Social skills are the verbal and non-verbal abilities people use to communicate, read others, and build relationships. They include listening, empathy, cooperation, emotional regulation, and conflict resolution.
They matter well beyond the playground. Social skills shape how children learn, how they cope, and how they get on with people for life. At The ABC International School (ABCIS), we treat them as something to teach, not something to hope for.
This article explains what social skills are and gives 12 everyday examples. It also shows how they develop from Early Years to Sixth Form. Finally, it covers the skills most guides miss: joining, repairing, and exiting.
Key Takeaways
- Social skills are the specific abilities used to communicate, interpret others, and maintain relationships. They are learned, not innate.
- Core social skills include verbal and non-verbal communication, active listening, empathy, emotional regulation, and conflict resolution.
- Being kind and being socially skilled are different things. Both matter, and only one of them is usually taught.
- Social rules are culturally specific. A child raised to lower their eyes to an elder is not lacking skills. They are using a different set.
- The CASEL framework identifies five components: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision-making.
- Social skills in childhood are linked to education and employment outcomes in adulthood.
What Are Social Skills?
Social skills are the interpersonal abilities that allow a person to communicate, interpret others accurately, and build and maintain relationships.
They include verbal behaviours such as conversation, tone, and knowing when to stop talking, and non-verbal ones such as facial expression, posture, proximity, and eye contact. They include the ability to notice that someone is uncomfortable and to do something about it.
Crucially, they are learned. They are not a temperament and not a fixed trait, which means a child who lacks them is not deficient. They are simply untaught, and teaching is something we know how to do.
Social skills, life skills, and soft skills
- Social skills are specifically about interaction with other people.
- Interpersonal skills is usually a synonym for social skills, especially in workplace writing.
- Life skills are broader, and include self-care, safety, and managing money.
- Soft skills is the same territory as social skills, described from the employer’s side of the desk.
12 Examples of Social Skills
Most lists of social skills are written for the workplace. Here is what each one looks like in a child or teenager.
| Social skill | What it means | What it looks like at school |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Verbal communication | Speaking clearly and adjusting tone to the listener | Explaining an idea to a group without talking over anyone |
| 2. Non-verbal communication | Using and reading facial expression, posture, eye contact, and personal space | Noticing a friend has gone quiet and asking if they are all right |
| 3. Active listening | Focusing on the speaker and checking you understood | Asking a follow-up question instead of changing the subject |
| 4. Empathy | Understanding how someone else feels | Comforting a classmate who lost a match |
| 5. Emotional regulation | Managing your own feelings before acting on them | Taking a breath instead of shouting when a game goes wrong |
| 6. Turn-taking and sharing | Giving others a fair share of time, space, and resources | Passing the ball, or waiting to speak in circle time |
| 7. Cooperation | Working towards a shared goal | Splitting tasks fairly in a group project |
| 8. Conflict resolution | Settling disagreements without damaging the relationship | Agreeing on new rules after an argument at break |
| 9. Assertiveness | Stating needs and boundaries clearly and politely | Saying “I was using that, can I have it back?” |
| 10. Respecting boundaries | Recognising when someone wants space or a different answer | Stopping a joke when the other person is not laughing |
| 11. Asking for help | Knowing when and how to ask | Raising a hand, or asking a peer before the teacher |
| 12. Joining and leaving conversations | Entering and exiting smoothly and warmly | Joining a game already in progress without stopping it |
The first three are the foundation of strong communication skills. The last one is the skill most children are never taught, and we return to it below.
Types of Social Skills
One widely used way to group social skills comes from Skillstreaming. Psychologist Arnold P. Goldstein and colleagues developed the programme. It sorts skills into six families, from simple to complex.
- Beginning social skills: listening, starting a conversation, asking a question, saying thank you.
- Advanced social skills: asking for help, joining in, giving instructions, apologising.
- Skills for dealing with feelings: knowing your feelings, expressing them, understanding someone else’s.
