Social Skills is Canceled... again!

This blog post is a transcript of Episode 90 of my podcast/YouTube series. Because of that, it is not written to be grammatically/syntactically correct.

You can listen here and watch here.

Once upon a time, I had a podcast called Social Skills is Canceled, and after a few episodes, I decided to change the name of it. I'm not really sure why. I don't really remember what I was thinking. I changed it to Social Skills Unscripted. I think it's because I was talking about all the things that happen in my social groups and how I respond to them as they come up, naturally and authentically, so Social Skills Unscripted just seemed like a good fit. Then I took a hiatus.

I've been off of the show for about a year, and I now that my book is coming out, which was a really random project that I decided to do, I called the book Social Skills is Canceled. Obviously, that phrase is just really significant for me, and so I decided to restart the show and to go back and rename it Social Skills is Canceled. I will continue to share what I teach my students in our social groups, but I'm adding how it's applicable to the different types of students that are in my program and that are out in the world, so that you as a parent, as an educator, as a therapist, whatever your role is, you can take the same things that I teach my students, and you can teach them to your students or your kids based on their social type.

If you haven't already, you can find this at socialskillsiscanceled.org or.com (it doesn't matter, I own both), and that will take you to the website that has the book, and you can learn more about the book, you can also take the quiz. (There's my cat's tail if you're watching us on video. She's also featured in the book!) You can take the quiz to see if your child is what I refer to as a circle, a triangle or a square.
In this episode, this is an introduction to that concept and to the book itself. And then from here, we'll go into each one of the lessons and how they apply to each one of the three shapes, as I call them. So let's talk about each one of these shapes. What do they look like? What do they mean? How do they show up in the world? What do they need?

Characteristics of Circle Students
I call the first shape Circle, and in the book, the characters are actually named after the shapes. So the first character that shows up in the book is the character of Circle. Circle represents... I use the word "students" because not all of my students are kids, but they are all students. And even if you are here listening for your kiddo, your kiddo is also a student. So I use the word "students" primarily. Circle represents students who have a reputation for being friendly, possibly kind, possibly helpful. Other people know them. Other people like them. Other people like being around them.

The main conversation that sticks out in my mind when I think about Circle students is, I had a parent telling me about one of my former students who was in middle school at the time, and it was about this time of the year, it was the start of the school year, and they were going to Meet the Teacher, or Open House, or whatever it was that was happening. And the mom was saying, "You know, Steph, we're walking down the hallway, and everybody is saying hello to her. Everybody knows her. Everybody knows her name. Everybody we saw is saying hello to her." It's a perfect example of a circle kid. They are known and they are liked.

Challenges for Circle Students
So the challenge, what's confusing to a lot of adults and sometimes to Circle students, is, why don't they have friends? People like them. Circle students usually get high commendation from other adults. Teachers love them. Other adults, neighbors, family members, everybody enjoys being around Circle students. So when we come to recognize that they don't have friends, it doesn't make sense. How can someone who's so friendly not have friends?

The reason for this is that being friendly does not equal having friends. Circle students tend to think that everybody is their friend. They also tend to like everybody, just like everybody likes them. Sometimes, if I talk about how we all are annoying, sometimes, Circle students have a hard time understanding that, because they don't often find other people annoying. They aren't usually as bothered by things people do that other students or adults might be bothered by. Circle students also have a hard time kind of conceptualizing that other people might find them annoying. Sometimes it has nothing to do with them. Everybody in the world is annoying to somebody. That's a really difficult concept for most Circle students, because they don't live in that world where people are annoying.

They don't usually have the social skillset to engage with their peers. They tend to be parallel conversationalists, meaning they might listen to everybody's conversations, they might know exactly what everybody's talking about, but they aren't actually participating and engaging in the conversations. And by default, the people having the conversation just aren't really paying attention to them because they're not part of the conversation. So they don't get intentionally ignored. Nobody's intentionally choosing not to talk to Circle students, but because they typically don't have the social skillset to engage, they get unintentionally left out when students are making plans, when there's things happening, they tend to just not think about the Circle students. Again, it's not because they don't like them, it's because they're not top of a lot of their peers minds, because they're not engaging in in social situations. They're on the perimeter.

