIFE IS COGNITIVE LEARNING.