- Alternatives to aggression: sharing, negotiating, using self-control, responding to teasing.
- Skills for dealing with stress: handling embarrassment, being left out, responding to failure, resisting group pressure.
- Planning skills: setting a goal, deciding what to do, solving problems in order.
The CASEL framework, covered further down, groups the same territory differently. It starts from the self and works outwards.
What Does Socially Skilled Actually Mean?
A socially skilled person is not the most talkative person in the room. They are the one who correctly reads what is happening and adjusts.
Social aptitude, a related term, means a person’s capacity to learn these skills, not their current level. A child can have high aptitude and low skill. That simply means they have not yet been taught.
That is very different from a child who struggles despite teaching. The two should not be confused.
Being socially skilled means being able to: enter a conversation without disrupting it, notice when the other person wants to leave, disagree without damaging the relationship, and repair things when they go wrong. That last one is the rarest and the most valuable.
Being Kind Is Not the Same as Being Socially Skilled
This is the question parents actually arrive with, usually phrased apologetically: my child is lovely, so why does nobody call?
The answer is uncomfortable and it is not about character. Social life runs on a set of specific manoeuvres, and warmth does not automatically supply them.
| The manoeuvre | What it requires | Why kindness alone does not do it |
|---|---|---|
| Joining a group already playing | Watch first, work out the game, then contribute to what is already happening. | The kind child asks “can I play?” and gives the group a chance to say no. The skilled child simply starts helping. |
| Reading a room | Noticing tone, timing, and who is not enjoying this. | Warmth without perception leads a child to keep going when everyone wants them to stop. |
| Repairing a rupture | Naming what happened, without grovelling and without defending. | A kind child apologises. A skilled child apologises for the right thing, and then moves on rather than dwelling. |
| Exiting a conversation | Ending it warmly and leaving. | Kind children often cannot leave, and become the person nobody can get away from. |
Look again at the first row. It explains more childhood loneliness than anything else on this page. Children already playing do not want to stop and hold an audition.
The child who watches, works out the game, and joins in is not being sneaky. They are being skilful, and that skill can be taught and practised.
The Skills Nobody Teaches: Joining, Repairing, Exiting
Joining
Watch for a moment. Work out what the game is. Then contribute to the game as it exists, rather than asking for permission or proposing a new one. “Can I play?” hands the group a decision. Picking up the ball and passing it does not.
Repairing
Falling out is not a failure of social skill. Not being able to come back afterwards is. The repair has three parts: name what happened, say the specific thing you got wrong, then change the subject. Children who over-apologise stay stuck in the rupture, and children who never apologise never return from it. This is closely related to emotional intelligence, and it is teachable.
Exiting
A conversation that cannot be ended is a conversation nobody will start. Teaching a child a warm way to leave sounds trivial. It is one of the reasons other children choose to approach them.
Why Are Social Skills Important?
Social skills are sometimes treated as a pleasant extra. The evidence suggests they are closer to a foundation.
Friendships and belonging
Children who can join, share, and repair are more likely to be included. Belonging, in turn, makes school feel safe enough to take risks in learning.
Academic learning
Durlak and colleagues (2011) analysed 213 school social-emotional learning programmes involving over 270,000 students. Students in those programmes gained 11 percentile points in academic achievement compared with control groups.
Wellbeing
Children who can name feelings and ask for help cope better with setbacks. Social skills sit at the heart of wellbeing for students, alongside sleep, exercise, and a sense of purpose.
Life after school
A long-term study by Jones, Greenberg and Crowley (2015) followed children from kindergarten into early adulthood. Teacher-rated social skills at age five were linked to education, employment, and wellbeing outcomes years later.
The study shows an association, not proof of cause. It is still one of the clearest signs that early social skills matter long after school.
Social Skills Are Not the Same in Every Culture
Almost everything written about social skills assumes there is one correct way to behave. There is not, and families in Ho Chi Minh City know this better than most.