Circle students really enjoy talking to adults, sometimes more than they enjoy talking to peers. They also often enjoy being around people who are younger than them. So Circle students are the students who, if they're in elementary school, at recess they're hanging out with the teachers instead of playing on the playground. As you get older into middle school and high school, passing periods, they're not talking to other students in the hallway. They might either be hanging out talking to the teacher after class is over, or talking to the next teacher before class starts. They're not usually talking to other students in the hallway.

So this is the core of social struggles for Circle students, is that they don't have the social skillset to engage with other students. It becomes more and more apparent the older they get. One of the challenges for adults who support Circle students is recognizing that they don't actually have friends. Because we see them as friendly and we see that everybody likes them, we don't always recognize that that is not the same thing as them having friends. So Circle students often get overlooked when it comes to social support and social interventions, because they're not doing things that are 'socially inappropriate', and so they often get overlooked. I call them floaters. They float from class to class. They float from grade to grade. They float from elementary to middle school to high school to adulthood. They become adults who hang out with their family because they just never built those social connections. That's a summary of a Circle student.

Characteristics of Triangle Students
A Triangle student is usually very easy to identify. Triangle students have a reputation for being annoying, possibly rude, sometimes intense or too much. Triangle students are known. Like Circle students are known, Triangle students are known, but for a very different reason. Triangle students are the students who are often in trouble, sometimes even for things that they weren't actually responsible for. But they are 'that kid'. Triangle students are 'that kid'.

Whereas Circle students are often socially neglected, unintentionally, but socially neglected, Triangle students are socially rejected. Their peers will sometimes outwardly reject them by saying things to them like, "I don't want to play with you," or "Why are you hanging out with us?" Or, "You're really annoying." Or they will be more covertly, socially rejected by their peers walking away from them, not choosing them in a group project, not wanting to talk about what they want to talk about, maybe even kind of subtly making fun of them. These are our Triangle students.

Challenges for Triangle Students
One of the big challenges for Triangle students is that they tend to get these reputations because they're trying so hard to make friends. They are overcompensating and trying so hard to make friends. Triangle students may develop a habit of saying things that aren't true in an effort to make friends. Triangle students may have hyperactive personalities, which can sometimes just naturally be off-putting to their peers. Triangle students may kind of be everywhere and into everything. They don't have a lot of 'chill'. Triangle students don't have a 'chill mode', and so they often are very talkative.

Triangle students also have great leadership capabilities. However, they very commonly don't know how to use that skillset to their advantage, so they may be considered bossy or overbearing. But they have great leadership potential. They tend to be very creative and have amazing ideas, but other people don't always want to listen to them. Other people don't always want to be around them.

Triangle students are at risk for mental health challenges, specifically depression and anxiety, because of the struggles they face when it comes to making friends. Most triangle students recognize that they don't have friends. They will often verbalize it. They are typically very aware of the fact that they don't have friends. Circle students often are not. Because they think everybody's their friend, they often don't recognize that they don't genuinely, truly have friends. Triangle students tend to be very aware of that. They also tend to be very aware that they have a reputation for being annoying, but they often don't know why. It's one of the most common things I hear from triangle students is, "Steph, people tell me I'm annoying, but I don't know why." I remember a fifth grade student telling me that they had gone on a field trip that day at school, and they were waiting to get on the bus, and the girls around him were telling him, "You're so annoying. You're so annoying." And he was confused and frustrated because he did not know why they were saying that. And if you don't have the self-awareness to know why people think the way they think about you, you can't possibly change it. You cannot change your reputation if you don't know why you have that reputation in the first place. So that's where most Triangle students stand, is they don't know why they have the reputation they have.

Triangle students have really big hearts for other people, often for animals. They tend to sense injustice. And so it's incredibly confusing to them that they care about other people, they care about things, but that doesn't always get reciprocated. So Triangle students often feel isolated, lonely, left out, and unfortunately, sometimes their social interactions are overtly negative. Triangle students even sometimes have negative relationships with adults, with teachers, with therapists, with counselors. Triangle students are the most likely to be dismissed or kicked out of services. It could be things like after school care, summer camp, even therapies. Sometimes, Triangle students are dismissed from therapies because they're not compliant, if you will. Triangle students are definitely not compliant, and so they miss out on a lot of opportunities and services and programs because of their behavior, because of their choices.

