I sometimes get asked how I decide what to focus on with my students at Starfish. How do I decide what to support them with and what to leave alone?

I focus on two things: things that affect each student's ability to function successfully in a group, and things that affect each student's ability to make and maintain friends.

First, this is a group program. Because of that, I am able to quickly and clearly see the things that cause kids to struggle in a group context. Maybe it's always needing to have things go their way. Maybe it's monopolizing conversations.

Second, I notice the things that are interfering with their ability to make and maintain friends. This is different for every kiddo. For some kids, it's that they don't know how to maintain conversations. For others, it may be their difficulty solving problems.

In this week's episode, I'm sharing stories from the rest of our 4th week of summer camp related to helping students improve their group behaviors and raising awareness of some things that are getting in the way of building friendships.

I'm sharing stories and strategies about everything from responding to things with, "I don't know", to choosing who to spend our time with.

Here's a clip from the episode:

Because at this point it's just an automatic reaction for him, but it doesn't always have to be. We can definitely break those automatic, shutdown, refusal, 'I don't know' kind of things. 'I don't know'... I've met so many kids who that becomes their default: I don't know. And it's when they're feeling a little bit overwhelmed by something. If we just step back and give them some time and space, almost always they will think of something to say.

I've seen that with so many different kids in so many different situations. Even… I remember I had a kiddo who used to say that even when I would ask him just a social question like, 'What's your favorite video game?' 'I don't know.' And then I would just wait a little bit. And then he would answer the question. Sometimes kids do this because they don't want to say the 'quote, unquote' wrong thing. Even though there's never a wrong thing at Starfish Social Club.