A Vietnamese child who lowers their eyes when a teacher speaks to them is not avoidant and not lacking in confidence. They are being respectful, precisely as they were taught. In a British classroom, that same behaviour may be read as disengagement. Neither reading is stupid. The rules are simply different.
The same applies to interrupting, to disagreeing openly with an adult, to saying no directly rather than softening it, and to how much distance you leave between yourself and the person you are speaking to. These are conventions, not virtues.
The goal is not to replace one set with the other. It is to become fluent in both, and to know which room you are in. That is a genuine skill, it is one that monocultural children rarely acquire, and it is a real advantage of an international, multicultural environment.
Children who grow up between cultures often build this fluency early. We explore their experience in our guide to third culture kids.
A child who can move between registers has not lost their culture. They have added a second one.
5 Core Components of Strong Social Skills
The Collaborative for Academic, Social, and Emotional Learning (CASEL) identifies five competencies. It remains the most useful framework available, and unlike much of what circulates about children’s development, it is real.
- Self-awareness. Recognising your own emotions and how they are affecting your behaviour right now. See our guide to self awareness skills.
- Self-management. Regulating impulses and recovering from frustration. Related to managing stress.
- Social awareness. Reading other people, including people whose norms differ from your own.
- Relationship skills. Forming and keeping connections. This is where making friends and active listening live.
- Responsible decision-making. Weighing consequences before acting.
Working in a group is a related but distinct matter, with its own failure modes. We cover it separately in teamwork skills.
How Social Skills Develop by Age
Children vary widely, so treat these as broad patterns rather than milestones. What matters is steady progress, not a precise age.
| Stage | What typically develops | How adults can help |
|---|---|---|
| Early Years (ages 2 to 5) | Playing alongside others, then with them. Sharing and turn-taking with support. Naming simple feelings. | Give children the words for feelings. Keep group play short and guided. |
| Primary (ages 5 to 11) | Games with rules, a strong sense of fairness, first close friendships, and early disagreements. | Practise joining and repairing. Talk through what others might be feeling. |
| Secondary (ages 11 to 16) | Peer acceptance matters more. Group identity forms, and much social life moves online. | Allow more independence. Discuss online behaviour openly. |
| Sixth Form (ages 16 to 18) | Adult-style communication, public disagreement, leadership, and professional manners. | Offer real responsibility, such as leading a team or debate. |
In Early Years, much of this happens through play based learning. In secondary school, digital citizenship becomes part of social skill. By Sixth Form, many students are building leadership qualities on top of these foundations.
Shy, Introverted, or Struggling? These Are Not the Same
Parents conflate these three constantly, and the confusion causes real distress.
- An introverted child finds social contact tiring and needs to recover afterwards. They may be highly skilled. Nothing here needs fixing.
- A shy child wants contact and is anxious about it. They often have the skills but cannot use them under pressure. Rehearsal, low-stakes practice, and ways to build self confidence in students all help.
- A child who lacks the skills may want contact, feel no particular anxiety, and simply not know the moves. What helps is direct teaching.
These require different responses, and giving a shy child more instruction, or a skills-gap child more reassurance, achieves nothing.
When to seek advice
If a child consistently cannot read facial expressions, finds change deeply distressing, does not seek to share enjoyment with others, and this pattern is stable across settings and across months rather than weeks, that is worth discussing with a school counsellor or paediatrician. Not because something is wrong, but because the right support is specific, and earlier is better. Shyness alone is not this.
How to Improve Social Skills
For parents
- Name the two rulebooks. Talk openly about how things are done at home and how they are done at school. Children handle this well when it is made conscious.
- Rehearse the joining move. Literally practise it. Watch, work out the game, join the game. It feels artificial and it works.
- Narrate other people out loud. “She went quiet when you said that. What do you think she was feeling?” This is how perspective-taking is built, and it costs nothing.
- Let them witness repair. Apologise to your child in front of them, properly, and then carry on. Most children have never seen an adult do this.