Triangle students often will have one or two other students that they do well with, they get along with, typically because they're similar. But Triangle students really, as I mentioned, they care about other people, and so they also will kind of burn friendships. Obviously unintentionally. They tend to be a bit clingy. Because it's so hard for them to make friends, they can be clingy. They can hold on to other people that show interest in them, which, of course, backfires. So this is what it's like to be a Triangle student.
The third type of student is what I call a Square student. A Square student is basically somebody who exhibits social anxiety. In my opinion, Square students are the hardest to identify, because social anxiety doesn't always look like what we expect it to look like. In my book, I presented it in a more typical way, the way that we would expect it to look but that's not always what it really looks like, and so Square kids, in my experience, are the hardest to identify of the three.

Characteristics of Square Students
Square kids often prefer to avoid social situations. They don't want to go to the holiday party. They don't aren't really excited about going on field trips. They don't speak up in class, they don't answer questions, they don't ask questions. Their agenda is to not draw attention to themselves. Social anxiety means that you are overwhelmed with concern about what other people think about you, and so you are concerned about what you say, you're concerned about what you do, you're concerned about what you look like, because you don't want other people to have negative thoughts about you.

Square students tend to withdraw and isolate. Obviously, this makes it really difficult for them to make social connections. Similar to Triangle kids, Square students will sometimes have one or two other students that they really get along with, but that becomes the extent of their social network. And so if somebody moves, if somebody is a different age, and they end up in different schools, if it was a one-time environment, our Square students have a really difficult time finding new social connections.

Unlike Circles and Triangles, Square students tend to be unknown. They tend to fly under the radar, which is what they're trying to do. So other students might not know them, especially as you get into older grades where there's a lot more kids, other students might not know their name. They might not have any connection or recognition. Typically nobody is overtly disrespectful or rude to Square students, unlike Triangle students. Typically people just don't even notice them. They're just not part of the social scene. Circle students tend to be on the periphery, Square students are not even in the picture. They're not even on the scene. If they are, it's not because they chose to be. It's like in the school cafeteria, you're naturally in that social environment, but most Square kids would prefer to not be in the school cafeteria.

Square kids also fall under the social radar sometimes with those of us that are adults, similar to Circle students, because they're not doing anything that's obviously socially inappropriate. Our Triangle students are the ones who may be yelling, running, having challenges with their behavior, causing challenges in the classroom. That is not a Square student. A Square student would be mortified if they did anything that drew attention to themselves.

Challenges for Square Students
They tend to be intelligent, so in class they're getting their work done, they're turning in their assignments, they're passing everything. And so in education, they tend to fly under the radar. They're not struggling academically most of the time. And as adults, we don't always recognize that they do not have social connections. We don't recognize that all the time. Teachers don't usually see their students in the cafeteria to know that this Square student doesn't ever talk to anybody. If you're an outside provider or a parent, you don't see students in the school setting, and so you wouldn't know what it's like for them at recess or what it's like for them in the cafeteria. You wouldn't know because you don't see that.

Square students, even with adults, are typically pretty reserved. Some Square students have selective mutism, where they in some situations don't talk. It could be people that they don't know. It could be new situations. It could be people they don't like. But this is a Square student. Sometimes Square students, even when someone asks them a direct question, they don't respond. I have one student in particular I'm thinking of right now who is one of the models for Square in the book, and sometimes he would even start crying if someone asked him a question and he just would get so overwhelmed that he would start, if you persist, he would start crying instead of answering the question. There's this feeling of, 'I don't want what I say to be wrong.' Square students do not ask or answer questions in school.

They tend to have really close relationships with their families, with people that they trust and that they get along with. Outside of that, not so much. They might be at risk for perfectionism, because, again, they're they're trying to do what they think is the right thing, even though, in social there's not really such a thing. They are at risk for other anxieties because they already have social anxiety. So this is a challenge of a Square student, is that it's pretty impossible to make friends when you're not connecting with other people. When you're not putting yourself in social situations, it's really difficult to make friends. The only way to really pull that off is if adults are organizing and contriving situations, but that means that it's being created with peers who that student might not want to be friends with. So it's a difficult struggle.

The Importance of Mixed Social Groups
Those are the three types of students. Those are the three characters in the book Social Skills is Canceled: Circle, Triangle and Square, and I based each character off of a mix of students that I've worked with that represent each one of those social types. The point of the story, one of the the main themes of the story, is that in the beginning of the story, all three students are in social skills groups in their school, and they're in groups with other students who share their personality type. So Circle is in a group with other circles. Triangle's in a group with other triangles, and Square is in a group with other squares. This is typically how social skills is taught. We typically segregate students based on their, what I call presentation.

Here's the challenge with this: If you imagine a group of circle students, what are they learning from a social perspective, by being in a group together? What are they learning? They're not dealing with any other personality type, they're dealing with a bunch of typically easy-going peers, just like themselves. So they're not learning how to speak up for themselves because they don't have to. Nobody's talking over them. Nobody's trying to be the color that they want to be in the game. They're not learning how to initiate conversations. They're not learning how to change the topic if somebody's talking about something that might not be appropriate, they're just going with the flow, which they already know how to do.

Think about a group of triangle students, which is typically chaos. A group of triangle students is a group where the students are trying to be silly. They're playing around. They might be talking over each other. They might be just doing things to get attention from the group and from the teacher. A group of triangle kids together is actually pretty difficult to run, because they run the group. Again, triangles are mostly natural leaders, so you have them trying to lead. All of them!

A group of square kids gets nowhere because nobody wants to say anything. It's really difficult to run a group for just kids with social anxiety, because nobody wants to say anything.

So one of the themes in the book is how the three personality types, the three social types, actually need each other. They need each other for feedback. They need each other to be able to see how other students navigate social situations. They need each other to have as practice partners and to be able to try things out. But because they all struggle to make friends, it creates this unity and this bond, and this is what happens in non-book world as well. This book is based on what I do, and so this is what happens in my group as well.

I used to separate my students, just like most other people do, and it I didn't change it intentionally. I changed that structure because, when we came back from lockdown in 2020, the schedule was a mess. Not all the students came back. Some of them came back on Zoom instead of in person. And so the schedule we had in March of 2020 was completely in shambles. So I just made a new schedule, and I said, "Tell me when your student can come, and that's the group that they'll be in." And so that started in the summer of 2020, and ever since then, that's how I've run the groups. Students come based on the schedule, not based on their social type. And it showed me how much they need each other, how much they benefit from each other, and how much they can teach each other. Each one of the social types understands things about social interactions that the other types don't, and so they can each see what other students are doing that are getting in their way, and other students can see what they're doing or not doing that's getting in their way. And so they they make their own feedback loop amongst them. That's what the book is based on, that's what my life is based on, is working with all three social types, but working with them together so that they can learn from each other, they can grow together, and seeing the bonding, in the community that takes place among them.

Another theme of the story is not only helping students understand themselves, one of my big goals with the book is for everybody who reads it to identify themselves in at least one of the characters. To say, "Oh, I identify with Circle," or "I can see how I'm like Triangle," or, "Yeah, Square sounds kind of like me." But a secondary goal is for students to be able to understand the social types that are not like them. So if your students is Square, this story helps them better understand Triangles and Circles. Your student's a Circle, it helps them better understand Squares and Triangles. If they're a Triangle, it helps them better understand Squares and Circles. It also helps us adults better understand all three. It gives insight into why each one of the characters says and does the things that they do, and what they're struggling with, and how they help each other so that they can all be more successful.

Next episode:
At the end of each episode, I am going to do a random number generator on my computer. My program has 32 lessons that I teach throughout the school year here in the US. Thirty-two lessons divided into four modules of eight. I'm going to use a random number generator and see which lesson we're going to talk about on the following episode. It gave me 17. So 17 would be module three, which is the one I start teaching in January, and it would be lesson one. Oh, this is a great lesson to do our first episode show about! This is the lesson about joining a conversation. Module three is all about conversations, and lesson one in module three is about joining a conversation. That means on the next episode, that's what it will be about. I will share what I teach my students in that lesson, why I teach it, and how it applies to Circles, Triangles and Squares.