- Do not fix it for them. Arranging every friendship denies a child the practice they need. The discomfort of a failed approach is the lesson.
For students and teenagers
- Start small. Practise low-pressure exchanges first, such as greeting someone new or thanking a teacher by name.
- Be curious, not impressive. Ask a follow-up question about the other person. People remember being listened to.
- Watch the cues. Notice how people react to your tone and body language, then adjust.
- Have an exit line ready. “I’ll let you get on, see you at lunch” ends a chat warmly.
- Join something with a shared task. Clubs and teams give you something to talk about. See the importance of school clubs.
- Reflect afterwards. Ask yourself what went well and what you would try differently next time.
How We Build Social Skills at the ABCIS
At The ABC International School (ABCIS), students from dozens of nationalities share a classroom, which means the cultural point above is not theory here. It is Tuesday.
We build social skills through structures where the interaction has a purpose, because children do not learn to negotiate in a vacuum.
- House Teams. Dalat Dragons, Hanoi Hornets, Mekong Monsters and Saigon Serpents place children alongside peers across year groups whom they did not choose. Learning to get on with people you did not pick is the whole of adult life.
- Model United Nations. Students must disagree, in public, with people who are trying to defeat their proposal, and remain civil. There is no more demanding social exercise available to a teenager.
- Drama club. Students role-play bullying scenes as the target, the bully, and the bystander. Rehearsing each role builds empathy, and it underpins how we prevent bullying in schools.
- FOBISIA events and school trips. Meeting students from other British international schools across Asia, away from home, where every social approach must be made from scratch.
Small classes mean a teacher notices the child standing at the edge of the group, which is the precondition for helping them. We hold four consecutive BSO Outstanding inspection grades, most recently in January 2024, and are accredited by Cambridge International and AQA. Every year, over 95% of our graduates go on to study at universities across the world.
Families who want to know more about student life at the ABCIS are welcome to contact us. You can also visit to see our classrooms first-hand.
- Trung Son Campus: #152-158, Street No. 1, Trung Son, Binh Hung Commune, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
- Nha Be Campus: #2, Street No. 9, Tan An Huy, Nha Be Commune, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
- Phone: +84 (0)28 7308 1828
- Email: office@theabcis.com
Lovely Is Not Enough, and That Is Good News
If social skills were a matter of character, there would be little to do. Because they are a matter of technique, there is a great deal to do, and most of it works.
The child at the edge of the playground is usually not unkind, unwell, or unwanted. They are usually just waiting to be told how.
Book a campus visit and watch a break time. It tells you more about a school than any assembly.
Frequently Asked Questions
Social skills are the verbal and non-verbal abilities people use to communicate, read others, and build relationships. They include listening, empathy, cooperation, emotional regulation, and resolving conflict. They are learned, not fixed traits.
One common model, Skillstreaming, uses six families. These are beginning skills, advanced skills, feelings, alternatives to aggression, stress, and planning. The CASEL framework uses five competencies instead.
They help children make friends, cope with setbacks, and learn in groups. Research links strong early social skills to better education and employment outcomes in adulthood.
It means reading a social situation accurately and adjusting to it. A socially skilled child can join in, notice when someone wants to leave, disagree kindly, and repair a falling-out.
Social aptitude is a person’s capacity to learn social skills, not the level they have reached. A child with high aptitude and low skill has usually just not been taught yet.
They include conversation and tone, body language and eye contact, listening, empathy, managing frustration, and resolving disagreements. They also include joining a group, repairing a falling-out, and ending a conversation warmly.
Kindness and social skill are different things. The most common gap is the joining move: asking “can I play?” lets the group refuse. Children who watch, work out the game, and start contributing are usually absorbed without comment.
Start with low-pressure conversations, ask follow-up questions, and watch how people react. Join an activity with a shared task, and reflect on what worked afterwards.
Mostly, yes. The two terms are often used interchangeably. “Interpersonal skills” is more common in workplace writing, while “social skills” is more common when talking about children.
